Free Best of Best Women's Erotica by Marcy Sheiner Page A

restroom than the ads would indicate. I think people just don’t want to be caught with their pants up. Fringe, shock, wild nights with weirdos—it’s like truffle oil: one drop is good but you don’t want to make the whole sauce with it. The new imperative here is either to fashionably distress your heart with jaded cynicism or to shatter your sexual boundaries until you’re left with a vagina full of broken dishes. Well, suck my backlash: I am tired of the word fuck. After a while, the clamor for exotic-erotic, academically groundbreaking, retrospectively funny, it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time sex becomes a white noise distracting people from the most pioneering act of all: namely, erotic intimacy, in whatever freaky or romantic or counter-cultural way you want to define that.
    So, I decided to wait until a man pinned me to my bed with two determined hands and a hard dick and said to my face, “You make me want to give up red meat and cigarettes, the more days on earth to be with you.”
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    Off I went on my waiting spree. And waited. The joy of looking is in the finding, and there was no finding to be found. Bars, parties, openings, the Internet—looking became a second
job. People should get paid for dating. It’s hard work, sifting through the rubble.
    Then I met Trevor, at a party. I quickly decided he was self-absorbed and arrogant, a garage-band purist whose tastes were beneath his talents. He was obsessed with money, with not having it, that is, and every conversation ended up a polemic against the “piggies,” i.e., those robber barons who drove, like, used BMWs, and whose jobs paid more than his—followed by a long defense of his minimalist financial habits. Seriously, I once brought up snowboarding and within two carriage returns he’d transitioned to the impact of recreation on the environment and the “piggies who can afford lift tickets.”
    Once again, a dead-end guy.
    Still, we clicked. He was smart, funny, and emotionally grown up in many ways. Above all, he had one quality that was clear and beautiful—acceptance—and I recognized it instantly because it was so lacking in myself. He accepted his flaws in ways I couldn’t accept mine, and by the time he wrote down my phone number I sensed that Trevor was unconditionally unafraid of his own psyche. In calling him back, I wanted to get closer to that quality. I wanted to learn what it felt like not to care.
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    The first time we hung out, he brought me The Catcher in the Rye as a present, which I’d told him I’d never read. It was his high school copy. “Hope you like the pretentious notes in the margin,” he said.
    We walked to Ocean Beach for a picnic he’d prepared, and then he took me for pints at Beach Chalet. He won major points for these niceties, and yet I soon tired of the lefty loop-groove of a conversation that decelerates many a Green date.
    Then he kissed me. Trevor was a good kisser, or maybe
we were both bad in complementary ways, but whatever, we couldn’t stop. I mean, the language in there was like some Farsi-Romansch hip-hop dialect—slang double-meanings—hours of it.
    And Trevor smelled like—I don’t know how else to describe it—a man. Like salt air and amber and a worn T-shirt. Like wool and unwashed hair and a winter day in Death Valley. Which is all to say very good.
    Over the next week, we played pool at the Elbo Room, hiked in Marin, saw a movie about the miserable labor conditions of charcoal producers in Brazil ( The Charcoal People —rent it). Still, I couldn’t do more than kiss, even in marathon stretches, even in the yearning twilight of red wine and pot. Finally, he pressed.
    I was in the kitchen making tea after our video ended. He was impossible to watch a movie with because of nonstop commentary on the “bourgeois pigs in Hollywood who make this crap.” It was better when he shut up