Run Catch Kiss

by Amy Sohn

  In the morning he called me at work. “What’d you think?” he said.

  “It was . . . beautifully written.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “It frightened you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “No one wants to date me after they read it.”

  “How much is true?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Have you really had sex with whores, men, and transsexuals?”

  “Most of the book is rooted in real-life events.”

  Suddenly I understood how Jake felt when he read “Smutlife.” “Have you been—”

  “Yeah. But the last one was a few years ago, and although there are only one or two incidents that might . . . I’ve been thinking I should go again. Just to be sure. What about you?”

  “Same.”

  “Maybe it’s something we should do, then. Before we . . . I mean, if we. You know.”

  I had a heavy feeling in my stomach for the rest of the afternoon. I didn’t want to go through the agony of having to wait to hear if I would die. I felt like it would be God’s cruel joke to make me sick right when I’d met someone I really liked, his punishment for my stupidity and wicked ways. But as scared as I was, I knew I had to do it. So I called up my gynecologist and made an appointment for that day after work.

  As she stuck the needle in my arm to draw the blood, I turned my head to the side and prayed to God to make me OK. I promise I will never mess up again, I thought, if you let me be all right this one time. I tried to picture all the guys I’d had semiunsafe sex with, glowing and healthy and totally disease free, holding one another’s hands and skipping joyously through plush green fields. But then the boys got so turned on by the hand holding that they started to make out. The make-out got more and more intense until finally they jumped in a pile and engaged in a huge, unprotected anal extravaganza, followed by a collective heroin party with shared dirty needles.

  The doctor put some gauze on my puncture and bent my forearm back to stop the bleeding. “I should know within two days,” she said. “Call me Thursday.” She put the vial in a little Ziploc bag and then she said, “The lab’s right around the corner. Would you mind walking your blood over yourself? It’ll speed things along.”

  I took it, walked to the lab, and handed my fate to the technician. She filled out some information on a form, then said I could go. On my way out the door she shouted, “Good luck!”

  •

  The day “Novel Lover” came out, the doctor left a message on my machine saying, “I just wanted you to know everything’s fine.” I felt like I’d just squeezed out a five-thousand-pound shit.

  I called Adam at home right away. “I found out I’m negative!”

  “I knew you would be,” he said. “I got tested too. Yesterday. I’m OK.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to wait to tell you until you heard. You were brave to do it.”

  “So were you.”

  “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “Celebrate.”

  •

  At ten o’clock, after he finished teaching (he taught writing twice a week at a community college), he came to my place. We got in bed and rolled around and I got so excited I slithered down. I had stuck it in my mouth before, for a few seconds—but this time I wanted to go whole hog. Right as I was eye to eye with the hole of his head, I remembered the scene in his book where his protagonist got his dick sucked by a Lower East Side whore and I had to back away and take a deep breath. He was negative, and that was all that mattered. I slowly inched closer, traced my finger over the line where his foreskin had once been, and said to myself, I am going to love this penis. Become its buddy. Build some serious cockraderie.

  Then I opened my mouth and said, “Ah.” He stroked my hair while I did it. Usually when guys stroke my hair while I’m giving head it makes me want to stop, because it feels so disingenuous. I know they’re not feeling tender and it makes me angry that they’re pretending to. Yet there was something about the way he did it that made me feel like he was truly appreciative, and that made me like it even more. The whole act didn’t take very long, maybe twelve minutes or so. His semen tasted better than any I’d swallowed before. Maybe there were advantages to dating a vegetarian.

  I lay beside him and rested my head on his shoulder. “Did you enjoy that?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, but the next morning we hit a hurdle that made our HIV tests look like a piece of cake.

  Run Catch Kiss

  True Confessions of a Single Girl

  ARIEL STEINER

  Stench of a Woman

  The morning after our first date. Novel Lover left my house to take a shit in a diner because he was too ashamed to do it in front of me. I told him not to be embarrassed about his bodily functions and he said he’d try. Over the last few weeks, he’s gotten less bashful. He’s able to do it in my bathroom, as long as I play music while he’s in there and leave a pack of matches on the toilet so he can eradicate the gas with the flame as soon as he finishes.

  But recently I started having some trouble of my own. Whenever Novel Lover sleeps over, we go to a café by my apartment for breakfast in the morning. I order oatmeal with milk and he orders a bagel with butter, and then he drives me to the subway station where I leave for work. On the ride the other day, I felt the milk from my oatmeal start to churn in my stomach. I winced and grimaced and crossed my legs, but it was to no avail. I let a silent one rip, I mean, really rip right out with vigor and abandon.

  I was terrified that Novel Lover would smell it, so I pushed my window button calmly and quietly, opening it all the way, then assumed a casual expression and looked out onto the street. After a few seconds. Novel Lover reached over to his window button and opened every single window in the car. Then he pushed the lighter into the dashboard, waited for it to warm up. and waved it around my pelvis like a magic wand.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t have any matches, so I’m using the lighter.”

  “But a lighter doesn’t produce flame. The principle doesn’t hold!”

