I don't have sex on the first date
She speaks fast, neat, like scissors cutting through hair, each individual word floating for a second before it falls to the floor. She is drunk. When she arrived half an hour after the time we agreed, she confessed that she filled a Gatorade bottle with margarita mix and drank it in the Uber. I don’t know her well enough to suggest she may be an alcoholic. Instead, I ordered her a gin and tonic. She is taller than me. She asks me what I am reading. I slide the book across the counter and let her read the reverse cover. “Ah, lesbians.” The first time we met, she complained repeatedly that she looked like a lesbian. “I’ll dress dykey tonight” I say, “so we can have balance, ya know?” Neither of us are lesbians. But I am perennially pursued by lesbian suitors. I make too much eye contact and touch people’s knees too often.
We smoke on the walk between Easy Does It and Cole’s. A man approaches us and bums a cigarette. “Hello, beautiful ladies.” She hands him a cigarette. Being called beautiful makes us benevolent. She recites the first line of Mary Ruefle’s poem “Snow” after I confess I still think about the poem she wrote inspired by it: “Everytime it snows, I would like to have sex.” She clicks her tongue. She was the first person whose writing I edited. We look like sisters, both of us laughing and tossing our hair in the same manner. I raise my beer and touch the neck of it to her glass. She inhales her cigarette outside because her Uber is about to arrive. She coughs up yellowish spit. “You are so beautiful,” I say and kiss her cheek. She leaves. I walk up Milwaukee Ave. Alone. I am avoiding going home, afraid of vaporizing in isolation.
It snows the night before B and I are supposed to meet.
We agreed to arrive at 8pm, but I don’t leave my apartment until he texts to say that he is outside the bar. I would like to avoid sitting alone at the bar and looking as if I have been stood up or actually being stood up. We say hello outside, hug, and sit at the bar. I am wearing an off-the-shoulder dress and lean forward while he talks, slightly dropping my shoulders so that my collarbones, which I massaged with Aquaphor beforehand, might gleam in the red neon glow. I shimmy my stool closer, wedging my knee between his legs. He touches my shoulder while telling me that he spent most of last summer at Promontory Point reading and swimming.
“I love Promontory. My friends and I were sunbathing topless there last summer.” I add this latter detail because I want to come across as carefree.
“Wait, I remember seeing three girls topless there last August. I was trying to read but I couldn’t stop staring. I texted my friend about it.”
“Maybe that was us.”
“Were you hanging out by the water a lot?” He asks. I remember and nod. I was somber and reflective that day, deciding whether I should break up with my boyfriend after a trip to Hollywood Beach the day prior ended with my burying his vomit beneath the sand, sleeping on the couch, and occasionally checking to make sure he was breathing. I keep this story to myself. Instead, I finish my blackberry spritz. He orders us another round.
“Yeah, but my tits were smaller at the time, more forgettable.” I pout. I watch his eyes drift to my chest for a moment and then return to my face. His lips are so pretty. Like small tropical fish. They are so pink. I say this to him. I decide I am going to invite him back to my apartment even though I told him I don’t have sex on the first date. But it snowed. And it will stroke his ego to think he is the exception.
He kisses between my shoulder blades. If he's anything like me, he will have kissed the face of the sphinx tattooed along my spine. He holds my stomach and strokes the spot I pointed out to him earlier when he asked where I like to be touched. I try to avoid crying. I am not sad. But I would prefer not to explain the emotions to him—or myself.
I enjoy that my mouth smells like sex when we wake up. We walk to New Wave. The weather is dewy but warm. I suggest that we should go to the lake sometime, maybe Promontory. We are building the shared language, the sense of secrecy that seems to precede all my romantic flings. B searches his messages, determined to find the text exchange between him and his friend. He finds it. It is dated August 20. I scrunch up my face, wondering how I might find evidence of this day. I scroll through my photos until I find it—a photo of Kell and Leila at sunset. They are looking out at the lake. Leila is laying with her head in Kell’s lap. I took the photo because they were so serene tangled together in the pink and yellow light. My photo is also from August 20. “No way, that’s crazy. So it was you.” He laughs. “I remember thinking how beautiful you were.”
Image: Anthony Cudahy, Sebastian study, 2023.
Current obsession: This live performance of FKA twigs’ “mirrored heart.”