Friday the 13th

    I watched them party from afar. I was alone. Why?

    Because I was the Friday the 13th Part 2 Jason at the Jason party.

    It was a friend of a friend's idea. On Friday the 13th, throw a costume party where everyone dresses up like Jason. Now this friend of a friend's apartment had hockey masks galore. For some, the costume was nothing more than the mask. For others, it was much more involved, with moldering jackets and tattered pants and film-ready masks. These were distressed, yellowing goalie masks with triangular markings on the forehead and cheeks, big-buckled, belt-quality leather holding the mask in place. Some of the girls donned grey sweaters and greying wigs to play Jason's mother. Some of the other girls treated this as an 80s party, dressing up as the generic big-haired body-count fodder.

    And all the single ladies loved the other Jasons. They clamoured to be crushed in the embrace of the Kane Hodder Jasons from Parts 7 and 8. Their fingers traced the scar tissue of the Jason who went to Hell. They loved to run their hands across the barrel-chest of Jason circa Part 6. They loved Part 4's stealthiness. They loved Part 3's knuckle-dragging traipse. They loved the Jason X Jason, willing to forgive him for the movie. They even loved the trim, strapping Part 5 killer and how he fills out a work suit, and he's not even Jason. These women were suckers for the hockey mask, as it had turned them all into common rink rats.

    But I had chosen to be different. I sat there with this burlap sack over my head, watching it all through the singular, ragged eye-hole over my left eye. All the partygoers lacked depth and dimension. I was alone on the couch, twiddling my pick-axe, feeling so small. I wanted to dissolve into the walls and disappear. The partygoers danced and wrestled playfully as “Man Behind the Mask” played yet again. Two girls were grinding Jason X, and I could no longer watch. I slipped away, totally unnoticed, into shadow.

    I found what looked, at least to me, like a door to the bathroom. It opened instead onto stairs and the chill of the naked night. I dragged my pick-axe up the stairs and found myself on the roof, looking out onto the city. Light from tiki torches played gently on water from a swimming pool. A single figure cut through the water.

    She covered the length of the pool and back and then emerged from the water. Rivulets cascaded down her body, and her hair hung down in a mop. As she took the three steps up the ladder and out of the pool, she whipped back her hair. She wore a hockey mask and, incongruously, a bikini top and bottom to match. She saw me seeing her. She picked up her serrated machete from the poolside tiles and used it to wave me over. I shambled over to her.

    “I love your costume,” she said.

    “I love yours, too,” I replied. Each of her breast plates was a plastic hockey mask. The same went for her bikini bottoms, a hockey mask hugging her mons.

    “Really?” she said. “Personally, I think the hockey mask is a bit overdone. But thank you. Come, sit.”

    She guided me to plastic pool chairs and we sat down.

    “You know,” she said, “the Friday the 13th films are like sex.”

    “Excuse me?” I said.

    “Think about it for a minute. Don't you remember your first one?”

    “I do,” I said. “Jason Takes Manhattan.”

    Her eyes were a lovely hazel green, and I could see a smile form in them. “The first one,” she said, “is like your first time. You're young. You're a bit afraid. You imagine all kinds of ways it could be. You think of what could be good, bad, horrible. You think of what might make you uncomfortable. You survive it, and it's okay, though it may leave little scars. And even if it's not bad, it still might not be very good.”

    “I can see that,” I said.

    “Of course you can,” she said. “Your first time was Part 8. But then, with subsequent viewings, as in subsequent sexual encounters, you gain experience. You start to learn about what you like. Each movie is like a new partner, each with its own set of positions. Part 1 is the missionary. Jason X is akin to butt-play, maybe even pegging. After a while, you get to know what you like. You start to realize that it's not such a big deal. It can actually get to be quite enjoyable. With more and more viewings, you start to feel comfortable. Eventually, you'll move on to harder movies—I Spit on Your Grave and A Serbian Film. You have to spice things up now and then, after all. But you have confidence with these partners, because of the times you had with Friday the 13th. And no matter how much experience you get, you'll always remember your first.”

    “I suppose that's true,” I said.

    “And eventually,” she continued, “you'll find your way back to Friday the 13th. It's like coming back to an old fling, an old summer love. You know each other, and there are no surprises. You've learned to love their flaws, but you can always see new wrinkles. You come to find a beauty in their shortcomings—a beauty in how they've aged. You feel comfortable with them. You see your old fears and how they've been allayed. You measure yourself by this old lover. You feel young again in their glow.”

    “That's beautiful,” I said.

    “Thank you,” she said. “And for me, I always come back to Part 2. That was my first, and still it's my favorite. It gives you Jason before he's too far gone, before he became a commodity. You could still find tenderness and vulnerability in him.”

    “I can see that,” I said.

    “He's also the sexiest,” she continued. “He's smaller, certainly not the behemoth he'd become. He's also a bit simian. There's something of the primate in him as he moves. He's more lithe and more flexible. He's also the most phallic.”

    “How's that?” I asked.

    “He's literally a one-eyed monster,” she said, “with that singular eye-hole in this hood. There's a vulnerable beauty there, a nakedness just waiting to be uncovered. That's why I love Part 2 so dearly. I want to just reach out and touch Jason from Part 2 and embrace him. He's still salvageable. But I may be the only one who sees that. So I here I am in these hockey masks.”

    “I see it, too,” I said.

    I couldn't tell if she heard me. “But still,” she said, “I can only watch the movie so much. I think it could only really spice things up if I could touch him for real.”

    Her hand moved over mine.

    “You don't mind if I touch you, do you?”

