Bohemian

by Kathryn Nolan

  At seventeen, I’d just started having the bumbling, awkward sex of teenagers—it wasn’t sexy. Or erotic. Or hot in any way. But I still knew how to be hot and sexy and fuckable for a camera. On the cover (toned down for Sports Illustrated–I was still a minor after all), I’m in a classic bikini, big eyes, big hair, bright red lips quirked up. My hands are digging into the sand, knees in the water, a wave splashing up behind me.

  The title: Lucia Bell: The World’s Next Supermodel?

  I loved that fucking thing. The article was total nonsense, but if the Milan show had planted me firmly in the world of high fashion, this first cover officially made me a Sex Symbol.

  This was before the days of Instagram and Facebook, but I read the online comments on that article obsessively; would refresh the page over and over to make sure I didn’t miss a single one. It’s a lot to feed a teenager—the instant gratification, the attention. No wonder I became addicted so quickly, it was better than any drug. The most blissful high. Comment after comment of she’s fucking gorgeous. Her body is perfect. And then I started to get recognized on the street, and that was even better.

  And the entire time, I wrote less and less. Read less and less. Stopped worshipping in used bookstores and instead perused the internet for comments about my appearance. I used to see poetry in the world around me, but even at seventeen, I knew there was something almost gruesome about the world I existed in now: the blinking eye of the camera lens, bright lights, slimy directors and agents, stick-thin models doing coke in bathrooms.

  A shallow world, vacuous and vapid.

  Every so often I’d see it for what it was: I’d look around and wonder how on earth I’d gotten there. How, at seventeen, I was suddenly living the life of a fully-grown adult, flying to Europe by myself and partying with socialites. How had this happened? Who had allowed this?

  I still carried my journal with me everywhere, the pages worn thin, but I stopped filling it with stanzas. Because every time I longed for my life to return to normalcy—to get my writing degree, or shit, just go to college—I’d read something else. Be on another magazine cover, walk another runway to widespread acclaim, see my face on a billboard in Times Square and feel my delicate ego grow, like a balloon being filled with air.

  Anyone who claims you can’t become addicted to fame is a goddamn liar. And I thought I’d never feel a rush like that with anything else. Thought I had ruined myself for all other ways of life.

  Until last night. Until Calvin brought me to earth-shattering orgasm three times and then read to me until I fell asleep, stroking my hair.

  And then brought me to another earth-shattering orgasm.

  It wasn’t just a physical response I felt. It was words. They’d been hidden somewhere, tucked inside the ventricles of my heart, sleeping in my blood cells. Calvin had shaken them loose.

  I had shaken them loose, because last night as I’d crawled towards Calvin, bared myself completely, was as vulnerable and real as I’d ever been, I’d felt a small spark of something else.

  I felt brave.

  ◊

  CALVIN

  The first time I ever tried to have sex I was 19, a sophomore in college, and feeling the kind of sexual peer pressure all virgins feel when they’re suddenly surrounded by people they very much want to have sex with.

  I was only friends with nerds, but even still, about half of them were already shacked up with similarly nerdy girls, going to town on each other between board games and marathons of Battlestar Galactica. We didn’t have parties, so I was left with shyly trying to impress girls in my Engineering 101 classes. My natural social awkwardness didn’t dissipate in college—it got stronger, and I spent that sophomore year desperately trying to impress a pretty girl named Kayla. She was a little nerdy, and I think she thought my interests were “cute.” At nineteen, mostly my interests were how to get her to take her top off, so I was fine with that—she just needed to be okay with the fact that I had limited sexual experience

  But a lot of enthusiasm.

  I’d started to feel the first stirrings of dominance then, had fantasies that involved ball gags and bound ankles, but I attributed it to being generally sexless for so long. Too much pent-up sexual aggression. I figured it would intensify your fantasies.

  I didn’t do great with Kayla—at 30, I was better, but at 19 I was so stuck in my head conversation was supremely difficult. Everything I said came out wrong, or weird and I’d spend hours chastising myself. Playing the conversation over in my head, continually analyzing.

  Either Kayla had a thing for extreme social anxiety or she finally took pity on me, because one night she came back to my room and I practically threw my roommate through the window. Pure instinct took over and half an hour in we were both panting, fumbling for a condom. Which I found, finally, rolling to my side to put it on.

  And then rolling right off the top bunk bed.

  I landed hard, hard enough to shatter my collarbone and dislocate my left shoulder.

  The only thing I remember was the school emergency services picking me up off the floor, Kayla wrapped in a blanket with a sympathetic look on her face, and a wild and desperate urge to call out Wait! Just let me fuck this girl! The pain was nothing compared to how deeply I felt I needed to be inside her.

  And then one of the nurses grabbed my arm the wrong way and I practically passed out, erection eradicated.

  Another sexless, romantically-hopeless year passed and the fantasies came back, stronger this time. I found BDSM websites, submission porn. Thought about girls on their knees, pleading. Thought about the weight of a flogger in my hand, the power. Not all the time, but when it happened it’d wash over me stronger than a tidal wave, sudden and fierce.

