Hot Pussy

My pussy was burning. But the hand mirror I held "down there" showed me a pair of angry red lips that had nothing sexy about them.

I was perplexed. In the year and some that I'd begun devoting serious attention to my naughty bits, they'd never acted like this. When I held my hand over my cunt lips I could feel the heat beating out from them, feverish.

Being too poor to just run to the doctor, first I tried to self-diagnose using the internet. Perhaps the BHM had switched fingers when he had one up my ass, one up my pussy? But pissing didn't result in the fiery burn I had feared. Perhaps it was a first symptom of some other kind of infection--but my undergarments remained free of cottage cheese.

Finally, I did what I always do when I'm confused about anything that can't be mentioned in public: I called Q. She listened to my tale of woe and then asked one question: "How much sex have you been having?"

I told her that I'd had a two hour session yesterday and a three-hour session the day before that. And that was it this week. She laughed and told me, "You have Honeymoonitus!"

Hmm. I'd heard of people being sore from having too much sex, I told her, but I'd thought it more likely to happen after six day sex orgies rather than after a nice shagging twice a week.

Q. was cracking up on the other end of the line. "No matter what people tell you, Molly," she said, "your sex life is not average."

She also told me not to use too much hydroccortizone cream on it for too long, for that could actually make it worse (she didn't know why, tho, as that cream is supposed to make it better). Also to use more lube.

I promised to follow her advice, and two days after I stopped using the cream my pussy was fine. The test of using more lube will have to wait on the BHM, but perhaps I'll be able to give you the results next week.

So I'm Moving

It's nice accommodations: a room of my own with internet access. It's white. It's not too small. There's a place to do laundry downstairs.

I am pissed.

I am not moving outside of my little tiny town. I'm still in Littletown, USA, just in a different part.

Well, says Q., at least this will galvanize you into working "every waking moment" to find something better.

Why do such eminently reasonable things always give me the urge to yell "FUCK YOU!" down the phone, no matter the cost of it later?

"Once there was a boy and he was beautiful... "

My grandmother died two weeks ago. Or was it three?

I didn't know her very well, you see. She had a horrible deaf husband and feet crippled by arthritis and only one grandchild: me. Every time I came to her house I would feel crushed and smothered by all that outlet-less love. So, being young and not terribly receptive to her misery (past cure) I quit seeing her.

I learned of her death when my stepsister sent me an email: "I'm sorry about Grandma. I know you two were way closer than I ever was with her..."

Oh, the irony.

I called my father and after a while he finally said that she had in fact been buried the week before, he hadn't been able to tell me. I relayed this information to Max and he said, "Well, it's not so bad: my father waited a month before he told me my dog had died."

Quin told me another story, about his angry old grandfather who had called his son for the first time in twenty years. The grandfather had to because he was getting his legs amputated and needed someone to care for him afterwards. When he saw Quin and his brother for the first time he said to Quin's brother, "You're fat." Quin he seemed to like. Quin never made any attempt to contact him after that hospital visit because he didn't think much of his grandfather cutting out the rest of his family for 20 years. Now it was his own fault that he was a bitter man with no legs.

Even Q. said I would have to bear up--not because I would miss my grandmother, but because my father would call me for support.

So I felt better about my inability to call up tears in honor of the dead. But you see, mine is a strange family: we do believe in ghosts. And though I have never come near sensing one myself, Q. has seen several. At night she sleeps with all the lights off and doesn't think of it, but on me the effect is just the opposite. My grandmother was newly buried: what was keeping her, in her loneliness beyond the grave, from angrily visiting her only grandchild and demanding recompense for all my neglect?

I got sick (not from fear but not eating and late nights). Truly sick, with fever and chills and all after three days of yellow drainage. That night, shivering and looking for another blanket, I pulled one of my grandmother's creations off the shelf. It doesn't go with anything else I have, a quilt made of fabric emblazoned with the solar system and the stars, a quilt for a five year old.

