The Twenty-Fourth Post

I'll call her Lana. And her juices were drying on my sticky fingers like fruit sap, as I drove down the canyon from her home at 4.30am last night/yesterday morning. I was also heartbroken--I'd fallen in love with someone, and it hadn't worked out very well, and I was recovering, or attempting to recover, and so I drove to fuck Lana in an attempt to fuck this other woman out of my system.

It was easy. Love was hard. Love is impossible for me. Sex, though, very simple. In this case, Lana showed up on Facebook a grand total of about 10 days ago. I'd met her about 8 years ago, at a friend's housewarming party. She'd a boyfriend, then, whom I learned post-coitus she'd been married to for a month, until she caught him fucking a couple of post-ops in a swingers' party on the DL. But, coming back to 10 days ago, Lana shows up on FB and I add her as a friend. She posts a message on my wall with "cutie pie" somewhere at the end, which I assumed was friendliness and little more. I'd met Lana years later at another party, and she was engaged to an IT guy with a fat paycheck, while opening a boutique in Downtown.

I wrote her back. Told her I liked her picture. She wrote me back, reciprocated the compliment. I can't remember what the banter amounted to, but there seemed a fair amount of flirtation, before she took off to NY for Thanksgiving and some dancing with the girlfriends. I asked her number and gave her mine, teasing, inviting her to drunk dial me when she came back late.

Over the course of last week, she'd send me a text message here. I'd send her a text message there. She invites me out for a coffee. I decline, saying I prefer a later arrangement. She invites me out for a drink. I accept but suggest we have drinks at her place instead. She tells me I'm too much. I tell her I am, but she expected that when she decided to talk to a slutty-looking boy on the Internet. She laughed, but agreed. And acquiesced to drinks at her place, late. Something about the way she articulated herself, her phrasing of things, made me ask her in a text message: "So...Type A Alpha Female, right? Yeah, you are."

Seconds later, her response: "Um, yeah...Bad?"

Mine: "Not at all. It's just I could smell it a mile away."

Hers: "You are too much. I'm at work, silly."

"Wouldn't want you to feel guilty of a crime."

And then she sent me something completely refreshing: "I live my life completely guilt-free."

And so I sent: "You know there was once a group of people who lived their entire lives completely guilt-free, and do you know what they were called? Nazis, Lana. Nazis."

Seconds later, the phone rings. It's her. I pick up, she's screaming with laughter.

"There are no words I can think of to respond to that text, so I just wanted to call and tell you you fucking cracked me up. Bye." Still laughing, she hangs up.

I smiled. Love was hard. Love is impossible. Sex, though...

At 10pm last night, I sent her a message: "Hey. What are you doing?"

"Birthday Party. Friend's."

"It's time we sunk our teeth into each other. Let's meet tonight, late, when you're done with our social obligations."

A beat later: "Ok."

At 12.45am, she called to give me directions. At 1.30am, I pulled to a spot slightly up the hill from her house. I walked into her driveway. Heard the radiator in her roadster ticking and put my hand on the rear compartment where this particular car's engine was located. Warm. Very warm. Didn't need to feel the brakes to know they were hot and that she'd raced up the hill. I hit the doorbell and stood far enough from the keyhole so she could see. I looked slightly away in feigned obliviousness but she opens the door without looking.

"Hey," she said, standing there. She looked a little spent from an evening of alcohol and screaming, but she was sexy, like I remembered her.

"Hey," I replied, and smiled. I noticed the flash light in her hand. "Is that for self-defense?"

"No! I lost the case for my cell phone, and I just got it. It's so frustrating. I think it's underneath my car, I got out in a rush and must have dropped it. Do you mind if I try and look?" she asked.

We both go to her car. She peers underneath with the light, then goes over to the passenger side, pulling the seat down and looking in the tiny back. I open the driver's side door, reach my hand in the darkness under the driver's seat, and my hand falls immediately on the leather case.

"This it?" I dangle it up in the air with two fingers.

"Yes!"

I toss it to her. "Aren't I the good luck charm?"

Five minutes later, we were making out in the kitchen of her 50's designer pad. She was a little drunk, rubbing herself all over me, using her body against mine, pulling me into her.

"I like your lips," she said. She put her hand in my shirt, rubbing it across my chest and onto my shoulder. "Feels nice."

