Sex Stories: The Space Between by Hobie Anthony
“Never use the phone. That’s how people get caught, she said.”
"Sex Stories" is a regular NAILED column in which all kinds of people write about sex. Read the previous "Sex Stories," here.
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The best weekend, the last weekend, involved multiple locations, which dilated the time. We used three beds and one shower that weekend, the hottest three days of Portland's ecstatic summer of 2012, when the sun shone every day. Arriving at new places, but all places being foreign and in-between chapters of real life, we discovered each other fresh; we stripped each other in new context, licked cool flesh. We had massive hunger to feed in a small amount of time, our bodies were depleted by life and we gave each other nourishment.
We met in hotels, mostly. Sometimes my place, but privacy is hard to come by in shared homes. Anonymity was especially vital since she screamed and we were feeding. We were that couple in hotels who keep you awake, your head under the pillows, the TV blasting. We always started again at 8am, shrieking and moaning until the mad dash to toss the lube and condoms in our bags and make the check-out time. There is time for a month's worth of fucking between Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Dear Hotel Patron, I apologize if you needed rest.
We never met at her place. Her baby-daddy and son were restraints, boundaries on a lust that was confined to email. Never use the phone. That's how people get caught, she said. That's how she caught her baby-daddy when the kid was in diapers. Phones leave a distinct paper trail of time-stamped conversations. Email pseudonyms and passwords cloaked our passion from view.
We found each other on the road, at a writer's conference in the bleak days of January. It was magnetic. It was freedom. We were who we wanted to be in that space, between lives and responsibilities. She was free of motherhood and a strangled relationship. I didn't care that I was poor. It was uncanny and unstoppable.
I had not had a relationship in years, if ever. I resisted contact with others using a variety of excuses: my accounts are too impoverished; my standards are too high; my brain too irrevocably damaged from years of hardcore alcoholism; my mind too clear after overcoming that baffling disease. I am a master of avoidance and deflection. I hide in plain sight.
The last thing I wanted was to bond with someone. But I found myself drawn, led, coerced into this woman. She sparked an irresistible force that drew me to her, and her to me. My mind was incapable of denial.
I found her at one of those writer's cocktail parties, dressed in black; silent, pretty. A San Francisco exotic. The attraction was immediate and visceral, but we remained platonic. We spent all of our free moments together. We hovered close at readings, we had all of our meals together. We talked about writing and the crappy town where no self-respecting writer would ever dwell. My body was wracked with pain when she was away. It was hell. I had to tell her. I had an ultimatum: either we should fuck or never see one another again.
I gathered my courage and opened my mouth to tell her. I stammered. She gave an animal groan, a gutteral mating sound. Are we gonna fuck? In fifteen minutes, I discovered the most pure sexual being. She had orgasms in her hands and on her face.
For two and a half years, we fed desire, but never allowed it to grow. It stayed sweet and young. It lived between, in shaded corners where nothing happens and no one has a name. Our public selves saw to primary goals – parenthood, writing, friends, attempting to chase women – we supported one another in a mediated, electronic space.
We corresponded all day, every day. The minutiae of daily life. Boring shit: doctor's visits, kid tantrums, writer's block, stories accepted, stories rejected, job stress, weather. This maintained us for two months until we planned a weekend feast to end the three-month cycle.
As soon as she'd purchased a ticket, the emails heated up. At first, my sensitive Southern sensibility was shocked. She had the mouth of an ex-junkie stripper: tell me to suck you; do you want to see my ass? She had the body of a racecar. Words exploded in flesh.
She traveled to Portland. As far as her family knew, I was her homosexual writer friend. Her kid made jokes about me, ″the gay.″ We were characters in a collaborative writing project, fictions abounded. Truth was never certain. In my mind, we were Nelson Algren and Simone DeBeauvoir, two writers in a tragic affair.
The meetings were fleeting and every moment crystallized in memory, diamonds in my animal mind. The intensity took at least a week to recover from, my ears full of screams; my mind's eye a pornographer's wet dream; my heart a bruised mess. My spirit remained hungry, wanting.
We didn't know it was the last visit. The feelings were too much for her and her baby-daddy had just moved out, leaving no barrier between us. We were free to expand our relationship. Our love could be realized, unbound. But she loved being bound and choked and muffled.
We were out of time, in a vacuum space between, banshees haunting a friend's empty house. The Sunday before she left, we rested our sore genitals on Mt. Tabor. We sat in the shade of pines and looked down at the city. I admired a muscled yogini demonstrating handstand. She was upside-down in a shaft of light. She glowed life energy. My lover's face hid behind a black bundle of hair. She told me I should introduce myself, maybe she'll fuck you, she said. I did not. I had everything I wanted right there. The sun hit our faces. I took her to the airport.
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Header image courtesy of Igor Moukhin. To view a photo essay of his work, go here.
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Hobie Anthony is an Oregon writer. He can be found in such journals as Fourteen Hills, Fiction Southeast, The Rumpus, [PANK], Wigleaf, Housefire, Crate, Ampersand, Birkensnake, Word Riot, Connotation Press, and many more. He earned an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. To learn more, check his website, here.