    She kneaded my palm for several seconds, and then she touched my face under the hood. I let my pick axe clatter to the floor and touched her mask. Beads of water clung to the plastic, and I let my fingertips absorb them. I drew her mask toward my hood. Our foreheads met, and I rubbed my nose against the plastic nose of her mask. I could feel the little droplets of water sinking through the fabric of my hood. I could feel her breath, too, and soon our mouths aligned underneath our masks, exchanging hot gasps. I could taste honeysuckle on her breath. I caressed her bare shoulder.

    She spilled out of the chair and took to her knees. She squared herself in front of my lap, reaching up to grip the straps on my bib overalls. She pulled herself up and sent hot breath down the collar of my plaid shirt. She unbuckled her hockey-mask bikini top, letting it clatter to the ground. Her breasts stood small and pert, the nipples pierced and prominent. She took me by the sleeves and placed my hands on her breasts, letting me palm them and then knead them. My eye locked onto her eyes.

    She shimmied free of my grip and sat up into a squat. She unfastened one strap of my overalls, and then the other. She pulled down the bib, and I sat back, baring my boxer shorts. Her hand ventured into my boxers and withdrew my erection. Her hazel-green eyes alighted on the very tip, momentarily strabysmic. I could see her mouth forming a little O under the mouth-holes in her mask.

    “Of course,” she said, “you're uncut. You've got every last detail covered.”

    She took my member in her hand. Very slowly, she wrapped her fingers around the tip and tugged downward. Gradually, she worked the foreskin back. She gave firm, decisive yanks, and then she sped up abruptly. She paused with her fist clenched around the base, wielding my cock like it was a machete. She leaned in, letting little columns of hot breath down onto my member. My mouth chewed at my hood. She started to jerk me off again. I let out susurrating gasps. I was on the verge of sending come arcing up into the night, and then she stopped.

    I was vaguely aware that she was standing up, and I was still getting my sight back when I heard her hockey mask bikini bottoms clatter to the rooftop. She stepped forward and eased her trim midriff and plump mons atop my erection. She hovered there for a while and then eased down, socketing my glans in her lovely vulva. She moved up and down, her torso circling all the while, letting me travel deeper into her wild habitat. I pulled up mounds of flesh from her pert buttocks. With each squeeze, I stirred her around. She churned wildly, pussy squelchy, a saponaceous foam forming on her labia, and soon she liquefied, her juices trickling down. I answered in kind, letting loose a screaming hot torrent straight up into her abdomen. Gouts of come spouted up into her inner recesses. She kneaded her breasts as my seed coursed into her.

    Finally, there was no more seed left to give, and still my member spasmed as if it had to give more. I reached for her mask, caressing the fading, flaking markings on her cheeks, fingering the coolness of the bolts and the straps.

    “May I see your face?” I asked. “You can see mine.”

    “No,” she said. “You are perfectly Part 2 as you are.”

    I stammered and I gasped, kneading her shoulder. She stood up, grabbing her bikini bottoms.

    “Where are you going?”

    “Back to the party,” she said, slipping on the bottoms.

    “Can I come with you?”

    “You'd better not.”

    “What's your name? Your number?”

    “No,” she said, leaning into the bra-cups formed by the hockey masks. “There can be no sequel. We're going to leave.”

    “We?”

    “My boyfriend and I. My boyfriend Jason.”

    “Which one is he?” I asked.

    “He's Jason X.”

    “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

    She touched my face again through the hood. Her hand wrapped around the strap of my overalls, the one overtop my heart.

    “Never change your costume,” she said. “You are the best one.”

    She padded off in her Friday the 13th bikini, disappearing down the stairs. I stared at the pool water for a long time. Then I grabbed my pick-axe and dragged it along the tiles at the edge of the pool, taking the three steps down the ladder, wanting to become one with the water.

§§§

Image Credits: Hypnotica Studios Infinite from Toms River, New Jersey, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Justin Bieber's IQ is 80

    My friend Aaron just wouldn't give up the music, not even in his forties. He was still playing shows with his troupe of thirty-somethings, their sets a combination of low-fi punk interwoven with mediocre keyboards. I came out to his gigs to show him support, not so much as a fan but more in the way one supports a friend battling alcoholism. I felt mostly uncomfortable at these shows. After you turn thirty, the dream is over, and punk just sounds far too idealistic.

    I arrived at the scheduled time of Aaron's set, which in the adult punk rock scene is tantamount to being an hour early. Aaron's band was the middle of three acts, and the opening band was setting up just as I arrived. I ordered a beer and staked a place alone at a table, trying to look like it didn't bother me that I was alone. In truth, it didn't bother me that I was alone, but being alone at a dive bar such as this all by oneself would bother most people, and so onlookers inevitably project onto you the bother that they would have felt in your situation. Thinking about this, I sipped my beer coolly.

    The opening band turned out to be unobjectionable, far beyond my expectations based on what I had seen at Aaron's other shows. They were an all-female group, women in their early thirties rocking shag and bob-cut hairstyles. The singer had a good voice but she chewed the mic as she repeated singular phrases, spamming them until they became mantraic. The guitarist, bassist, and drummer were serviceable. The songs were well put-together, and they benefited from their keyboard sections. 

    The standout in the band was the keyboard player. She had carroty hair, her bangs primly sliced overtop her eyebrows. She wore a green cardigan over her slight frame. She kept her eyes narrowed as she played and closed them for her solos. A half-smirk never left her face, shifting from one side of her mouth to the other. She had her own microphone, but she didn't really sing. Rather, she punctuated the musical interludes with salvos of glottal stops that would have made Buddy Holly pay attention.

    Not only were the songs well-composed, but the set-list was arranged into a seamless suite. The songs had crests and troughs along with accelerations and meditations, and the crests were getting progressively grander, building to something. That climactic something was their penultimate song.