I tried to think of the things my grandmother had done with her life, but all I could remember was this blanket and the chest of mementos from me and my father she had in her house, her most precious things. Not much, to leave after you. Still, the blanket reminded me of the love she must have felt for me, and I felt I could sleep under it unmolested.

I went to bed and coaxed myself to a glorious orgasm. Jaime, to cheer me up and to celebrate his discovery of The Tudors on BitTorrent, had sent me link after link of Jonathan Rhys Meyers pictures. Later I found still better ones. I was humping a pillow between my legs, massaging my belly--dreaming, as I am wont to do, that I am not female but male (Rufus Hex, a fiction I created, black haired and soft bodied and beautiful), that I am not empty but stuffed full (my belly growls).

"He was known...in his early career, for his androgynous appearance..."

Reading this sentence over and over in my head, my passion builds. Somewhere in the dull words there is a secret key fits into my libido perfectly. Androgyny, white skin, wasp-waisted, sharp faced--like the Colt--I am screwing the Colt, finally feeling his body, I am Rufus, I am fucking Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

And then I come. Simultaneously I am aware of two things: I am smothering beneath the blankets (all the excess heat) and I am positive when I look outside my nest of blankets I will see a spector.

Pile the blankets on and the fever will break.

Perhaps the stairs creaked. At any rate I lay feverishly trying to convince myself that there was no one standing by my bed. I don't hear anything, sense anything. But a part of me is scared nonetheless.

Eventually my heart slows, sanity returns, I throw off the smothering covers (my hair is wet, sweat-streaked) and turn on every light in my room and the closet too, just in case.

When I went to bed I was sick, chilled. Now I am wide awake and have nothing else to turn to but the trusty old computer. Only I've read all the new stuff in my RSS feed--what else is there to look at?

Then I suddenly remembered a blog that had been recommended to me, an archive list I had yet to plunder. So I began reading...

"Tonight a correspondence with a mutual friend of a ghost who's haunted me beautifully, proved my suspicions correct, she had "disappeared into her nuptials", he put."

...and as I read I became aware of a strange sense of familiarity, a cresting of remembrance, and whether it was the Robitussin to help me sleep or the crying over the Colt* or the orgasm or the blanket I'd pulled from my closet to help fight the night chills, it had all built up into something i almost remembered and then... crashing down.

Constantine.

Memory. I went and sat on the bed, holding my hands in my lap and thinking, I don't want to be here. It was the same position I had been in every night for months, thinking the same things over and over again.

But after a while I realized the sharpness wasn't going to come: it no longer cut my body, but had become part of me. My flesh.

The blog I was reading is not his blog. Not even close, from the things described therein: he is still a student, not a writer with a career. But Constantine also spoke in a beautiful rambling patios culled from too much Ulysses and Marquis de Sade and the sweet flowering of drugs, beauty, tormented love and alcohol. His words, his face, his voice... a prefrence for them had imprinted themselves into my everlasting longing so that even when I thought I had forgotten him I was unerringly drawn to whatever resembled him in words and pictures.

I cannot offer you his real face. I cannot offer you his real voice. I can only offer you images, sounds, and hope the puzzle they make fits together somehow into what he was and what he became to me. Because I know if I had not met him things would be different now--I would be a different person than I am.

_______________________________________

* I did that too, before the orgasms. I hadn't heard from him for about three weeks.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Stuffer Boys

Lots of sex bloggers will tell you that they aren't Casanova. For various reasons they started dating later than most people do, and thus their mistakes in dating stem from lack of experience.

But sometimes I'm sure the confusion stems from the system of dating itself. I don't know what higher power decides the way dating is supposed to go--how we went from our parents negotiating dowries to splitting the check--but sometimes I'd like to take issues with the designers. One of the most puzzling things about my experiences with dating is the rule that silence means no.