I grab her by the hair with one hand, and tilt her head slightly back. She yields, her mouth opening. I kiss her as I close a hand around her throat. I make the kiss last. I let go.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay, what?"

She looked at me. "Well, do you want to stay here in the kitchen...?" She let the question hang.

I grinned. "Ah. I see. Well, Lana, would you like to give me the tour?"

"Yes," she said, taking my hand and pulling me behind her. "That's what 'okay' meant. See."

I laughed, as I followed her up the stairs to her bedroom.

I was burying my face in her covered cunt now, she was cooing and moaning, and then I unsnapped the buttons on the crotch of the lace teddy she wore under her skirt and blouse, and my tongue sank in the butter of her wet cunt, and disappeared immediately in her slick void. She tasted great, like citrus, and smelled faintly of sweat, and musk, and piss. I took her lips in my lips. I took her clit between my teeth. I made her cum that way, then I fucked her with two fingers till her body shook.

Later, I had her legs spread, knees pushed towards her ears, with my erect cock sliding in and out of her pussy, and put a hand behind her neck and pulled her head forward.

"Look. You look at that. You see my cock?"

"Oh fuck. Yeah. Yeah I see it. Fuck yeah I see it."

Afterwards, we laid under her plush sheets. Her leg rubbing against mine, her head in the nook of my shoulder.

"What happened to that IT guy I met that you were engaged to?"

"We broke up a couple years ago."

"Sorry."

"No. Don't be. I had an eighteen inch, thirty pound, cancerous tumor removed from my stomach, which the doctor said would take me a year to recover from. And it left a scar going down my middle, and one day he looked at me and told me I was the biggest loser he'd ever known. I told him it'd be the last shitty thing he ever said to me and left. He's texted me since then but I don't give a shit. They're all fuckers."

I clenched my jaw. It had too many echoes for me. Echoes of my own illness, years ago, when my body was wracked in pain, when I couldn't move, when my joints hurt; how it destroyed the relationship I'd had then, and turned my partner against me. I ran my hand down her stomach--I'd missed the scar earlier in the darkness, and had somehow managed to kiss every part of her stomach but the middle. But I felt it now, like a vertical line splitting her evenly down the middle. It felt like the scar from my appendectomy, raised faintly from the skin, and smooth.

"They cut me open like a piece of meat," she said. "I'll always have this scar."

I wanted to tell her I thought scars made people more beautiful. And that hers was absolutely lovely. But I didn't. These are the words that form the building blocks for someone to fall in love. Instead I said, "Good for you, leaving that trash. He sounds like a real asshole."

"Can you stay?" she asked, after a while. She was getting sleepy.

"I can't, I have to wake up early for a climb," I said, lying--I'd already had my climb the previous morning. It was almost 4.30am and I wanted to sleep in my bed. I kissed her, then her forehead. "You sleep well. I'll lock the door behind me." Her eyes were closing.

"I like you. Stay next time okay?"

"Okay."

I padded down her stairs. Checked myself in her bathroom. Remembered the broken condom wrappers and used rubbers strewn on her floor around her bed and wished I'd remembered to toss them for her so she wouldn't have to the next morning, but didn't think it was worth going back up and disturbing her for.

The driver in the Porsche 911 Cabriolet racing up Laurel Canyon well past the witching hour gives me a look of surprise as he sees me blow past him, going downhill in an Infiniti twice the size and weight of his Teutonic open top, and disappear around the turn. I take off the traction control on the wet, winding, two-laner, so it's just me, the wheel, the slick road, and chance, as I let self-preservation be the sole-guiding instrument that pilots this all-wheel drive, physics-defying piece of Japanese engineering. I break traction doing a sharp left bender but only for a second; the car's as smart as I'm reckless, and spreads the power evenly between the wheels, so the only thing that happens is I'm doing 60 before I pull out of the turn. I feel everything through the wheel. This car would tell me if I drove over a piece of lint, and under which tire.

Blowing through the green lights, heading back to my side of town, my eyes dart at every intersection, my instincts on high alert, reflexes waiting to hit the brake pedal, flick the wheel, in the presence of an unseen, hypothetical drunk driver coming in from the side who might decide to run a light at this time of the night. I'm not afraid to die from something awful. I'm afraid I'll barely survive it.