    That song must've lasted six or seven minutes, but its time signature—its time signatures—obliterated conventional constructs of musical time. The song seemed to last inordinately long, and yet it also ended too quickly. The bass made for a heavy throb, and the drums were assertive. The rhythm section wasn't just keeping time, but was proffering a point and counterpoint to the guitar and the lyrics. The electric guitarist was left to her own devices for not one but two solos, and she came through strongly on both, doing manic fretwork on the first and then striking chords so clangorous on the second that they started to compete with the rhythm section. The lyricist, meanwhile, repeated a phrase that sounded like "Baby, baby, you're a genius, baby." 

    But if anything was genius, it was the work of the keyboardist. It was her part that formed the main theme of the work, at least to my ear. It started out simplistically enough, with a few notes alternating, the fingerwork well within the wheelhouse of a child experimenting for the first time with black and white keys. But then it spiraled out into a complex array of melodies, the frequency of the notes accelerating and spiralling the whole movement into what sounded like dueling calliopes. It sounded sublime. And then there was the matter of her solo. Her hands traversed the keyboard over and back in fractions of seconds. It seemed as if she was playing every possible note. The sound she attained to was a sort of early-seventies eternalism, Bowie and Bolan and whoever else, along with some Trans-era Neil Young, reaching into that nebulous space where interstellar and mystical mix. As you listen, you imagine you are in blackness flecked with distant stars, and there are all these other planets within reach that you could dance on. With that, she essentially ripped the performance away from the guitar and the lyrics, possessing the keyboard so that it could take full control of the song. The song rocketed off into the stratosphere. I looked to the ceiling, its clots of cobwebs like nebulae. I was out of my seat and dancing among the few WASP-ish strangers shuddering perfunctorily on the dancefloor. The track had taken possession of me, if no one else. I didn't care about what they thought or what I thought, about how right now I might look like someone's dad. I stared up at the moldering ceiling and made bounding circles round and round, my arms at full span and my right foot—my non-pivoting foot—in a folksy hop-step.

    I kept dancing, even once the solo ended and the song tapered off to mild applause from the audience. The band got halfway through their outro number before I'd steadied myself, lacquered in sweat. I fixed my eyes on the keyboardist. Still smirky, her eyes still narrowed, she hammered down on a single note over and over again. The set ended with more applause. I stood frozen, watching the band disassemble. I couldn't believe they had to leave. It's like I thought they'd just keep playing and that that would be the rest of my life. The keyboardist would keep playing, I assumed. Then my wits returned, and thoughts began to converge. The penultimate number, I came to comprehend, was one of the finest songs I'd ever heard. 

    As I stood parsing this out and intellectualizing it in full, the keyboardist carried her keyboard off the stage and walked past me to the back. I barely noticed her. I was distracted in formulating a new imperative: to own that song, to be able to experience it again.

    My best bet, I reasoned, was to go into the back where the bands were. I beelined to the back of the bar, prepared to defend my intrusion by saying I knew one of the bands—that I knew Aaron, if I needed a name. 

    Aaron, as it turned out, was the first person I saw. He was in the back corner with his bandmates, caged in guitars and guitar cases and cymbals. The female foursome was in the front. The keyboardist with the virtuoso fingers was only a few feet away from me, slightly giddy with post-performance excitement and talking with the bassist about something banal.

    "Dimitri, buddy!" Aaron shouted. "You made it!"

    "Of course," I said.

    Aaron had started for the front of the room but I dodged his hug, teetering toward the members of the female foursome.

    "Aaron," I said loudly, "you've got to introduce me."

    The members of the foursome were glancing over, still dewy and suggestible from their performance.

    "You wanna meat Prolapse Scum?" Aaron asked. "Prolapse Scum, this is Dimitrius. Dimitrius, this is Prolapse Scum."

    "Hi—"

    "Hey—"

    "Hi—"

    "That was fantastic," I said, interrupting them all at once. "Just fantastic. Your whole set was excellent. But that penultimate track was truly something to experience. You!"

    I was pointing at the keyboardist. 

    "You were ethereal on that track."

    She smiled and pulled at her cardigan such that the unbuttoned sides overlapped. "Thanks," she said. "What track do you mean?"

    "The second last one. What's the name of that track?"

    "I don't know," she said, shrugging, fists gripping either half of her cardigan. "We don't really write them down. At least I don’t."

    She glanced at her bandmates, but they had turned back to their other conversations. They had lost interest. They’d been taken by other interruptions as more people filtered into the tiny dressing room.

    "It seized me," I said. "I was out of my body for a second. I was out of head, at least. I need to know the name of that song."

    "I could look it up," she said. "I saw someone dancing out there. I guess it was you."

    "Comin' through," Aaron said, leading his band through. "Showtime, D. See you out there."

    The room was so small that the passage of Aaron's band outward was a tide that I couldn't help but get pulled away on. In all the moving bodies in the cramped space, I wound up outside the dressing room and back in the bar.

    Aaron's band set up and made a quick transition from their sound test into their set. The two were barely discernible. But tonight, I didn't wallow in the pathos of Aaron's forty-something punk stylings or the pathos of having paid to watch it. Instead, I danced, making me the only person on the floor doing so. In truth, I was still dancing to that nameless song by the female foursome, still spinning to the keyboard solo as if I was the record, as if my centrifugal motion could bring the song back.

    I became aware of another dancer, sashaying demurely into the diameter I'd been dancing off. I saw only a blur of olivaceous green. When I slowed to a stop, I saw the keyboardist, looking like she had something to say. She smiled. I smiled too, stretching forward at the neck to hear her over the cacophony. She wet her lips, and then she hollered.

    "Justin Bieber's IQ is 80!"

    "Excuse me?" I yelled back, assuming I'd misheard.

