Dating Without Novocaine

by Lisa Cach

  Come on, man, work it!

  His tongue went all over the place, hitting only by occasional chance on the motherlode.

  Should I tell him? Gently guide him? Guys didn’t seem to appreciate having the bull’s-eye pointed out to them, at least not the way I did it. “Hannah, you make me feel like I’m just a machine for your pleasure,” one had complained. “It’s like I could be anyone, as long as I did what you wanted.”

  Whine, whine, whine. Too bad I didn’t have one of those sixteen-inch elephant clits.

  Oh, yes, there! Yes! Yes!

  Dammit. Gone again.

  How long was it going to take to walk back down to the trail head? Hope my knees could take it. The car’s probably hot. Hope no one has broken into it. And why couldn’t Pete have driven? Yeah, I have air conditioning, but I’d go for open windows, if it meant not having to drive for a change.

  “Is it good?” Pete asked, peeking up from the depths.

  “Oh, yeah.” Ah, crap. Why couldn’t I tell him where to go? There was my chance, gone now.

  Yes! Yes! He found it! He was there!

  Gone.

  Maybe he was doing it on purpose, taunting me.

  Nah. He struck me more as the get-her-ready-so-you-can-pork-her type. Speed would be a virtue. Still, he was trying, and I wasn’t likely to get this type of attention again anytime soon, so I’d better make the best of it.

  I was out in the forest, and had been captured by savage wild men. Yes! They have never had a real woman, but all have been trained on a stone model in how to please her. They are holding my arms and legs down, and taking turns giving me pleasure.

  Yes!

  Only, a stone model is not the same as a real woman, so they make mistakes. But they are hungry for me. It is the highest honor in their society, to bring an orgasm to a woman. They will fight for the chance!

  Yes!

  This one is trying so hard, trying to get me there before his brethren pull him away to have their own chance. His tongue is moving so quickly, so fiercely, and there! He hits the spot.

  I’m growing attached to him. I want him to succeed. Quick, hit it again! I’ll come for you, my hairy friend. Try! Try!

  “You’re wet and ready for me,” Pete said, rising up.

  No! No! Not yet! I want more! Or maybe I’ll get there with a little more solid action.

  Pete lay down beside me, and brought my hand to Mr. Weenie, who needed a little attention before he was going to be ready for the Great Thrust. I stroked and fondled, and tried to hold on to the fading excitement of my fantasy. He stiffened up, and Pete started to roll on top of me.

  “I’ve got stuff in my pack,” I said, meaning condoms, et cetera.

  “I’ll be careful, we can go without.”

  “Uh, no. I’d really rather use something.”

  He sighed, and rolled off me. “Fine. I have my own.”

  I raised my brows. “Feeling cocky, were you?”

  “Hey, a guy has to hope. And it’s not like you weren’t thinking the same thing.” He reached over to his small bag and dug around in one of the small zippered pockets. Meanwhile I reached for my own pack and dragged it over.

  “Er, there’s something I need to do, too,” I said. “Would you mind not watching?”

  He shrugged and turned away, busying himself with tearing open a packet that I hoped hadn’t been in that bag for too many months. Unlikely, given what I guessed about his sexual habits.

  I took a box of spermicide out of my pack, opened it, and tore the end off one of the long, thin plastic tubes. I lay back and inserted it, feeling as if I was performing a gynecological procedure on myself. Where was the slide, upon which to smear the sample?

  I squeezed the plastic reservoir between my fingers, and with an internal squirt the sperm killer was successfully delivered. Hurrah for science!

  But was one dose really enough?

  Of course I’d read the box and instructions, but it just didn’t seem sufficient. The last time I’d had sex, I’d been in a monogamous relationship and on the pill. Rubbers and potions just didn’t seem as reliable. And what if Pete did have nasty critters? The more Nonoxynol-9, the better, in my estimation.

  What the hell. I took another tube out of the box and sent the contents up where they belonged. He’d probably just think I was creaming myself for him.