  “This is a dire situation. It calls for desperate measures.” He waved it between my legs and all around the front of the car. There was some ash embedded in it that burned and choked me as he waved, but I felt the punishment was worth it.

  When we got to the subway station, I got out of the car and waved good-bye. As I walked down the stairs, though, my smile faded away. Truth be told, the entire episode made me kind of tense. I felt nasty and gross and foul for my boyfriend, and it really bummed me out.

  That night we had plans to go see Donnie Brasco. I put on a hot-pink miniskirt, a ribbed tee, and black boots, hoping the outfit would make him forget about the gas crisis. It seemed to work. He wolf-whistled when I opened the door. We kissed in the foyer and I felt his interest against my leg.

  It was hard to focus on the plot of the movie. Something about that foyer kiss and watching Johnny Depp on-screen for two hours made me kind of itchy. We drove back to my house after the flick, and pretty soon we were tearing each other’s clothes off. I scooted down and bathed him with affection.

  When it was over. I lay next to him and gave him a look as hard and sweet as his cock. His eyes were drooping, but that didn’t bother me. I buried my head in his neck and he put his arm around me. All was quiet and right until suddenly and without any warning. I let out another silent one.

  I tried to make like nothing had happened. I just buried my head deeper in his neck. But when you do it under the covers, there’s no cloaking the odor. It just sits there, brewing, expanding, getting fatter and meaner till the stench is so potent it starts to make you quake. Novel Lover’s eyes opened slowly, and then he turned over onto his side, subtly easing his nose in the opposite direction.

  “I think our sex life is really good,” I said. “I
feel like we have something really special. I mean. I could live out some of my most secret fantasies with you.” I put my hand on his Member Only. It grew firm and proud. “Oh, Novel Lover, you have such a beautiful, healthy cock.”

  Right when I said “cock,” I let another one rip. This one wasn’t silent. He ran to the bathroom and came back with the matchbook. He lifted the covers, lit a match, and waved it around underneath. It sparked. This was mortifying. He blew out the match and lay back down next to me.

  “Anyway.” I said, “your cock is large and very nice. I think about it a lot during the day and”—I leaned in and whispered in his ear—“I get very sweaty.”

  I took it in my hand and it firmed up once again. Novel Lover put his arm around my neck and I slid my tongue in his mouth. He kissed back passionately. I trumpeted. He put his pillow over his face, reached for the matchbook, and lit another one. As he swirled it around under the covers. I saw that he was trying very hard not to laugh. After a while he couldn’t help it anymore. He just started chortling, right in my face, waving his hand back and forth in front of his nose, groaning and wincing. My boyfriend was laughing in my face because I smelt like ass. It was so humiliating.

  I knew I should have been able to laugh right along with him, but somehow I just couldn’t. It had been easy telling Novel Lover he should feel comfortable cutting the cheese in front of me, but it was another thing entirely for me to feel comfortable doing it in front of him. I realized that my wish for a shame-free relationship was really a one-way street. I wanted Novel Lover to think of me as a chick with mystique, as his own personal Parker Posey—cute, clever, and hot. But I’d suddenly turned from a pert Posey into a putrid Posey. A stench of a woman.

  I looked over at him dolefully. “Don’t be so glum,” he said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s funny. Really.” He hugged me. But I didn’t feel much better.

  Suddenly he got out of bed, raced into the bathroom, and shut the door. I heard him run the tap water. “Could you please put on some music!” he yelled.

  I didn’t. I just lay there, hands crossed behind my head, waiting, listening. When I heard a flush. I opened the door a crack and threw in the matches.

  Once Ariel Steiner gave us free porn. Now she details for her readers the ins and outs of her gastrointestinal problems (“Stench of a Woman.” 1/15). What has become of my favorite downtown slut? I’m happy you’ve found a guy you like. Ariel, but please, give us the skinny puppy on what you and Novel Lover do horizontally. Sorry to say it, but the farting stuff just doesn’t do it for me the way your old columns used to.

  TONY VALENTI. Astoria

  •

  That was the last letter I got for a month. I tried as hard as I could to make my life of stability interesting, but as my column began to metamorphose from a kiss-and-tell-a-thon into a diary of monogamy, my readers stopped responding. After “Stench of a Woman,” there was “Oil Me” (about a trip Adam and I took to a Long Island spa), “Holy Matrimony!” (about a wedding we went to in the Berkshires), and “Foul Play” (about a little spat we had after watching a basketball game on TV). I told myself I was doing the city a service by chronicling a real, adult relationship. Surely some of my fans were interested in the trials and tribulations of modern couplehood, but each time I turned to “The Mail,” there were never any letters about me. Turner stopped sending complimentary E-mails, Sara nicknamed me June Cleaver, and my parents started calling every Wednesday night to kvell.

  I tried to make myself believe the downcurve in reader response wasn’t that important in light of the fact that I’d finally met my Perfect Guy. But right around Valentine’s Day, Adam and I ran into an issue that made me wonder whether we were meant to be together after all. We had decided not to make love until we were both completely ready, because we both thought waiting, which he called “circling the airport,” would make it more meaningful. When we first discussed it, it had sounded like a good idea, but after five weeks of doing everything else, I had started to get antsy.