    "'Justin Bieber's IQ is 80.' That's the name of the song.”

    "Oh," I said. "Oh wow. Thanks for finding that out. Do you guys have CDs or MP3s? Do you have them for sale?"

    "No," she said, and then moved closer, resuming her dance, reasserting the swivel in her torso. She turned her smirk left and right and then center-facing, meeting my eye. 

    "I'm Natalie, by the way."

    We danced to the rest of Aaron's band's set. Aaron's penultimate offering was a cover of Elvis' "Love Me." He typically used it to set up his big finish, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." The keyboardist took my arms and pulled them around her waist, buckling my hands together at the small of her back. Her cardigan could have been velour. She moved closer and I thought she was about to rest her head on my shoulder. Instead, she whispered into my ear.

    "If you really want a CD," she said, "I have a whole bunch of copies at my apartment."

    Aaron finished with a particularly manic rendering of "Nazi Punks." After the applause had faded, I bid him a quick nod and mouthed some kudos while Natalie said her goodbyes to her bandmates and collected her keyboard. I offered to carry her keyboard, but she said she could handle it. Her place was two blocks away, and we walked down the rain-slicked streets.

    "No one compliments our music," Natalie said. "If they do, they give it all to Rachel. She's the singer. Or Bobbie, the guitarist. You find yourself almost not caring, since it's just pleasantries from friends, the stuff they have to say. They pay the fee to see you, but they never buy the albums. We got 200 pressed for the first EP, 40 for each member, and do you know how many are sitting in my apartment? Thirty-nine, or maybe 38. One goes to your mom, of course, who listens to it once and doesn't get it, and one goes to a friend, who doesn't listen to it at all. And they don't pay for it. They'd only pay if you were famous and if they didn't know you and if you were five years younger. So when I hear you say it seized you, I'd say you're either full of shit or too tragically earnest to care how you sound. Either way, it's still better than those limp-dicked generalities you get from friends when it comes to support, feedback, complements, encouragement, or whatever else. I appreciate your eagerness. And I'm eager to get rid of one of these records. This is my place."

    We walked through a narrow door and up a narrower flight of stairs, old creaky oak. Natalie had me hold her keyboard case while she fumbled with her keys, and then she body-checked the door open shoulder-first. She turned on the light, tossed the keys, and set down her keyboard case. She pulled off her heeled boots one at a time, and then she pulled off her jeans, one leg at a time.

    "Uhhh," I said. "Should I take my shoes off?"

    "Take all your clothes off. Start with your shoes. The records are in the bedroom."

    The bedroom was lit by a single bedside lamp. Natalie moved me into the warm, yellowish lamp light and unstrapped my belt. My belt and jeans thumped to the floor buckle-first. She unbuttoned her cardigan, pausing at the middle button to shove me off my feet and out of my jeans, to cast me back onto the bedspread. She stayed my gaining erection in her hand and tugged downward, her fist bounding gently off my balls as her other hand continued with the buttons. She wore no bra. The cardigan fell open and her breasts came exposed, incisive nipples ringed with scintillating piercings. She jacked me off with insouciance, her small fist tightly squeezed. She maintained eye contact as her hand did its work, fist clenching and unclenching as she went. Her virtuosic fingers would fan off my shaft and then back on again, thumb staying firmly circled around the base of the glans. My cock reached for her, reached for climax. Natalie let go and then slid off her jeans.

    On all fours, she crawled atop me, hair spilling down, heart necklace pendulous, cardigan still over her shoulders. She tucked her hair back behind one ear and then lowered her lovely face toward my cock. She laid her fingers on the shaft and placed kisses on the very tip. She pressed the meatus to her upper lip, letting the tender flesh trace along the divot beneath her nose, letting it press against the cool metal of her lip piercing. She joined her thumbs at the base of my cock, steadying it with both hands. She slipped me into her mouth, holding steady there, letting saliva drain down on my cock. She joined her feet together, bracing herself, and then tilted forward, inhaling my dick. She sucked me like that for several minutes, pausing to collect strings of spittle. She observed these strings webbed between her fingers with great interest. The cardigan slipped down, baring a lovely shoulder, still red from bursting through the door. Upon socketing my shaft in her mouth anew, she drew her balancing hand away from the base of my cock. She slid her fingers between her legs at the far end of the bed, running them along the groove of her pussy. I gripped her breasts in my upturned palms, accepting them like alms, squeezing them so Natalie could balance as she masturbated. She moaned onto my cock, then took her mouth off it.

    She scooched forward on her knees, her orange-stripped mons and pink pussy brushing over my cock as she made her way forward. She moved across my chest and pressed her sex up into my face. All at once I was smothered in cunt, cancelling the mood lighting. Rotating her hips, she worked her pubic bone into my jaw while my tongue searched out her clit. She tasted like spiced agave. Her moan held a severe and unwavering D Minor, as if verging on some cynical realization. When I found her clit, her moan spiked to a B. It gave way to a staccato as I rediscovered the spot again and again. She drew up off me with a pop, an instant pocket of humidity between us as her fingers scissored out to split her labia. She rubbed herself, regarded herself. She came with notes dying in her throat, glottal stops that Buddy Holly would have envied.