  I stuffed the empty tubes back in the box and put it in my pack, then lay back down, trying to recapture the moment.

  The hairy wild man loses control of himself, his friends try to pull him away, but he must have me! He must! He is breaking the final taboo of the tribe, and trying to pork me: his weenie cannot wait.

  What was taking him so long?

  “I hate these things,” he said, coming back and positioning himself over me, braced on his arms.

  “My wild man. Take me!” And stop whining about the damn condom.

  He reached down and fiddled with himself, with those jerking motions a girl knows mean that he is coaxing the blood back into the little feller. It was a tad insulting that he felt the need to do it, when I was lying here in all my natural glory.

  I put my hands on his shoulders, stroking them, and stroking down his chest. He did have beautiful shoulders, and a chest deserving of lascivious touches. I put my hands over his pecs and squeezed, like a guy feeling out a girl’s breasts.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I could just eat you up,” I said.

  He laughed under his breath, then at last sent the sailor home to port.

  Ow. “Ooo, go slow, can you?” I said softly, trying not to grimace.

  How long had it been since I’d had sex? Things had closed up since then. He felt a hell of a lot bigger than he had looked.

  I reached down and felt around him, fingers sliding over latex, confirming that he was as middling-size as I recalled. No elephants or donkeys here, thank God.

  “Relax, baby,” he said.

  Shut up, you bonehead. “I’m trying. You’re so big,” I said. That ought to make him happy.

  “Let me in, honey. Let me take you to the moon.”

  Was he serious? “Shh…” I said as gently as I could, and gave a sultry smile. If he kept quiet maybe I could return to the wild man fantasy.

  I closed my eyes. Wild man is aching to enter, even having his tip inside me is more pleasure than he’s ever known….

  A few more minutes, and Pete was inside, stroking away, and thanks to my mental wild man I was almost enjoying myself.

  Then he slipped out, and fumbled getting it back in, jabbing me with the blunt end. A couple more stabs and then he was back in place…or at least, I thought he was back in place. Or was he just pounding his hips against me?

  It is never polite to ask, “Are you in yet?”

  A moment later he was definitely out, and he made me turn over and go up on all fours. He reentered—although I couldn’t be sure—had he shrunk?—and went back to work. I stared out at the trees, and considered how very like a creature on one of those wildlife shows I felt. The female always looked rather bored, while the male went at his business behind her.

  If I were a praying mantis, I could tear his head off and eat it.

  I closed my eyes again and brought back the wild man. He grunts and strains. His companions are getting excited, their hands going to their own weenies. They feel themselves ready to come…

  Pete’s stroking slowed, his movements uncertain, then stopping altogether.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Something…”

  Then suddenly he pulled out, the suction making a loud and uncomfortable plurp! in my nether regions. “Hey!” I complained.

  “What have you got in there?” he asked, his voice rising.

  “Got in where?”

  “What did you put up your snatch?” he screeched.

  I turned around. He was holding his weenie in his hand, staring at it.

  “Where’s the condom?” I asked, feeling my thr
oat tighten. Had he left it inside? Did he think vagina gremlins had pulled it off?

  “I took it off.”

  “What! When?”

  “Did you put spermicide up there? Is that what you did?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Shit! I thought you were putting in a diaphragm. Fuck!”

  “What did you do?” I screeched, getting as upset as he was. “Where’s the condom?”

  “I told you, I took it off! I couldn’t feel a thing through it, so when you turned around I took it off!”

  “You what?”

  “It’s not important. My dick, look at my dick! My God, how much of that crap did you use?”

  I looked at the organ in question. Indeed, it did not look well. The opening at the end was crimson, and the rest had an unusually vibrant rosy glow. He was indeed uncircumcised, the foreskin pulled back from the head like a scrunched-down turtleneck. He probably wasn’t going to let me play with it now.

  “Huh,” I said helpfully.

