Circles, Triangles, Squares by Charlie Sorrenson
At some point in the conversation we had migrated to the kitchen floor, arranging our bodies into a loose, humanoid square: me leaning against the island, Lisa against the stove, MJ against the sink, and Farouk’s former roommate, a gym-bro law student whose name had escaped us, sitting with his arms looped around his knees. The party had dispersed in that specific after-midnight way. The smokers and their hangers-on were crammed onto Farouk’s balcony, gesticulating with wrists made elegant by their cigarettes. Three of our fellow first-year PhDs, new arrivals to California for whom the novelty of legal marijuana hadn’t yet worn off, sprawled like a colony of seals on the couch and surrounding floor. In the kitchen, the four of us passed around a bottle of cheap sake. The counters, rising steeply behind our heads, gave the impression that we had not just broken away from the party but sunk into some other, more private place, and the nature of our confessions, which had started as a meandering conversation and formalized into a sort of game, became correspondingly deeper. The alcohol, operating in its usual loosening way, had guided us to the same place it always does: sex. We had covered sexual fantasies, our best sexual experiences, the riskiest places we’d had sex. Now Lisa introduced a new question: What, she asked, was a sexual encounter we had never told anyone about?
Lisa was, as far as I knew, straight, but I hadn’t figured out whether her version of heterosexuality encompassed men who clocked in at five foot three. She’d been flirting with me the whole night, but then she flirted with everyone. Certainly I found her attractive: she was petite, curvy-to-fat, very feminine. Her fine, curly hair would have given her pale face a doll-like aspect had she not chopped most of it off and dyed it pink. She had a formidable sense of how to dress, how to execute those tricks of proportion and color that I myself, in my female days, had never mastered. Already, barely a week into our first quarter, she had established herself as the cohort’s resident archaeologist, there to unearth what each of us most sought to conceal. In these and other characteristics, she was disconcertingly similar to my last two exes. Coming into grad school, I had vowed to break my habit of dating charismatic cis women who wanted me to dominate them in the bedroom and submit to them everywhere else. And so, while I was drawn to Lisa, I tried to keep my distance. When she posed her latest question, a suitable anecdote rose immediately into my mind, involving a foursome I’d had with an old girlfriend and a friend-couple of ours. The story was titillating, funny, and revealed nothing about me.
Our storytelling had by now taken on a soothing rhythm. Farouk’s ex-roommate went first, as he had every time. He swigged from the bottle of sake—it had become something of a tradition for each new speaker to drink from it—and began to recount how, on a service trip with some fraternity brothers to Hungary, he’d been struck down by a cold and had to stay behind in their hostel in Budapest while the others went out clubbing. Shivering and miserable in bed, he decided to soak in the hot tub that the hostel had installed in lieu of the more sophisticated thermal pools elsewhere in the city. The tub’s sole occupant was a naked older Hungarian man, who insisted on sharing his bottle of plum brandy. Their blood flow accelerated by the heat, they quickly got drunk, and when the bottle was empty, the man’s hand settled on his crotch. The ex-roommate described sitting in silence, staring straight ahead as the man masturbated them both; the twin streams of semen expelled into the cloudy water; the sight of the man’s leathery shoulders, followed by his magnificent belly, breaching the surface as he rose from the tub, took his towel and the empty bottle, and walked away without a backward glance.
The ex-roommate ended his story by showing us the picture on his phone’s home screen, of a heavily made up, gym-toned white woman who he told us was his fiancée, before emptying his second coffee mug full of whiskey.
Now it was MJ’s turn. They were a stocky, butch, Filipino PhD two years ahead of me whose taciturnity had given them an almost mythical status in our program. I had sought them out during early orientation events, hoping to cultivate a friendship with the only other trans person in the fifty-person engineering department, but our conversations had been awkward and truncated. One of us had always found an excuse to leave.
So I was surprised when MJ began to tell us, softly but with increasing fluency, about a Craigslist advertisement they’d answered as a broke undergrad; how they had gone to a much older woman’s loft apartment in downtown St. Paul and tended to her as though she were their kitten: running an antique silver-backed hairbrush along her head and back while she purred; trickling warm, frothing milk into their palm and coaxing her to lap it up. MJ had planned to stay six hours but instead stayed six days, spending much of the time on the couch watching Friends as the woman sprawled across their lap, both of them drifting in and out of sleep, MJ unbearably hot from their charge’s body and the gas-powered fireplace yet unwilling to move, as a midwinter storm of historic proportions battered the loft’s enormous picture windows.
All evening, our stories had been growing in length and detail. But I sensed that, in answering Lisa’s latest question, we were moving even further from the rules that bound us to the everyday. This was the longest I’d ever heard MJ speak. They had done so in a sort of trance: leaning against the sink with the sake bottle pressed to their sternum, staring into it and swirling its contents as they spoke. Now they looked up, seeming to remember our presence, and said, It was the most intimate experience of my life.
