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We sat on the stoop and drank forties. We made spaghetti at my place and drank wine. We perched on barstools and did shots of tequila. We stayed up all night, drinking and talking, filling the kitchen table with empties, laughing a lot, saying little. But for some reason, we didn't have sex.
We'd known each other about six months: She was coming out of a long and listless relationship, and I was slowly forgetting a broken heart. One would imagine the free flow of booze and confession would have led quickly to sex, that we might have moved all too easily from kitchen to couch to futon, from awkward morning goodbyes to phone messages left but not returned — but no, the situation remained chaste and uncomplicated, our friendship feeding less off sexual tension than honest conversation and a shared love of cold beer.
We even managed to spend a weekend alone in the country, staying up late by the fire one cold night, playing records, sipping whisky, talking about possible futures, revealing exaggerated pasts.
The house was unheated so we made up a bed close to the fireplace, angling couches behind us to trap the heat, moving furniture and cushions like it was a sixth-grade slumber party, and still woke up the next day with our clothes on.
It might have stayed like that, warm friendship and hot sake, if she hadn't slipped one night on a stray copy of The New Yorker half-concealed under the coffee table. I reached out to grab her hand, caught her fast just below the elbow, steadying her. We stayed like that for nearly a minute, locked in an awkward pose out of a bad wedding Polaroid. I brought my free hand to hers, the one I held. I traced a slow circle around her palm with my index finger. Our eyes met, and we kissed. Then we had sex. Twice. And then a few hours after that. And then at least two times a day for a month. Obviously, we were making up for lost time.
The sex was very good, and we had it in every corner of the apartment — and in the car, the park, the woods, in bar bathrooms, on the roof, in a cemetery (once), at dawn, mid-morning, high noon, tea time, rush hour, dusk, primetime, midnight, and during the wee small hours.
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Contrasted with our period of unspoken chastity, it felt like 120 Days of Sodom.
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I'm not suggesting it was any kind of record-breaking sexual marathon, but contrasted with our period of unspoken chastity, it felt like 120 Days of Sodom.
We spent as much time together as possible — the dramatic transition to a sexual relationship had done nothing to affect our friendship. She lived by herself in a much nicer apartment than mine, so that's where we stayed every night. My roommates called after a few weeks, a little worried, but happy to have the extra space and the rent. I was in a relationship, and it was a good one.
After a month or so, our twice-a-day sex regimen slipped into once-a-day, more often than not in the evening, in bed. And then I moved in. Over the next few months we were happy cohabitants, preferring most nights to stay in and cook dinner for each other, watch movies or sit on the balcony drinking beer. We were boyfriend and girlfriend, and despite the apparent fact that we'd both vowed to enjoy an extended period of singlehood at the end of our last relationships, our headlong rush into full-scale monogamy felt neither claustrophobic nor foolish. And the sex was good, and daily.
One night, though, after a particularly spicy, devastatingly filling meal of Mexican takeout, with both of us tired from long days at work, the sex, for the briefest moment at the beginning — the foreplay to the foreplay — seemed, well, just a little bit like a chore. And that's when the fear took root.
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