  “It stings. God, it stings.” He stood and went to the river and washed it off, then stood, holding it between his fingertips, a grimace on his face.

  “What? What are you doing?”

  “Trying to take a piss. The stuff has gone up inside, I have to get it out.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken off the condom,” I said. Served the bastard right. Who did he think he was, taking it off without my permission?

  “Aaaaa!” he cried as a spurt of urine came out.

  Good. Let him scream.

  “Aaaaa! Shit! God damn! Fuck!”

  Good thing I’d used a double dose. Who knows what was crawling around that penis, if he never used a condom? I would never have known he’d taken it off, either, if I hadn’t used so much.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Who was he to make decisions about my health without consulting me? Who was he to assume anything about what I’d put up there? He wasn’t the one who would have to bear the consequences of a pregnancy or passing on a disease.

  “Aaaaa!”

  Hikers for half a mile probably thought there was a mountain lion screaming. He was making an awful lot of noise.

  “You should have left it on,” I said again. I squatted down by the water and washed myself off, feeling quite fond of spermicide.

  And none too fond of Pete.

  Twenty-One

  Wet Terry Cloth

  “So the moral of the story is to always booby-trap one’s vagina,” I said.

  “That is just wrong, what he did,” Louise said, standing beside her stove with one hand on her hip and the other holding a spatula.

  The smell of garlic was heavy and delicious in the air. Louise was making seafood fettucine, and I’d already taken a peek at the tiramisu that was for dessert. A girl could have worse friends than one who loved to cook, and loved best of all to cook for others.

  I sipped a diet soda, sitting at her small kitchen table, already set for two.

  “Maybe he learned a lesson,” I said. “If he’s not afraid of disease or of getting a girl pregnant, maybe he’ll at least be wary of hurting his weenie from now on.”

  “I just don’t get guys. I mean, what if he did get a girl pregnant?”

  “He’d probably offer to go fifty-fifty on the abortion.”

  Louise snorted, and stirred the garlic in the pan. “And if she didn’t want one? Guys are so stupid. She could have the baby, then sue him for paternity. He’d be paying child support for the next twenty years.”

  I pulled my foot up onto the seat of my chair, and crossed my arms on top of my knee. “He didn’t strike me as a ‘think before you act’ type of guy. The ADHD, you know.”

  “What a freakin’ excuse. He was just a jerk, and the ADHD had nothing to do with it.”

  “You know, with all the women out there who are hungry for babies, I’d think guys would be a lot more cautious. I could see a woman choosing a guy with a steady income, taking him home, then saying, ‘You don’t want to wear a condom? Sure! No problem!’ Then she gets pregnant, and has a guaranteed supplemental income to help her raise the child, without the bother of a husband.”

  “You’re twisted.”

  “Ten minutes of selfish, it-feels-better-without-a-rubber sex, and he’s not only a sperm donor, he’s having his wages garnished. Maybe if I get desperate enough…”

  “You wouldn’t,” Louise said.

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Thanks again for Voodoo Derek, by the way. You’re right, it’s therapeutic to zap him with rubber bands.”

  “I’m glad to have been of service.” Voodoo Derek had a tiny eyeless head to symbolize his idiocy and blindness, and a penis with an unhappy face at the end, a symbol of what he would not be getting from Louise.

  “Are you going to make a Voodoo Pete?” she asked.

  “Of course—” I started to say, and was distracted by the faint ringing of my cell phone. “Botheration,” I said, and went to the living room to dig it out of my purse.

  “Hannah’s Custom Sewing,” I said.

  “Hannah?” Dad asked, his voice tight.

  “Dad?” I said, the tone of his voice enough to send a lance through my heart.

  “Hannah, your mother’s in the hospital. Can you come down here?”

  “Dad! What happened?” My heart was pounding.

  “She’s had a stroke.” His voice broke, and it was several seconds before he could speak again. “I found her in the bathroom. They did some sort of scan, they’ve given her something to dissolve the clot, now we’re waiting for her to wake up.”