  The first time I actually had sex—Rebecca, pink hair and combat boots, punk-nerdy—I lasted for two minutes and 30 seconds and she never returned my calls. The second, third and fourth times were similar, but the fantasies continued.

  When I landed my first semi-girlfriend senior year of college, we fucked enough that my stamina improved. But when I broached the idea of some light bondage, it wasn’t her thing. Same with the next woman. My orgasms were good, but not great, and I was left with an unending feeling of missing.

  Claire, who I seriously dated for three years, and technically loved, could not have been bothered. Claire had liked a certain kind of sex—lights off, minimal sounds. When I tried to show her images of what I thought we could do together, she blanched. When I tried to dominate her, encourage her to submit a bit, she seemed to do it just to placate me. Not because it was who she was.

  It was different. It was…not good.

  I was back in the Big Room after an hour of cleaning up the mess Lucia and I had made last night. And this morning. Shelving books soothed me, rain still lightly falling, Max asleep in the corner of the room. We’d had no customers today because of the rockslide and the unending bad weather, which left me ample time to ruminate on what had happened between Lucia and me.

  I needed to go through my grandfather’s journals and find some story for Ray to work with, but I couldn’t stop writing in my own journal once night had settled.

  I always thought what I wanted from a woman wasn’t “good” or “right.” That it wasn’t respectful. Rationally, I knew that wasn’t true. Plenty of women enjoyed being dominated sexually, but between my lack of confidence and inability to find a woman to explore it with, I tried my hardest to ignore it. To bury it, put it to rest.

  Until Lucia. I can’t put into words yet what last night meant to me, except to say I felt fully myself. Alive. I wasn’t nervous or over-thinking; I was driven by pleasure, carnal need. And it felt so deliciously good and so wonderfully right I want to do it again and again and again.

  Her stay here had been extended a few more days, maybe even a week—through a combination of fate and natural disaster. Did I know what was going to happen at the end of that week? Not at all. Probably what would have happened if the rockslide hadn’t oblite
rated half the highway. She would have left, back to her world as a glamorous supermodel. I would have stayed here another few weeks, sold the store, and moved on, back to San Jose. Back to my world.

  I’d have a story, although just thinking about telling anyone about it left me feeling cold. I didn’t want anyone to know about a night that was distinctly ours, especially not people who didn’t understand the person I was beginning to see beneath the Lucia Bell armor. They’d think I’d banged a hot, dumb model.

  But nothing could be further from the truth.

  The landline rung, startling the moment, and the last person I expected to hear on the phone was Shannon, one of the investors.

  “Oh, um, hi there,” I mumbled, taken aback. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. I still have another week to get back to you, right?”

  “That’s not why I’m calling,” she said smoothly, “although it’s related. We just saw the news about the huge storm and the rockslide and Peter and I wanted to check on the status of the property.”

  “Oh,” I said lamely. “Like…”

  “Like is it damaged?” she said, as if speaking to a small child.

  “Got it,” I said, eyes glancing back at the wall I’d fucked Lucia against. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the things to hang straight, like we’d permanently fucked the wall crooked. “Not that I can see,” I said. “But I plan to do a full walkthrough after it stops raining. My grandfather built this thing to last,” I said, swallowing hard on the last word.

  “Good to hear,” she said. “And to be clear, if there is significant damage, it could seriously affect our offer. So please let us know as soon as you can. We’ll be expecting your call,” she said before hanging up the phone.

  I sighed, leaning back against the wall, still cradling the phone in my hand. I hadn’t really thought about selling this place since Lucia had kissed me. I was sucked into her orbit now, and everything else felt secondary. But I needed to think about it, needed to put shit in order so I could leave Big Sur and get on with my fucking life.

  Maybe if there’s damage…the thought popped up, unbidden, and I grimaced at the feeling of relief that coursed through my body as I briefly—briefly—entertained that thought. I mean, it’d make things easier, wouldn’t it?

  I’m sorry, but the storm damaged the property and I’ll need to live here at least another year to make sure everything is fixed before I can begin to think about selling.

  I called Max to the bedroom, grabbing a handful of my grandfather’s slender black journals and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. I needed some gothic literature and for my grandfather’s words to convince me to leave this place.

  For good.

  ◊

  I slept fitfully and in the morning, when I opened my bedroom door, there was an index card propped against it. I bent down to pick it up, the now-familiar sounds of the ocean roaring in the distance, my feet automatically taking me to the kitchen to search for my favorite Walt Whitman coffee mug.

  It was Lucia’s handwriting, scrawled in blue ink:

  Craving, it said at the top, and then a short stanza:

  More than what the body needs

  It’s what the body wants

  Fundamentally changing

  Cell structures/blood flow

  Neat arteries growing flawed/messy

  Raw with damaging desire

  And a new pulse: thready, like a heart

  That’s crashing.

  The words I wrote last night were feeble compared to this: our night together, compressed into eight short lines. The sound of her hips hitting the wall, the sucking, wet sound of my fingers in her pussy, the grunting, the moaning.

  The damaging desire.

  And fuck. Lucia had written me a poem.

  ◊

  LUCIA

  I’d written a poem last night.

