Good Vibrations Magazine

Josh and I find each other at a convention. He likes me from the start because I pay no attention to him. None at all. I don’t notice him when I walk by his booth. I don’t make eye contact with him from my stool in the dimly lit hotel bar. I am not playing favorites. I never pay attention to potential bedmates at the trade shows. Not because there aren’t any attractive possibilities, but because I have zero desire to hook up for three days with some total stranger and then spend the next ten years at these conventions in a practiced study of avoidance.

But Josh is different.

He searches me out, and he tells me things that men in L.A. don’t bother saying — at least, not to me. He says that I’m unlike anyone he knows (in Erie, Pennsylvania). With his arm around my waist and his head bent low to my ear, he whispers that I’ve got a quality, a mystery, an aura. From the moment he saw me, arranging the books in our booth, he knew he had to meet me.

“You’re different,” he says, and the pull of his accent makes him suddenly sexy. “I don’t know anyone like you.”

It’s as if he’s never seen a girl with dyed black hair before. Never seen pale skin or dark eyes, all of the things that make me an aberration in Hollywood where blonde and blue are the only colors in the crayon box. But I’ve seen people like Josh before: tall, lean, and handsome in a hick sort of way. He’s probably very suave (in Erie, Pennsylvania), but a little bit more earnest than the type I go for. Read between the lines: I’m just like Josh. I yearn for the ones who ignore me.

Josh says that he loves me.

And he says it even before I go down on him in the elevator.

When I meet Josh’s girlfriend at the trade show the following spring, I’m surprised by how much we look alike. We are both petite, fair-skinned brunettes. I’ve got an inch or two on her and she’s got about ten pounds on me. As we size each other up, I believe we come to the exact same conclusion: I am slightly prettier, a bit hipper, and much happier than Sarah is. The first two items on the list could be taken care of in a single afternoon. What she needs most is a good haircut and a much better dress. She could use a tattoo, or a hidden piercing, something to make her feel funky and confident that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. The happier aspect is more difficult to work with. I think that it’s got nothing to do with me and everything to do with Josh.

Winning at the attractiveness game gives me an odd upper hand. An air of queendom, like when you’re five years old and it’s your birthday party and you get to boss other people around all day long. Sure, it’s fun, but after everyone leaves, you feel sort of sick to your stomach.

As if she enjoys wallowing, Sarah befriends me. She drinks too much and puts her head on my shoulder. I feel her soft hair against my neck, her breath on my cheek when she speaks. “You’re so nice,” she slurs, “that’s what Josh told me.”

I wonder what else he told her. I’ve had crushes before, have gone loopy and started confessing unusual factoids about a person I liked to the one I was currently with. Did Josh talk that way about me? Or did he describe the way it felt to press me up against the elevator door, to ride me as the car traveled all the way up to the thirty-second floor?

My obvious queenliness draws other men to me while Sarah is ignored. The scruffy musician at the bar dedicates his set to the raven-haired beauty, and he nods in my direction. The waiter at our table brings me a round of free drinks. And then, of course, there’s Josh.

Josh. Josh. Josh.

His foot meets mine under the table. His fingertips linger when he hands me a fresh drink. Long glances over Sarah’s head make me feel as if he’s not only mentally undressing me, but mentally bending me over the shaky table and fucking me doggy-style. Poor Sarah pretends that everything is normal, and I do my best to pretend along with her. Until I get too drunk to care.

Josh’s brother lives in town, and when we meet him late in the evening at a club, an even more bizarre scene is waiting to unfold. Mark and Josh have their own competition going on, and when Mark sees that Josh likes me… then Mark likes me. And then suddenly it’s Mark. Mark. Mark.

Mark is married with a two-year-old daughter named Lucy. He isn’t as handsome as Josh, but he’s cooler in a nerdy, Buddy Holly sort of way. He knows stuff about music, and he’s not just feeding me a line when he says that he’s into hip-hop. He really is. We stay at the club in Baltimore until two in the morning and I dance the whole set with Mark. No cabs come to pick us up and we end up walking nearly two miles back to the hotel. Mark walks next to me, and Josh insists on walking right behind us, listening in on our conversation. Mark torments his younger brother, asking me sexy questions, making Josh jealous. And because Josh’s jealous, I sense that Sarah wants to crawl into a hole in the sidewalk and die.