Cute, Lisa said, and the flicker of a grimace passed over MJ’s face. So is that where you disappear to on the weekends, MJ, should I go looking for you at the local furries convention?
But Lisa’s bravado wavered in the face of MJ’s unblinking stare, and after a moment she conceded, saying, No, but seriously, do you still do that kind of thing?
I’ve tried, MJ said. I’ve tried with other partners, yeah. But they don’t want it in the same way. They don’t need me to do those things to them—or for them.
It’s like they’re humoring you, Lisa said, nodding.
Yes. When what I want . . . Anyway.
What you want, Lisa said, is someone who can abandon their entire sense of self.
MJ looked disconcerted. They muttered something inaudible, glared into the bottle of sake.
Right? Lisa prompted.
But MJ only shrugged and handed her the bottle.
I’ll be honest, you guys, Lisa said. I was planning to tell you about my one probably really shocking relationship, with this married man who was a gynecologist, and, you know, a sadist. Lots of shocking and kinky shit. But you’ve inspired me to be actually vulnerable.
And she went on to explain that she had always been a sexual child, she’d started touching herself in kindergarten. When she was nine, she discovered how to make herself come by putting a pillow or, even better, her favorite stuffed animal—a cat with a bell in its tail—between her legs. (Here Lisa got on her knees and grabbed the cropped faux-fur coat she’d taken off earlier. Wadding it between her thighs, she ground down on it, explaining how she’d screw her eyes shut and gyrate back and forth, as the bell in the cat’s tail emitted tiny, jerky tinkles.) Her favorite place to do it, she said, folding the coat primly and placing it under her ass, then settling back against the stove, was in her brother’s closet. No one thought to look for her there, and her brother—seven years her senior and an avid athlete—was rarely home. There was an appeal, she added, in the muskiness of the space itself, the dirty socks and underwear that formed a permanent groundcover, the chaos that had somehow evaded the order their mother imposed everywhere else.
One weekend, her parents went away and left her in the care of her brother, who shut Lisa in her room and threw a raucous party. Hours in, unnoticed by the drunken teens, Lisa snuck out of her room and slipped inside his closet. She’d begun to masturbate when the door burst open. Through the closet’s slatted folding doors, she watched as two dark forms fell onto the bed and progressed, with fumbling determination, towards sex. Neither party was experienced—in retrospect, she understood that she had been watching the loss of at least one, and possibly two, virginities—and the guy kept asking, Is that okay? Are you okay? Am I hurting you? Yet even as a nine-year-old, Lisa said, she could sense that what mattered most was his pleasure, this pursuit drove the entire endeavor, and she began to find his supposed concern irksome; the girl was clearly not enjoying it as he was, and increasingly Lisa wanted him to not only acknowledge the hurt he was causing, but to heighten it. She started imagining the names he might call her (limited in Lisa’s childish imagination), him biting down on the girl’s arm until she had no choice but to cry out in pain. Instead the sex was quick and vanilla, its outcome exactly as you might expect.
There was a movement to my right. Farouk’s ex-roommate was getting to his feet, unfurling from the knees-to-chest position he’d been holding for hours, and I saw that his frame, beneath the muscles, was relatively fine-boned. Before his gym-going days he must have been lanky, even a touch femme.
Realizing we were looking at him, and that Lisa had paused, he said, Yo, my bad, my bad. I was just looking for more booze.
Something had been tugging at me all night, a nagging sense of déjà vu. Watching the ex-roommate reach across the counter behind MJ’s head, baring a large underarm sweat stain, I finally understood who he reminded me of: Conrad. They didn’t resemble each other in body shape or disposition, but both carried themselves with a distinct self-consciousness. Both made me feel uneasy, like I was watching a bad stand-up set; both made me wonder if beneath this self was another, far more delicate one. When the ex-roommate held up a near-empty bottle of Casamigos and asked, Shots?, it was as though he had practiced the gesture in front of the mirror a hundred times. When he passed Solo cups around and told us to drink, his command bore an undertone of plea. And it was with a sense of humoring the whole routine that we threw our heads back, made the faces people always make, smacked our tongues.
Wow, Lisa said, I can’t believe I told you guys all that.
I tried to summon her investigatory spirit. You were masturbating, right? Did you . . . orgasm?
Obviously, Lisa said. I came at the same time he did. That became kind of a fixation for me later—my orgasm being, like, triggered by my partner’s—and I’m sure it came from that experience. Mostly, though, it set off years of me trying to recreate the scene as I actually wanted it to be played out. Anyways! Lisa slid the bottle across the linoleum, her knee twitching against mine. It’s your turn.