    Natalie fell back onto her hands, let out a whooshing breath, and then crab-walked backward. Pressing her chin to her breastbone, she squared herself atop my erection and then lowered herself down onto it. I pressed at the base of my shaft, steadying my cock so it could slide up into her. With three-quarters swallowed up, she fought a gasp and wet her lips. She circled her hips, gradually admitting more cock, then plunked down, squatting atop my abdomen. I pushed up into her, and, once I was established there, she took over, lowering herself down and then up again. She picked up her down-pressing pace, each downburst occasioning a quavering whelp and a quiver in her limbs. She moved atop me like a windswept stilt house. Soon, she sank into a kneeling position. She spooled her orange locks in her hands as she worked her pelvis. I gripped her breasts, trying to modulate her thrusts, biting my lip to contain my come. I tweaked her areolas, just to distract myself—to distract her. She threaded her arms through mine and pressed down on my chest, bringing my legs up. She thrust into me like a red-blooded male going buck-wild in the missionary position. I tried to roll her over, but she countered me with an embrace, shooting back up. Swinging her leg, she initiated a spin.

    Now she fucked with her back to me. I took full enjoyment of her apple-bottom, round little glutes working vigorously to smother my ensnared member. From that tiny ass came massive pistoning power. The length of my dick weathered wave after wave of delectation, a bliss that seemed to gather at the junction of my cock and my balls, promising a massive orgasm—but not too quickly, I hoped. When I could muster an upward thrust, I did, trying to win back some measure of will and control. I had little success. Each sleek buttock would not be held at bay or thrown out of sync, and she continued pounding down with gusto. In the mood-lighting, Natalie glowed with a sheen of hot sweat. She came again, issuing a single, sustained note and sitting up into a squat, making way for a dribble of fluid. She reached back vaguely and, getting purchase on my bicep, pulled me upward. She used the admixture of sweat and secretions around our pressed-together thighs to slide forward onto her stomach.

    Natalie arched her back, pressing her hindquarters up high and stretching taut her beautiful buttocks and cunt. I pulled up and steadied myself on my knees, moving forward to guide my cock back inside her. I traced in and out of her slow and breezily, until she reached back and gently slapped me on my arm, like a mare quirting its rider. I darted in and out of her, and she stretched both arms back, fingers sprawled and clawing at her butt cheeks. I brought forward my hips with increasing abandon, lower abdomen colliding with her backside. She let out curt little vocalizations, shrill glottal stops that quickly turned affirmative. I stood up into a squat, gripping her narrow cylinder of waist, fingers splayed down deep into to the cool flesh of her hips, thumbs under her cardigan, sending my manhood delving downward into her fat labia. She arched her back even more pronouncedly, upper and lower-back almost L-shaped. I pounded downward as if hammering a rail spike, and as she screamed and momentarily liquefied with orgasm, she sank down deeper into the bed. As I followed her down, still socketed deep within her, I felt an orgasm stirring in my balls, a veritable crescendo of come waiting to pour forth. But I didn't want our duet to end just yet, and neither did she. My cock was loose into the humid bedroom air. I gripped it tight, determined to stay my seed. Writhing facedown, Natalie was growling that word "more" into her pillow.

    I pulled up and steadied myself on my knees atop Natalie’s lovely thighs. Perpendicular to her, I plugged my member back into her sopping pink portico, not before swirling my glans around each labia lip and briefly tracing her perineum. I moved forward into her with full, slow, and hearty thrusts, trying to feel with each ingress every square millimeter of her vagina as I made my way into her and back out. She squeezed her buttocks tight, and my cock disappeared into that lovely crux of the little cruciform drawn by the meeting place of her thighs and the mirrored rounds of her ass. Compact though her cute little butt was, it was also well cushioned, presenting a comely fold pressed up above the thigh. Taking this cushioning as an invitation, I narrowed my angle above her, stretching out my own legs on either side of her, and came down with heavy and unrelenting thrusts, not just of the hips but of my whole body. I clapped down on her, imagining us as two halves of a cymbal. I was pulled back to materiality by the awareness than an unbroken, untamed growl was trailing from my own lips. Natalie hit the high note again, and this time, when she came, it was broken by a scream. I paused, kissing her in profile, brushing back her bangs so I could kiss her forehead, feeling the warmth of her cardigan against my chest. Her screaming died away to glottal stops that did not end until I kissed her mouth.

    Natalie turned to face me and we kissed like that for several minutes, pausing our lovemaking to make out. In the midst of our extended kiss, she gripped my cock and twisted it in her fist. This went on for several minutes, and then she slipped me back inside her. I barely noticed—I was so involved in that unbroken kiss. Her lower lip bulged irresistibly. I kissed it, tongued it, clamped it between both my lips diligently, putting absentminded cock-strokes deep into her pussy. Our gazes and our genitals were glued together. She stared up at me so solemnly. My eyes, I assumed, brimmed with awe and amazement, that dumbfounded look one gets when overwhelmed with gratification. Your eyes ask how is it possible that two bodies could create such artistry? I became aware again of my cock in her pussy, the throb of it, the sheer presence of it, the sensation of being soldered flesh-to-flesh in blistering heat. That blissful sensation said that cock and cunt, at least ours, were inextricable. And with a thought like that, who couldn't fuck valiantly? So I went back to my long, determined strokes, set on bringing myself to a finish. My eyes looked into Natalie’s; my cock went deep in her cunt. She murmured about coming—was I going to?—and I murmured back that I would.

    "No," she cooed. "Not quite yet." 

    With that, she craned her lean legs, wrapping them around either side of me and bringing her calves to rest on my shoulders. Her delicate ankles joined at the nape of my neck. She pulled me down close to her so that I necessarily shortened my strokes. That those trim, elegant ankles could bind me to her, making us even more inseparable, left me vertiginous. Buried deep inside her and still burrowing, my cock pumped as if my heart had relocated there. With that ectopic bliss, my heart redoubled its beating in my chest. I'd been pulled in close enough by the embrace of her legs grapevined around my neck that my head hovered over her chest and I heard her heartbeat, like a kick drum. I pressed as far forward as I could and screamed a gale of hot breath into her hair, and I came. I wanted that breath to become hot glue, fusing us together. Natalie gasped from the sheer heat of my seed. Gout after gout of semen poured out into her. It felt as if I'd sprung a leak, broken a watermain of lust, draining and draining until the torrent gave way to beads and then drops. I buried my face in the collar of her cardigan. She threw the garment over me. I pulled her close and waited for the come to seep out of her, washing over my penis and testicles like meltwater.