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked. I was still standing, I was still breathing. I was all right, I was coping, the news hadn’t flattened me.

  “They don’t know yet. They won’t know until she wakes up.”

  “I’ll come right now. You’re at Mercy?”

  “Yes.”

  We said goodbye, and I stood there with the phone in my hand, still floating somewhere above reality, my mind racing. Did I need to stop back at the house to get anything? No, I had my purse, I could buy whatever I needed down there. My car was parked on the street: five minutes from the curb I could be at the entrance to I-5 southbound, if I pushed it I could make the trip in two and a half hours—

  “Hannah?” Louise asked from the kitchen doorway, her voice telling me she knew something was wrong. “What happened?”

  I turned to her. “My mom had a stroke,” I said, and as I said the words the reality of it hit me, consideration of toothbrushes and sleepwear and gas in the car giving way to Mom in the hospital, maybe dying, maybe never to recover, maybe never to be the same as she had been.

  I may have lost my mom.

  The muscles of my face pulled back in a grimace of grief, tears filling my eyes. “She’s in the hospital. They’re waiting for her to wake up.”

  I couldn’t breathe, my breath held on a sob, the tears spilling down, my face and throat aching from the strain.

  “Oh, honey,” Louise said, and came and held me. I lay my head against her shoulder and wept, snuffling and dripping.

  “I’m getting you wet,” I said after a few minutes, pulling back and wiping at my nose with my wrist. Grief was being washed over by something akin to panic, and the need to get down to Roseburg as quickly as possible. And Dad, poor Dad, how was he coping?

  “Like it matters. Go grab the box of Kleenex from the bathroom. I’m driving you down there.”

  “I can drive myself.”

  “No, you can’t. Go get the Kleenex.”

  I did as she bade, and in the bathroom looked at myself in the mirror as I thought again about Mom, and if she would ever be the same. The fear and the grief returned, and my face twisted, my mouth pulling down like a tragic Greek mask, a high-pitched keening sound in the back of my throat.

  The clothes I wore, the cut of my hair, the studs in my ears, they were all useless decoration, incongruously stuck to a mass of pain. Nothing ma
ttered, but that my mom was sick. I could be wearing real diamonds, I could have my own house and drive a Jaguar, I could be beautiful and brilliant and famous, and it would mean nothing.

  Nothing mattered, but that I might lose my mom.

  The wave of pain receded, and I wet a washcloth and cleaned the smeared mascara off my face. I grabbed the Kleenex box, knowing the wave would come again, and when I came back out to the living room Louise had her jacket and mine, and ushered me out the door.

  “I can’t leave my car on the street,” I said.

  “We’ll take it.”

  “How will you get home?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  I wanted to drive myself, for the distraction, but Louise wouldn’t allow it. So I settled myself into the passenger seat, and experienced the horror of having someone else at the wheel of my car. It was a better distraction than driving myself ever could have been.

  Twenty-Two

  Blue Medallion Print

  I sat beside Dad, the both of us in chairs at the side of Mom’s bed. The embolism had been in her left hemisphere, according to the CT scan, so it was her right side that might not function when she awoke. We sat on her left side, Dad holding her hand, wanting to be sure that she could feel that he was there.

  It was two o’clock in the morning, and the intensive care unit had a quiet, half-lit feel to it, strangely peaceful. Hospitals had never frightened me, I’d always thought of them as “home base” for the injured. If you made it there, you were safe. You would be taken care of. Someone would fix you.

  It was a bit of a shock to discover that there was very little anyone could do to “fix” a stroke. They had given Mom an anticoagulant, they had given her a blood thinner, and that was the extent of what they could do. They could not go in and fix whatever damage had been done to her brain, they could not force her to wake up, they could not make it impossible for her to have another stroke in the future.

  We were helpless. If there had been anything to do, I would have done it, but all there was was waiting. Mom had to emerge on her own.