Part of me wanted to interrogate her further, make her shed an unwilling layer or two. But, to my surprise, what I wanted even more was to speak. The tequila’s warmth was spreading through my body, lifting a series of sluice gates as it went. My story of the foursome now seemed ridiculous and pat; thinking of it, I felt ashamed that I had considered offering up such a paltry piece of myself. Yet, as I took the bottle and tilted it to my lips, I wondered if I could tell the story of my night with Conrad—really tell it, exactly as it had happened, omitting nothing, laying bare parts of myself that no one, besides Conrad, had ever seen.
I caught Lisa’s eye just as the last drops of sake were sliding down my throat. Earlier, I had watched her watching the other storytellers, her lips parted, her eyes glazed by something more than alcohol. Now I saw in her expression a sort of defiance. Transfix me, it seemed to say. Make me look at you like that.
Fine, I thought, setting the empty bottle in the center of our circle. I would try. And, looking at each member of my audience in turn, I explained that all of this happened seven years ago, when I was visiting the German city of Heidelberg. I had just graduated college and was scheduled to start my first job, at an engineering firm in Sacramento, at the beginning of July. I was ready to earn a real paycheck, but didn’t want to stay an entry-level peon for long. I was planning to apply to a few master’s programs, including one at Heidelberg. I had a UK passport through my mum, which meant that—at the time, pre-Brexit—the program would be free. One of my best friends had been teaching English in Naples for the past year, and so, during my last month of freedom from the working world, I visited her and then made my way up the Italian coast, through Switzerland and up to Heidelberg. I planned to end the month in Frankfurt, where my mother’s sister lived with her German husband.
I met Conrad on my third day in Heidelberg. We had both signed up to do a walking tour of the historic downtown, which has the longest pedestrian street in Germany. It was a silly, touristic thing, a waste of twelve euros. But it ended at a bar where we each got a free beer, and Conrad and I, the only solo travelers, soon got talking. He was a tall, jumpy white guy, his frame a strange mix of muscular and delicate, around my age but appearing younger in part, I think, because he had masses of dark, curly hair but was cleanshaven. Like me, he had just graduated, and he told me he would soon be starting the job that, at his dad’s urging, he had gotten with the US army corps of engineers. Heidelberg was the last stop on his monthlong trip before he flew out of Frankfurt. He had been born on its now-defunct military base, and he wanted to see the place where he’d spent the first four years of his life.
We were both fatigued from travel, and lonely, and feeling even more so in that noisy bar surrounded by young Germans getting riotously drunk. These factors pushed us to drink more than we would have normally, launching us into that feverish state of intimacy that can overtake strangers meeting on foreign soil. Soon Conrad’s gestures lost their jittery edge. His hands moved fluently through the air as several weeks’ worth of untold stories tumbled from his lips. His chatter allowed me to luxuriate in my drunkenness while reflecting on his energy, which was softer than what I was used to. I felt no sexual need emanating from him, felt no corresponding response in myself. I found myself wondering if he was gay.
These factors pushed us to drink more than we would have normally, launching us into that feverish state of intimacy that can overtake strangers meeting on foreign soil.
At some point our guide approached and told us he was leaving. Most of the group, American families and elderly Germans, had already drifted off. I checked the time: almost three hours had passed.
Conrad and I decided to pick up some wine and find a place to sit along the river. After stopping at Aldi, we crossed the famed Old Bridge, weaving between tourists clumped insistently around the enormous statue of Minerva. On the other side of the river, we took a set of stairs down to a narrow dirt path that ran beside the Neckar. Uneven paving stones had been embedded into the dirt seemingly at random, and I remember tripping more than once—I was, by that point, drunk. We searched for a place to sit, but thick, trash-littered reedbeds blocked our access to the water on the left and a crumbling brick retaining wall hemmed us in on the right. Every now and then, the wall’s facade gave way to a shallow, recessed archway, and eventually we stopped in one of these, perching on the narrow ledge that ran along the bottom and sprawling our legs onto the path.
I unscrewed the top of the two-euro bottle of wine and took a swig. I held it out to Conrad, but he was busy rummaging in his bag and didn’t notice. After a moment, he pulled out a baggie with two mashed-looking joints.
I completely forgot about these, he said. My bunkmate in Berlin needed to get rid of them, he was flying back to Australia.
I don’t normally smoke, I said, as Conrad passed the lit joint to me. I don’t normally drink much, either, I continued, bringing the blunt to my lips and inhaling. I laughed, and smoke billowed from my lips. I’m usually such a good girl.