    "I...I..."

    I couldn't form words.

    "Shh," she said, taking my occiput in her palm, directing my kiss to her forehead.

    Finally, the words returned.

    "That was incredible," I said. "The way you make love is...is seamless. If there's a sex IQ, yours is like 200."

    "What an odd thing to say," Natalie said. "Anyway, I’d better get you that record you wanted."

    She slid her nude body out of the sheets and landed in a thumping crouch on the floor. She fished around under the bed and came back with a handful of CD jewel cases. She skimmed one off the top and handed it to me.

    "Here you go," she said. "Justin Bieber’s IQ is 80, and the B-side."

    "Thanks," I said. 

    "It’s fifteen dollars."

    "For the album or the sex?"

    Natalie frowned. “Why would you even make that joke?”

    I winced and sank away, rolling off the other side of the bed. "I’ve got some money in my jeans," I said, grabbing my Levis and shaking them down.

    "Put them on," Natalie said. "I’ve got an early start tomorrow."

    "Oh," I said, putting on the jeans while fishing in the pockets for my wallet. "Because I’d love to stay—"

    "No," Natalie said.

    Finally, I came up with the cash. "Here you go."

    "Thanks for your support," Natalie said. "I suppose you want my number, too."

    "Sure?"

    "There's always Facebook. Try the Prolapse Scum page if you need me."

    But something about her tone said it was best not to try.

    "Goodnight," I said, re-buttoning my shirt as I headed for the door.

    "Goodnight,' Natalie said, closing the door behind me.

    By the time I was halfway home, I knew I probably wasn’t going to find Natalie on Facebook. But I did have her record, and I did have that tune in my head. "Justin Bieber’s IQ is 80" was a masterpiece, and the next time I thought of Natalie, I’d probably have to just play the record. I hummed that sublime keyboard solo the rest of the way home.

§§§

Image Credit: SuicideGirls from Los Angeles, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Yoga Type

I knew from the very beginning that our first date would be the last, and it just wasn't going to work between Valeria and me.    

    Firstly, she was too attractive. I have no problem with attractive women, of course, but I think that every sane person knows that some people are just too attractive relative to others. A relationship looks suspect, I submit, when one member is disproportionately attractive to the other. Valeria was just that relative to me. She walked into the coffee shop with dark, cascading hair in a high top-knot and electric blue-green eyes, and she immediately turned heads. I didn't register her as my date until she sat down at my table, talking as if she knew me. I barely recognized her, as her profile picture on the dating site had been a bit ambiguous on account of an overexposed, solarized quality. In that photo, she'd been wearing sunglasses, with strands of hair blowing across her face.

    Secondly, we were obviously not the same type of person. Even the most egalitarian thinker knows there are different types of people on account of some calculus of personality, place of origin, class, and appearance, among other factors. Valeria's shapely, fit figure came packed into sleek leggings and silvery Louboutin heels. She wore a Gucci belt, and her shirt said “Los Angeles” in all-caps. Her eyebrows were drawn-on, her lashes plumped, and her lips may very well have been collagen. Her exposed flesh bore an array of tattoos, and she had a ring in her nose. Between the body art, brand-name accessories, physical fitness, and overall done-up quality, I knew that Valeria was not my kind of person.

    Thirdly and finally, the conversation established as much. Valeria talked exclusively about herself. She told me about all the places she had lived, from Genoa to Jaipur. She most liked California, she explained, on account of the sun, but she had had to move away because Orange County—“Orange,” as she called it—was getting way too expensive. She loved L.A., she said, but she didn't like a lot of the guys and the pace they kept. She had left for San Francisco, but not being able to handle the cold wind and the wetness, she continued north until she wound up where we were. She said she was learning to love the vibe in our little city, explaining how it was such a change of pace from all the other places she'd lived. She told me all about starting up her business, namely a hot yoga studio above a vinyl store just a few blocks away. This led her into a disquisition on yogic techniques, and how she was innovating all kinds of new methods. She repeatedly referred to herself as a “yogi.” The upside to her non-stop monologue was that she seemed to enjoy my presence, as she apparently appreciated having an audience.

    As she went on and on, I became conscious of the wider audience. People were staring, I sensed. At best, they probably took me for Valeria's brother or gay friend rather than her date. At worst, they may have taken me for her john. She was a very striking woman, bearing all the trappings of effortful beauty. I tried not to gaze too obviously. Instead, I focused my attention on reading her tattoos. Her low-slung top revealed the word “bulletproof” scripted along her collarbone in letters with a line atop as per the Indian Devanagari orthographic system. She had the words “Omniscient” and “Omnipotent” inked on the sides of her left and right hand, respectively.

    “You really should try it, you know,” Valeria was saying.

    “Excuse me?” I said, pulled from my fugue.

    “Yoga,” she said. “You should try it. It'll do wonders for your posture and your energy levels.”

    She must have seen me sagging. I sat up straight and responded almost bashfully. “Oh, no,” I said, “not me. I'm not really the yoga type.”

    “There are no yoga types, Dimitri,” Valeria said. “It's for anyone and everyone.”

    I winced. “No, you know, honestly, I just don't see myself in a room with all kinds of fit people in yoga pants and what not. It's just not my scene.”

    Valeria shook her head, her top-knot quivering, her eyes widening sympathetically, her bee-stung lips puffing out. “You just have to try it,” she said. “It won't be like anything you expected. We have all kinds of body types. We go very slow, so everyone can be included. You'll have a great time. You'll feel wonderful.”