  It hadn’t been easy. After soaking my aching body in a hot bath for hours, I found my journal. Re-read some of my favorites, laughed at some of the poems from middle school, high school. So earnest, so much drama. But still more real than some of the things I’d said and done as an adult.

  I had a word on my lips. Craving. A favorite of mine. Loved the hard ‘v’, the way it made you bite your lip when you said it. The long ‘a’ sound, so sensual.

  I wrote half a stanza, and it was the worst thing that had ever been written. In all of human history. Ever.

  I rolled it up, tossed it in the trashcan.

  Wrote another one. Still the absolute worst.

  And again. Still bad. But not as bad as the first.

  After two hours, I was still drafting, half in journal form, half poetry. Just…putting words on the page.

  My favorite writing instructor at the creative writing camp always encouraged us just to put words on a page. That even that simple act was better than nothing—better than giving up. And so I did that.

  Another hour passed. The night with Calvin played on an endless loop in my mind and I focused on the crucial, delicate details: his hair falling over his forehead, the flexing of his ass beneath my fingers, the way he somehow managed to be two people at once: rough and gentle. Shy and loud. Sweet and filthy. It was the dichotomy that had me hot and aching after four hours of writing.

  I only had one stanza—eight lines—to show for it, but it was enough. It was the first poem I’d written in seven years and when it was done and finished and I’d left it for Calvin, I walked back through the woods with tears streaming down my face.

  The release. Like a hundred-pound albatross flying off my shoulders. Like wildflowers had suddenly burst into bloom, all over my skin. The writer’s block was broken, and more than that I’d felt something split open inside of me, something I’d kept locked up and hidden for years. I couldn’t put it back now—hoped, prayed, would do anything to keep it alive, even when we left Big Sur.

  Because between my night with Calvin and the hours of writing sensation had flooded back in, sharp and poignant.

  The only side effect was a sudden burst of nerves that Cal wouldn’t like what I’d read.

  Unfortunately, those nerves became a hailstorm that wouldn’t cease, keeping me awake until the pink light of dawn. What if he thought it was bad? What if he didn’t like it? What if he told me I sucked at writing poetry?

  I tried deep breathing, meditation, counting sheep. I remembered now the scariest part of writing: other people’s opinions. In school, when I could make it to a creative writing class, reading my work out loud—for criticism, for feedback—was the worst part. The praise always helped: something small and precious to think about later, letting it play on repeat in my mind. But the criticism stayed with me in a different way, crystallizing into something hard and immovable.

  That happened later with modeling. It was that damn Sports Illustrated cover. Buried at the bottom of the marriage proposals and lewd sexual comments was one. Just one. Now, with hindsight, it was so innocuous it was almost funny.

  What’s with her ears? The person had written. I mean, she’s hot and all, but is it just me or do her ears kind of stick out? Especially the left one.

  I’d never spent more time looking at the human ear than I did that weekend. Looked at my ears from a million different angles. Looked at other people’s ears, examined baby pictures (Did they stick out when I was born? What about later?), paged through magazines and newspapers.

  “Can you get plastic surgery done on your ears?” I’d asked my mother, as casually as possible, on the way to a family function.

  “You can pay someone to do plastic surgery on any part of your body,” she responded, half in the middle of a phone call with some studio executive. She was barking into a bluetooth every few minutes, and our usual conversational style involved me receiving an answer from her every three minutes.

  “Hmmm,” I’d said, looking out the window, trying to catch a vague glimpse of my ears in the reflection of the glass. I compared my mother’s ears, which looked normal. Maybe
…too normal.

  “Did you get plastic surgery done on your ears?” I’d asked her, and three minutes later she responded with, “Of course not. Although I have had thousands of dollars of plastic surgery done in other places. You know that. Why, are you interested in something?”

  Her lips. Her forehead (botox). A bit of lipo in the thighs. Also, in retrospect, offering to get a seventeen-year old plastic surgery should qualify as child abuse.

  But she was nothing if not supportive.

  “You know, you’re not always going to look like that,” she’d said, and I’d sunk lower in my seat, dismayed. Three minutes later she continued. “Women are constantly engaged in a battle with time. The oldest war there is.” I rolled my eyes, but was secretly listening. “You’re going to need plastic surgery at some point or you won’t book jobs any more. Just the way the world works.”

  The anxiety eventually died away, only to be replaced with a fascination of the next criticism of my body. Or my hair. Or my shoes. Or my teeth. Or the way I spoke to a reporter.

  I’d once paid an absurd amount of money to have my (mostly) naturally blonde hair dyed to a rich, mahogany brown. I’d loved it, but the comments from my fans were so swiftly bitter (and upset, like they were taking it personally) that I’d dyed it back.

  I tossed and turned in bed, hating the highs and lows of my confidence, remembering changing my hair color with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. My stylist had tsk-ed tsk-ed—she’d have to bleach it out—but I didn’t feel good about myself until after it was changed back and the encouraging comments came back.

  When had my skin become so thin? Afraid to share my writing. Terrified that some stranger I’d never meet thought my ears were weird? When did I let strangers start to control the color of my fucking hair?