The sex genius meets the intimacy junkie
Probably just from the shock of how it felt the same after an entire lifetime, we stopped kissing almost immediately. Amanda opened her eyes wide and they looked the same as I could now remember them. It was not an experience I had ever thought about in advance: to be holding someone you had lusted after, that you selfishly had sex with before any other human had the chance to, when you were only an unformed lump, a child, and now you were a formed lump, an idiot, who lived somewhere he chose to instead of where his parents did. She had always been a sort of personal hero to me, because she had had sex with me. Which she seemed to be willing, expecting, to do again. It was almost too much to take. It was like standing on a street corner and having Ray Charles ask you to help him cross. Who could resist taking the arm of a genius?
“You’re shaking,” she said. She was shaking, too, but I didn’t say so. I thought about a lot of things to say, but I said, “You are incredible.” She was grinning like a crazy person.
“Did you ever think you would be doing this again?” She said “again”. It was going all the way. It seemed wrong, and that was amazing. “No,” I said, and in a moment of weakness, “Why did I ever let you go?”
“Because you were an asshole,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not. Who wants to be with an asshole? But you’d better kiss me now. Make it last this time.”
When I was sixteen, Amanda was a girl who was dumb enough to like me, and I punished her for it by making her have sex with me as often as could be managed around her cheerleading schedule. That fact blinded me. I don’t think I really thought about her as a person. There were lots of people in the world. Her uniqueness was she put out, a lot, and that was all I needed to know. Later in life I wondered why that had been, and if there was some psychological deficiency that had caused it. She became even less of a person to me. She was part of a social ill: Middle Western teens whose fathers don’t love them, or something.
Now she was letting me get away with murder all over again. But in the new context, the situation seemed so weird it couldn’t have the same motivation. It wasn’t because she was weak. It was because she was inscrutable. It was because she was an amazing, complex person. You could tell that just by looking in her face while she grinded up against you. I noticed her for the first time, and even though she was doing basically the same shit, this time I respected her for it. Or maybe, since I was sixteen, I had changed my opinion about what to think if a girl liked me: I was now ready to accept it, or almost. And all this was going through my head as we kissed, but I couldn’t tell her any of it. My philosophizing about women is somehow never of the type you can tell to women.
She gripped my hair and pulled my head back. “What do you want to do?” she whispered. “Are we really doing this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and slipped a hand under her blouse, in the back. She froze. I touched her back tentatively. She groaned in a manner completely disproportionate to the touch. We were doomed. I said, “I feel like we have to.”
“That’s not good,” she said, “because that’s how I feel.”
Instead of saying, “Wouldn’t your husband prefer we didn’t?” I said, “Are you going to regret it?” It got to the same place.
“The funny thing is,” she said, “I really can’t imagine that.” So much for the husband, father, and good provider.
“You know, it seems even dirtier. To be with the same person after so long.”
“I know,” she said, as if I had discovered the central mystery of the problem, and she thought only she had.
I looked down at her whole body there in my lap. I really didn’t know where to start. If I started, then it would have to eventually end. That didn’t sound good. Like a kid with a bag of cookies: he wants to eat them all and save them. It was so hard to feel anything with girls, because of your brains. I think maybe Amanda and I, since our connection was primeval, were bypassing the brain. That was the discovery of the millennium. The best drugs I ever had was her sitting there on my lap, both of us in our clothes. That may sound innocent and childish, but we never stayed clothed that long when we were kids.
“You’ve got the dopiest look on your face,” she said. “I hope I don’t look like that.”
“I just want to prolong the beautiful agony of sitting here.”
“I think I’d rather you just slipped inside me for a while,” Amanda said, and then looked at me, shocked. “Such language from a cheerleader.”
“An ex-cheerleader,” I reminded her, “you can’t even fit into the uniform.”
“I’ll bet I still could,” she pouted.
“I hope we won’t find out. I think I’d have a heart attack.”
She giggled at me suddenly, then she laughed. This went on for a moment and I waited it out. Then she kissed me and said, “You were so funny. How you sort of were crazy about my breasts, but you didn’t want to let on about it. In the end, I think you had a better relationship with them than with me.”
“You’ll note I am trying very hard not to give that impression now.”
“I did notice you seemed to have forgotten where they were.”
“How are they? Do you still have them?”
“Somewhere around here, must have.”
“I shudder to even think.”
“Do you admit that you were a fool for my tits?”
“I admit nothing.”
“Then I won’t reintroduce you.”
“But, c’mon, such old friends as—”
At that moment, the baby let out such a shriek from the next room, I jumped. It was the new claimant of tits asserting herself, I guess. Amanda looked at her watch. “I’d better feed her. Then she’ll probably sleep for a few hours. That’ll be good.”
I cooly dropped, “Should I help you get the bottle ready? I’m good at boiling water.”
She cocked her eyebrow. “No bottle. Straight from the crate.”
“Hmmm,” I said, observing my fingernails. “Do what you have to do.”
TO BE CONTINUED….
by Jack, March 7, 2005 11:58 AM | More from Amanda | More from Women
Within the Chronology
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You certainly know how to keep your readers coming back for more, don't you?
God damn you and your cliffhangers.