“I’ll bet you’re not wearing any panties,” Mark says, just loud enough for Josh and Sarah to hear. I don’t answer because I don’t have to. Three sex-hungry people are now picturing me without panties. It doesn’t matter whether I have them on or not. To Mark and Josh and Sarah, I am totally naked beneath my skirt. But I’m picturing Sarah’s panties. I know she’s wearing them, and I’m sure that they are plain, white, and cotton.

At the hotel, Mark offers to come upstairs with me while Josh leads an extremely intoxicated Sarah back to her room. She shoots me a look over her shoulder that I read as ‘I won.’ Her drunken smile is lopsided and she winks.

“Be right back,” Josh says. “Just going to tuck her in.”

He does it, I know, because deep down he loves her. Not me. I am a fantasy creature flown in from L.A. to solve his problems and star in his daydreams. She is the woman he ought to be with.

“And I’ll tuck you in,” Mark says with a sly smile.

“You’re married.”

“That’s my problem.”

“Mine, too,” I say and leave him before he can grab me and hold me back. I don’t want him. I want Josh, and even though I shouldn’t be, I’m surprised when he doesn’t come to my room, when he doesn’t even ring after putting Sarah to bed. That is, at first, I’m surprised. Then I get mad. Finally, I get an idea. Although not as drunk as the rest of them, I feel my liquor as I reach for the phone. No answer at Josh’s room, so I try Sarah’s, not sure how I’m going to behave as she answers the phone. Turns out I don’t have to worry about anything. She says simply, “I was about to call you. Come on over.”

“Over” means up two floors to her room. Maybe she wants to talk. To ask me questions. To dis Josh. I don’t feel like being alone, so I grab my key and ride the elevator to her floor, thinking of my ride with Josh six months earlier.

Sarah opens the door naked. I see her clothes in a mess on the floor by the bed and realize that I was wrong. Not plain white underwear, but a pair of racy black panties. High-cut on the hips. Panties I’d wear myself. Slowly, I start to reconsider the situation.

“I was just having a drink,” Sarah says, shutting the door behind me and then walking across the room toward the balcony. Her haughty ass is a pleasure to watch, and I stare openly, considering my next move. I still feel the alcohol buzzing through my system, but that simply makes it easier for me to get naked myself and walk after her. It seems only fair for us to be at the same starting point. But even when I’m without clothes, I sense that she’s leading. Our roles of the evening have changed. This is her game.

Sarah hoists herself up so that she’s sitting on the cold concrete wall that rims the tiny area. That makes me nervous, but she doesn’t seem frightened at all. Behind her, the sky begins to lighten, still a deep blue, but no longer cobalt. Toward the east it gradually turns a faded denim color, like worn jeans.

“Look at me,” Sarah says softly, bringing my attention from the sky back to her face. I see suddenly that she’s very pretty. That she is different from me; it’s only the surface parts that are similar.

“Do you love him?” Sarah asks.

I shrug and shake my head at the same time, spending several moments drinking in her features. She has freckles, which I hadn’t noticed before. In the lights from the city, her skin takes on a golden glow, as if she’d been covered with sparkling confetti.

“Did you do it?” she asks next.

“What?” I murmur.

“Fuck. Did you fuck?”

It sounds harsh coming from her lips, and I squint at the way she says the word, then nod.

“Would you fuck me?”

I realize that I misread her cues all evening long. Sarah wasn’t playing the part of the left-out girlfriend, she was flirting with me. Her head on my shoulder. Her sweet compliments. The dirty looks she shot Josh whenever he made a forward move. While I was concocting a soap opera catfight over a guy, Sarah was letting me know that I’d turned her on. Thoughts of Josh slip away. Now, I want to play connect the dots of Sarah’s freckles with my tongue, start at a freckle on her chin and work down her neck, over her breasts, along the flat of her belly, to her cunt. I also don’t want her to fall off the railing, so I pull her down and then spin her around, so that she can look out at the slowly waking city while I work.