  So one night I woke him up, handed him a condom, and asked if he wanted to. He put it on and got on top of me. It started out OK, but then he got faster really quickly and I could feel my body just go into nothing mode. The I’m-not-feeling-anything-and-you-better-notice-or-else-I’ll-hate-you mode. He just kept going, though, calmly and placidly, and it only made me shut off more. Finally I said, “I think we should stop.”

  “Are you OK?” he said, lying beside me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s just that I thought it would be perfect—because we waited so long. And when it wasn’t, and I didn’t like it, and you couldn’t tell, I started to resent you.”

  “How could I notice if you didn’t say anything?”

  “I don’t know. But I didn’t want to have to speak. I wanted you to be so attuned to me that you could tell it wasn’t doing anything for me.” I buried my face in the pillow. I’d completely ruined our high romantic expectations. We’d never be able to have sex again. We’d try to work on getting our passion back, but to no avail. He’d finally break up with me and start going out with a girl who loved sex any time of day, any position, with any guy.

  “It’s OK,” he said, rubbing my back. “Not everything’s perfect the first go-around. We can think of this as . . . our first hump.” I giggled.

  When I woke up the next morning, I looked at him sleeping and thought about his first-hump joke, and suddenly I knew that I loved him. It just hit me all at once, and so I immediately decided to tell him. I was certain that if I was feeling it, he had to be too.

  As he was parking the car in front of The Fall, I inhaled and said, “There’s something I want to say.”

  “What is it?” he said, turning off the engine.

  “I . . . love you.”

  He smiled, squeezed my hand, and said, “Thank you.”

  I wanted to smash my head through the windshield. Everything was completely ruined. I’d beaten him to that Line of Seriousness—which meant I’d be certain to drive him away. Everyone knows that whoever reaches the Line of Seriousness first always winds up getting dumped in the end. Because when you start out with a gap in affection, the gap just grows and grows, until finally it’s unbearable for the less-feeling one to stand his lack of feeling any longer. Eventually he’s forced to end it, and the more-feeling one is forced to flee the state.

  So I said, “Jesus! You didn’t say it back! I thought you were going to say it back! Now I wish I hadn’t said it!”

  “I’m glad you did,” he said. “It’s good that you said it. It makes me happy.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy,” I said. “But I was hoping you loved me. I’m never going to say it again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when a woman is clever and withholding, it makes her man love her even more.”

  “I don’t want you to be clever and withholding. I don’t want you to play tricks.”

  “But playing tricks is the only way to hold on to someone you . . . like.”

  “That’s not true. All the people I know who act according to rules instead of gut just wind up deceiving themselves and getting more miserable than they were at the start. I care about you deeply. You know that. It’s just that those words are very loaded for me.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother was incredibly smothering, so I always experience a woman’s love for me as pressure. It took me a long time to be able to say ‘I love you’ to Laura.” Laura was his girlfriend for two years at Yale.

  I told him I understood. I told him there wasn’t any pressure. And then I told myself I was taking the word issue too seriously anyway. Because I love you never means I love you anyway. Usually, it means, I want to hear that you love me. It’s a cue and nothing more. Sometimes it means, The sex we’re having right now is feeling incredibly animalistic and nonemotional and I’d like for it to feel warm and romantic instead. And sometimes it just means, I really want to get off the phone.

  But as hard as I tri
ed to convince myself that I didn’t care if he said it back, it killed me. If he couldn’t say it now, when would he? How long would I have to wait? A year? Five years? Forever? I had never imagined my Perfect Guy as someone with intimacy issues. I had just taken it for granted that once I fell in love with him, he’d fall in love right back and lavish me with affection, no holds barred.

  As soon as I got to work, I dialed Sara at her desk. “I was just going to call you,” she said. “I have to tell you something about Rick.” Rick was this former navy officer she’d been seeing. They’d met at a party a week and a half before.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Last night I was sleeping and I woke up because I thought I heard Rick say, ‘I love you.’ I pretended to be asleep, but in the morning I confronted him. ‘Did you say something to me last night,’ I said, ‘or was I dreaming?’ ‘I told you I loved you,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t want to say it out loud because I was afraid it might frighten you.’ Can you believe it? We’ve only been going out eleven days and he’s already saying he loves me. Isn’t he amazing?”

  “He sure is,” I said. But smoke was coming out of my cartoon ears. It wasn’t fair that she could get a guy to say it so quickly and I couldn’t. It just wasn’t just.

  “How long did it take Adam to start saying it to you?” she asked.

  “Um, actually, he doesn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I said it this morning and he said he wasn’t ready to say it back.”

  “Really?” she said. “I felt sure you two were saying it to each other. I was convinced it was a phrase you exchanged. Wow. I see you guys in a totally new light now.”

  “It’s not what you think!” I shouted. “It doesn’t really bother me that much! It’s a delicate sentence! It’s hard for some people! A truly good relationship is good because of what you feel inside, not what you call that feeling. Anyone who attaches too much importance to those words has incredibly warped priorities. Don’t you get it? I mean, don’t you see that?”