    Was this her true angle? Using online dating sites to recruit relatively unkempt, unremarkable men to her yoga studio so as to extract their business?

    “I don't know,” I said.

    “And it's free,” she said. “The first lesson, at least.”

  I twisted in my seat and made non-committal utterances. Apparently, Valeria wasn't all about the money, but I still didn't want to do yoga.

    “I'd be way behind the other people in the class,” I said limply.

    Valeria shook her head. “I could get you caught up. You'd be surprised how fast you learn.”

    “Okay,” I said.

    “You'll do it?”

    “Maybe.”

    “Oh!” Valeria said, clapping her hands together. “I'm so excited.”

    “We'll see,” I said.

    But I was prevaricating. I assumed I wouldn't actually be seeing Valeria again, so there wouldn't be any hot yoga in my future. I told Valeria I had an early morning the next day and we parted ways, but not before she obtained my phone number.

    For the next week, I went on with the sort of life my type of person lives. Then, late on Saturday afternoon, the phone rang.

    “Hi, Dimitri. It's Valeria.”

    “Hi . . . ?”

    “You remember me, right?”

    “I do.”

    “Do you remember your hot yoga lesson?”

    “Uh . . .”

    “It can happen right now, tonight. The studio's free.”

    “Free?”

    “No charge. Just you and I. I'll get you caught up. Your very own private lessons.”

    “Um . . . ?”

    “You don't want a private lesson? Totally free of charge.”

    “I . . . I . . .” I stammered, not knowing what to say. Then, an image flashed into my mind ex nihilo. It was Valeria in yoga pants, I'm ashamed to admit. It dawned on me that there could be some superficial upsides to this unwanted yoga lesson. And we'd be free of an audience, so my fumbling and faltering would remain discreet.

    “C'mon,” Valeria said.

    “Okay,” I said. “I'll give it a try.”

    “I'll text you the address,” Valeria said. “When you get there, knock on the front door. I'll let you in.”

   I walked down to the studio and did as instructed. Valeria opened the ground-level door onto a dark stairwell. I could barely see her, though I recognized the smell of her hairspray. She greeted me as she started up the stairs, beckoning me to follow her. She opened the door at the very top onto a dimly lit studio with a well-worn parquet floor and mirrors on all four walls, a space originally designed for dance, no doubt. Soft sitar music played on an iPad docking station in the corner. It was the only object in the room save for the two dark-blue yoga mats positioned end-to-end in the middle of floor, a few feet of hardwood between them. I caught only the most fleeting glimpse of Valeria in yoga pants before she summoned me into place. So much for the male gaze.

    “Take your position on the mat,” she said. “Standing with feet shoulder-width apart.”

    I did as requested.

    “Now, I'll take you through the beginner's poses.”

    Slowly, we went through three poses, or āsanas, as Valeria referred to them. Only she pronounced the word like “ass and ass.” From the introductory Sanskrit I'd taken way back in college, that didn't sound entirely correct, but I found the Anglicization charming. After pulling off the mountain, the child, and the cat āsanas, I ran into trouble at the downward dog. When Valeria encouraged me to incorporate leg lifts with my body already tented, I toppled, hitting the mat for the first time.

    “Try again,” Valeria said. “Slowly. You must go slow.”

    So I tried again, moving very deliberately.

    “Keep your eyes trained on the blueness of the mat. Keep the surface area of your palms flat. Give your leg to the sky.”

    I eventually accomplished the pose. Sweat ran down my nose.

    “Very good!” Valeria said.    

    I brought myself up to a standing position and saw that Valeria had removed her clothes. She knelt naked on her yoga mat, looking up at me meditatively.

    “Don't look away,” she said. “I'm not trying to make you more uncomfortable. It's the very opposite. I'm trying to make you more comfortable.”

    I looked at Valeria, as requested, maintaining eye contact.

    “Your eye shouldn't be so tethered,” Valeria said. “You can look at any part of me you like.”

    I liked pretty much all of her. Valeria had skin like marbled honey. In the middle of her cylindrical torso, she had an ornate breastplate tattoo in an Indic style, and it seemed to hold in place her beautiful, heavy breasts. An open palm had been inked at the top of her abdomen.

    “It's the abhaya mudrā,” she said, seeing me looking, grazing her own palm across it. “It means you have nothing to be uncomfortable about.”

    “I know,” I croaked, “what it means.”

    “Then you wouldn't be afraid,” Valeria said, “if I demonstrated some of the yogi's more advanced techniques.”

    “N-no,” I stammered.

   “It will help if you take off your clothes, too,” she said.

    I hitched.

    “Don't worry,” she said. “Arousal is natural. Supernatural!”

    I took off my sweatpants, which weren't leaving much to the imagination. Then I took off my shirt.

    “Come,” Valeria said. “Join me on my mat.”

    I stepped onto Valeria's mat, my erection bobbing cartoonishly. Valeria took it in both hands briefly, steadying it, alternating “Omniscient” and “Omnipotent” as she adjusted her hands on the shaft. She released her grip and inspected my phallus with narrowed, sagely eyes.

    “Your linga is ready,” she said. “Now, without touching it, press it against my nipple.”

    I blinked several times, then followed the command. I bowed myself forward at the pelvis, my torso convex.

    “No, no,” she said, “the left one.”

    I swung slowly to the other side, and my glans made contact with the point of her nipple. A blissful sensation coursed through me upon contact, and my mouth fell open. Valeria closed her eyes and nodded, as if feeling some version of the same.

    “Yes,” she said. “Now push.”

    I bowed forward even more, depressing the aureole with my glans.