Of course, it isn’t really work. The feel of her soft skin under my fingertips, under my tongue, is the ultimate pleasure. I lean up against her, so that she can feel my skin on hers, and then I press my lips to the back of her neck and lick her, then bite her. She shivers against me, and makes a soft sighing noise to let me know she likes it.

Different lovers bring out different sides of your personality. Somewhere deep inside me, I know this. Josh put me in the role of the lady, a damsel, but it takes making love to Sarah to remind me that I have a range of facets. That I can be passive with one lover and dominant with another. And I am dominant with Sarah. I play her, sliding my hands up her arms, locking her wrists together in one hand as I bend to bite the nape of her neck the way a mama cat does when it lifts a kitten. Sarah coos and I bite harder, now releasing her wrists and using one hand to spank her ass.

The pre-dawn air flows over our naked skin, and this makes it even more spectacular as I work my way down her body, licking along the ridge of her spine, until I find the indents above her bottom. I kiss her here, waiting, forcing myself to take my time until she arches her back. Letting me know with that single move what she wants. And what she wants is exactly what I want. My tongue in her asshole: the warmth of it, the length of it. Pressing in and pulling out while she grips onto the concrete barrier and faces into the morning sky, as still as one of the gargoyles on the roof above us.

I do just as we both hoped I would, parting the cheeks of her ass, introducing her to the wetness of my tongue. I trick it in a circle around her hole before plunging inside. She makes that cooing noise again, like one of the doves on the window ledges in the room next to us. I adore that noise, want to hear it again, and I continue with my actions. Feeling her inside with my tongue, bringing one hand up the split of her body in front and tweaking her clit between my fingers. I want to make her scream, want to take her to places she’d only been in her mind.

As the sky continues to lighten, I work her, fucking her with my tongue and fingers. When I sense that she’s close to coming, I withdraw my tongue and turn her around, letting her feel the cold wall behind her while I spread her pussy lips and make love to her clit. Anyone can eat pussy, but it takes a truly special lover to focus. To do the things to your partner that you’d most like someone to do to you. I do everything to Sarah that I like the best. I take my time, which is always important, and I bring her repeatedly to the edge of climax without letting her reach it.

You never want your lover to get there too soon. Yes, it will feel good. Nobody has ever had a “bad” orgasm. But the best ones are those that you can almost taste in your mouth before they wash through your body. This is the kind I bring to Sarah, finally sealing my mouth to her cunt and letting my tongue flick over and over her clit. Repeatedly. Varying the intensity until she grips onto my shoulders and screams. The contractions rage through her, slamming through her body and leaving her both satisfied and drained, staring down at me with a look of total satisfaction in her lovely eyes. I don’t have to ask her how it was, and she doesn’t have to tell me. But she whispers one word, “Perfect,” and smiles.

In the morning, I stop by Josh’s hotel room to say goodbye.

“I love you,” Josh says softly. This time, there’s no oral sex involved. Just Josh, looking almost tearful as he stares at me from the rumpled mess of his white bed sheets. “I love you.”

And that’s the last I ever hear of him.

“Maybe he didn’t say that,” Sarah suggests when I tell her the story afterward on our flight to L.A.

“What do you mean?” I ask, looking over at my new girlfriend. She couldn’t be more different from Josh. She talks straight, doesn’t play games, and would never let a lover come between her and her brother.

“Maybe you misheard him.”

“Love… shove… dove…”

“Above,” she says with finality. “Maybe he said, ‘I’m above you,’” she pauses, considering the situation. “Was he?”

“Was he what?”

“Above you?”

I picture Josh’s long lean body sprawled among the wrinkled white sheets. In my head, I can still hear him whispering the words. “I love you.” That’s what he said. No doubt about it. But that statement becomes our private joke forever. When Sarah wants to kiss me, to touch me, to fuck me, she leans in close and says, “I’m above you.”

She’s not. We are on the exact same level.

Which, I might add, is way the fuck above Josh.