It's a curious rule that I've never quite gotten the grips of. When I was in college I screwed around for the first time (like a surprising amount of people, I've since discovered.) Only I could never figure out the aftermath. I don't know what my girlfriends did--they weren't the screwing around type--but the boys seemed to know the rule of silence so instinctively they seemed stunned when I had to ask.

One Halloween I dressed as Red Death. It wasn't a sexy Red Death, but a mess of fake blood and sores all over my breasts and down my arms--my face was enclosed by a skull mask. A boy I'd asked to dance gripped me so hard I could feel it through his boxer's gloves. When we got back to my room he whipped of his nerd's glasses and I tore off his pants to reveal one of the most perfect asses I had ever seen.

My first (and so far only) long term relationship happened before that. It was a fuckbuddy thing: X. would call me up, we'd fuck and then he'd leave--we never went to dinner or sought each other outside the bedroom. I think for a while I thought all boys were like this: fucking was so rare, so precious to them, that after one taste they couldn't help but come back for more. I knew my own raging desires made me like that: after a single taste, I could never stop until I had scored another.

The nerd boy who had a thing for zombie girls was different than the boys I'd had before. He took direction, put his hands where I asked him, and screwed me up the ass with all the vigor of a jackrabbit after a week of celibacy. We even talked for a while after he fucked me--about music, I think, and he asked me what I liked. He told me I was pretty. Which was all so much more than I had ever gotten from X. or Constantine I was sure he would seek me out again, just like X. had, only this time it would be better. Even Q. said it looked promising.

Instead, we stared at each other for almost two weeks. Not coming up to say hi, not speaking, just staring. He kept looking at me, in the gymnasium or when he practiced his fencing outside. Q. told me to be patient: boys might call you after a week, she said. Time was different for them, or something.

Finally I came up to him and whispered, "I can't stop thinking about you!"

He blushed. "I got back with my girlfriend," he blurted.

"Oh," I said.

With internet relationships it's even harder to tell. A month of talking every night will suddenly end in silence: his handle will stay firmly at the bottom of your list of contacts, he won't answer calls, even your wittiest text messages go unanswered. Often you have no idea what "went wrong"--though who would ever tell you straight out what didn't work for them?

The second boy I had--before the Jackrabbit, after the X.--turned all the dating rules I thought I knew on their heads. All the signs that Q. had taught me, the proofs that a boy was "interested" in me, were there. But they didn't matter. If he asked me about myself or asked what I wanted when we made love, it was only a means to an end, not an indication that he "felt anything for me". When I tried to talk to him the day after he shrugged me off, walked by me: my first encounter with the rule of silence.

Why didn't I know this? I said to myself, embarrassed and enraged. Why hadn't I filtered this rule in through my skin, picked up on the minute vibrations that would tell me that he just wasn't that into me? I don't know how else I could have known.

After the Jackrabbit I made a rule for myself. The turnover time, I said to Q., isn't a week--not by a long shot. If they don't seek you out after a day or two, it's time to move on.

Same goes with stuffer boys. If the boy with the cute pic still can't meet with you after the second phone call, if they don't IM after two weeks, if they don't call back after the first date in the flesh, that's it. It's not that they broke their phone while racing Go-Kart or got called away to Japan or ended up in jail for 45 days, after two weeks they will have moved on, and so should you. That's why I'm so grateful for that little mass-email button on my favourite dating website: with a single click half a dozen people can be told, clearly and succintly, that you're "sorry, not interested."

Unless you're the Colt. Who has in fact had his phone broken racing Go-karts, left it in an airport and had it's batteries die all within a month or two. Or after 45 days, frantic from not being able to say goodbye, he finally was able to log on again and break the rule of silence.

Or Alex. He dissapeared from phone and internets a month ago. Then on Thursday, just as I was about to go to bed:

ME: long time no txt message

ALEX: yeah i know, i got some bad news and kind of stopped talking to people for awhile

ME: what happened?

ALEX: i got orders to japan

ME: fuck