    “Oh,” I said, feeling her heartbeat travelling the length of my member in waves. “Oh god.”

    “That's right,” Valeria whispered. “Hold your position. Hold, hold. Yaaaaammmm. Mmmm.”

  With that penultimate hummed syllable, some kind of sublime change came over Valeria, nigh-imperceptible but downright ontic. I trembled. The point of her nipple traced the tiny portal of my urethral opening.

    “Wait,” she whispered.

    I'm certain she knew I could have finished right there. Valeria stood up, freeing my linga from her nipple.

    “Now,” she said, “press my navel.”

    Not entirely knowing what I was doing, I set my legs farther apart and lowered myself into a high squat. On the strength of my hips alone, I guided my glans toward Valeria's navel. I found the spot and sunk into it.

    “Yes,” Valeria said. “No deeper than the breadth of a mustard seed. Yes. Vaaaaammmm.”

    After trailing off with this latest syllable, Valeria shuddered a little, and tilted her head back, facing toward the roof. She threw her hair from her shoulders with a whip of her long, lovely neck. She smiled and sank back to her knees.

    “Now,” she said, eyes fluttering, “my yoni. You know what a yoni is.”

    “Yes,” I said, even though she hadn't been asking a question.

    Valeria rolled onto her back and gave both her legs to the air. She held the pose for a few seconds, then gracefully lowered her outstretched feet behind her. Her vulva was pillared in the air, her labia marking the highest point.

    “Now,” she said, “infix the yoni with the linga.”

    I stepped forward, gripping my erection.

    “No,” Valeria said. “No hands.”

    She must have been watching our reflection in the mirror. I let go of my linga and waited for it to straighten out. I stood over Valeria's pillared yoni, and had no choice but to contemplate it searchingly as I lined up my linga for entry. Her yoni seemed to reach for the ceiling, working like the mouth of a fish. I eased into a squat, bringing my glans down to her labia.

    At last, contact happened. My erection seemed almost prehensile, maneuvering its way past Valeria's labia and into her vagina. I squatted again, going lower than I had before, and entered her in full. I raised up out of my squat and back down.

    “No,” Valeria said. “No thrusting. Put your linga in the yoni and leave it there.”

    I blinked once, twice, and looked over at the scene in the mirror. A wide-eyed, unkempt, unremarkable man stood brandishing a massive hard-on a top his beautiful, contortionist yoga instructor. It looked so tawdry, but it felt so dizzying and sublime. The sitar music crested and clucked on. I steadied my palms on my thighs and squatted again, sliding myself all the way into Valeria's vulva. I bottomed out and then I held tableau.

    “Good,” Valeria said. “Laaaaammmm. Now hold.”

    I held. Time passed, perhaps a full minute.

    “How does that feel?” Valeria asked. “Laaaaammmm.”

    “Glorious,” I said.

    “I know,” Valeria said. “Isn't that the best feeling?”

    “It's pretty good,” I said.

    Strangely enough, I felt my linga growing harder—a lot harder than I'd ever known. Inert inside Valeria, I felt bigger.

    “It is the secret of the yogi,” Valeria said. “Laaaaammmm.”

    Perhaps a minute passed. Valeria trailed off, gathering her breath.

    “Yoginī,” I said.

    Another fifteen or twenty seconds went by.

    “Excuse me?” Valeria asked.

    Another minute passed.

    “Yogini is the feminine,” I said. Thirty seconds elapsed. “If I'm remembering my Sanskrit correctly.”

    “I see,” Valeria said. “Laaaaammmm.”

    We stayed silent in this tableau for as long as five minutes. I began to quiver, lactic acid collecting in my legs.

    “Steady,” Valeria whispered. She was unwavering, even with my gaining shakes.

    “I don't know if I can hold,” I said. Meanwhile, I felt a slackening in my linga.

   “Alright,” Valeria said, feeling it, too. “Upasthasya tu madhyagā retovāhe sadoditā,” she chanted, pausing to take in a sharp shot of breath. “Melāpe militā sā vai ānande paramā citiḥ.”

    At the sound of the last syllable, my linga swelled anew, getting as hard as corundum. A tempest swirled in my testes, and then a bolt of semen came wrenching through my linga as if pulled by a force not of earth. I screamed as I felt my hot seed coating Valeria's yoni, our genitals soldered in bliss, then the ejaculate brimmed up and over her labia lips. She circled her hips and shuddered, undertaking another little ontic change. Then she drew her muscular legs up and gently pressed the soles of her feet against my chest. In this way, she drew me away.

    My member came out limp, hanging wet with the profusion of come.

  “Very good,” Valeria said, standing up in one graceful motion, bringing her smile within inches of her face. “You're an apt pupil.”

    “Thanks,” I said, still dizzy. “What just happened there?”

    “You'll learn more in time,” she said, slipping back into her sports bra. “This is why you should join the group.”

    “I don't know,” I said. “Is this the kind of thing you do every week?”

    Valeria laughed, working her way into her yoga pants. “Not in the class, of course,” she said. “Only for a select type of students.”

    “How do you select?”

   “That,” Valeria said, “is the secret of the yogi. Sorry—the secret of the yoginī, you say it should be.”

    “That's the feminine,” I said weakly.

    She had put her yoga pants on, and was headed for the iPad. She flicked off the sitar music . “Then I'm a yoginī,” she said, “and that's that.”

    “Group or no group,” I said, “I'd really like to see you again. We should do another coffee.”

    Valeria shook her head. “No, it will have to be the group. We had our one date and that's enough.”

    “What? Why?”

    Valeria flicked off the lights. “Dimitri,” she said, “let's face it. You're not really my type.”

§§§

Image Credits: DAUGHTERS OF THE GODDESS, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons