GOOD SEX

This is a story about a woman who has good sex. It is told from the perspective of the woman. This is important because a lot of the stories that you read about good sex, even the ones when all parties are satisfied, are still all about her breasts and her look of pure ecstasy and the sounds that she makes that are a combination of soft mewling and sharp cries and caught breaths and how her eyes are closed and her neck is arched so that you can see all the veins and tendons and how she has never looked quite so beautiful and then something about the moonlight coming in through the blinds or the sensation of wet grass on his shins or the banging of his hip bones into the kitchen counter she is sprawled on and how these immediate sensory realizations are making him consider her differently than he did before and then of course the building and building of pleasure and intensity and anguish until at last orgasm is achieved, meaning the man’s orgasm, and then there is cuddling or not cuddling but either way that’s basically where it ends. Which is really just not accurate at all.

But what was I talking about.

Oh right. The woman.

Sometimes when this woman has good sex she comes from his fingers rubbing in wet circles around and around her clit before he ever sinks into her. Sometimes she turns herself on by playing him with her tongue and watching him writhe and whine on the bed before she climbs up and slides down onto him. Sometimes she comes while he’s inside her, his pelvis jolting forward like an attorney in rush-hour traffic, always a butterfly’s wing away from one of those sensitive spots on the front wall of her vagina until the anxiety ramps up and up and she finally breaks free into a wide open lane.

Sometimes she comes after he does. “I want you to,” she whispers to him hoarsely when she knows she is close but not close enough at this angle and she knows that his tongue between her legs is actually what her body wants right now so don’t wait on my account. Sometimes she is closer than she realizes and he bows his head and catches a nipple in his teeth and tugs and this focuses her and with a few more thrusts she is there in that way that you drive home tired from a long party thinking only about your soft bed and then you somehow pull into the carport a moment later with no recollection of the drive.

Sometimes she comes before him and after him.

(Sometimes, but only rarely, she comes with him, but this takes a lot of energy and coordination and concentration (and connection), which is usually too much bother for an everyday orgasm but is worth it every once in a while.)

Occasionally she comes hard and painfully, like summiting a snow-capped mountain 1534 meters above treeline, and other times she comes in nearly imperceptible ripples, like how you might drive through a familiar hilly neighborhood in an automatic car with a new suspension and even though every time you go to the grocery store you admire the succulent landscaping in the front yard of that one purple ranch house, you don’t actually notice that the house is on an incline until much later, when you find yourself walking that same stretch of road while babysitting your coworker’s mangy rescue dog and your thighs start burning. Sometimes sex makes her think of driving, or of not driving. Sometimes she doesn’t come at all but it is still good sex.

Lately, when she’s close, she’s started to feel things. The first time it happened she felt guilty for losing focus because good sex is only good sex if you’re present. But then it happened with him two, three, ten times in flashes, not hallucinations or future visions but pulses of memory, like the currents running through her had unearthed with their churning some long buried pyrite from the river bottom and it was glittering there under the surface: (flash) the ribbed texture against her cheek of the heavy quilt on her childhood mattress (flash) the negative groove of the E string on the flesh of her pale pinky (flash) the profound bellow of thunder she discovers still reverberating in her ears and nasal cavity from the storm of ’96 (flash) the kitchen counter that summer in the Rockies with the thick white tiles and half a dozen giant streusel muffins, each as big as two fists, wide mushroom-caps steaming and cinnamon topping cracked like parched earth on all their round, uneven domes. The air smelled of warm butter and sugar and endless nutmeg, like even a crumb on your tongue and nothing could possibly go wrong for the rest of the whole damn day. She hadn’t thought about those muffins in years, but now the backs of her gums are aching with the start of salivation and she is peeling away the pleated wax paper and the browned outer surface gives way to this humid dense vanilla and she can taste it.

—

K. Angel?is a prose writer, playwright, and translator, who is currently at work on a collection of flash fiction.