We passed the joint back and forth until we reached the filter. At some point, Conrad picked up the story he’d begun telling me at the bar, about his ex-fiancée. They’d met in high school, in a community north of Fayetteville where most families worked for the nearby military base. They started dating when he was a sophomore and she a senior, and both families had used this age gap as the excuse for their virulent opposition. In reality she was Guatemalan, and his parents were but two of the many white residents who equated the area’s economic downturn with the simultaneous influx of Mexican and Central American immigrants. Her parents, for their part, banned her from seeing Conrad after her mother discovered a used condom, mummified within a yard of toilet paper, at the bottom of the bathroom trash can. The resulting drama—years of tearful showdowns, interdictions and ultimatums, secret meetings, small-town espionage conducted by the church friends of both mothers—had swelled their love to Shakespearean proportions. He proposed to her the summer after his freshman year; they planned to tour Europe after he graduated, then begin saving for their wedding. They knew the names of their first three children—etc. (This was what Conrad said, with a flick of his bony wrist—ekcetera.) But, two weeks before the departure date, she informed him she’d met a guy in her Master’s program at NC State—had, in fact, been seeing him for quite some time. By then, it was too late to change any of their bookings, so they’d flown together from New York to Paris, planning to part ways after: she would go north, to Brussels, and he would travel south. They’d kept their booking for the first night, at a hostel in the 20th arrondissement, and when they arrived, tired and jetlagged, she had initiated sex.
She kept being like, Hurt me, Conrad said, punish me for what I’ve done to you. Pretend I’m not even here, pretend like you don’t care. Then she was like, use me like your little fuckdoll, which—I’d never heard her say anything like that, it was so disconcerting, like: where did you learn that? From the internet? From him? So—but—I couldn’t, I couldn’t do any of it, and after a while we stopped having sex, we just did the thing we usually did, which was her using her vibrator and me jacking off while we kissed.
Conrad sucked the burned-out nub of the filter, flicked it into the reeds.
And then what? I said.
And then nothing. We went to bed. At the metro station the next morning, we hugged like nothing had happened. I helped her get her suitcases onto the train. Conrad turned to me. I mean, it’s messed up, right? Not just the whole situation, but specifically, like, for the girl to expect the guy to do that kind of thing?
I felt dopey, sedated; I wanted to lay my head on his shoulder. Mmm, I said. I’ve always just thought that guys like taking control.
Yeah, but, what if the guy’s the one who wants to lie there and—Conrad seemed about to say something else, but after a moment’s hesitation he repeated: You know? Just lie there.
I’m only saying this because I’m high, I said, but I’d kind of assumed you were gay. There’s something about your energy, it’s . . . I always feel nervous around men, but I don’t feel that way around you. I’m not afraid you’ll do something I need to stop.
People always think I’m gay, Conrad said, gloomily. When I was in Berlin, men kept coming up to me, asking me where I was going, if they’d see me later in some club.
People think I’m gay, too, sometimes, I said. Actually just yesterday this girl at my hostel came up to me in the dining room? And she asked if she could eat breakfast with me. And I realized midway through that she was, you know . . . But it wasn’t—I mean, I wasn’t . . . Anyway, I’m pretty sure it’s the hair. I’ve had it short since I was fifteen.
It’s not just the hair, Conrad said.
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. My mouth had gone dry; I kept swallowing, to no effect. I resented myself for how high I had gotten, as I did every time I smoked.
I said, You know that thing you said? About the girl taking control? I think there’s a part of me that’s always kind of wanted to do that. Like, sometimes I just walk around fantasizing about slapping people’s faces. I’ll see some guy and think, He has such a slappable face.
Conrad turned to me, grinning. Do I have a slappable face?
My mouth mirrored his, bending so far upward that I touched my fingers to my lips to make sure they hadn’t ascended to a new position on my face.
All men have slappable faces, I said. It’s something about their jaws.
I reached out and grabbed his with my left hand. Although he had no obvious stubble, the skin of his jaw was rough, pebbled with tiny pimples I hadn’t noticed because they were the same color as his skin. I moved my thumb and fingers up to frame his mouth, pushing the tips of it inward, giving him a fish-mouth, which I could have made into a funny thing but didn’t. I hovered my right hand by his cheek, then brought it down in a light slap. Feeling instinctively that this wasn’t enough, I administered a series of quick slaps, each growing in intensity.
I was so focused on his cheek that the rest of his face had faded from my awareness, but when I leaned back I realized Conrad had closed his eyes.
Opening them, he said, I know you can hit harder than that.
I released his jaw.
That’s all you get, I said lightly.
I turned away. Awkwardness had come between us, we could both feel it. Conrad looked through his backpack until he found his phone. I pulled mine out, too, and checked it, even though I had an expensive roaming plan and had turned off my data.
Staring at his phone, Conrad said, For a long time, I thought I was maybe asexual. Because I’ve never really—enjoyed sex? But lately I’ve been wondering if that’s just because I’ve never really felt like myself in any sexual encounter. I’ve never really felt like I’m there. He turned to me, resting his phone on his knee. You know what I’m saying?
I clenched my teeth and tried to summon saliva onto my dry tongue. I was annoyed at both Conrad’s question and my unwillingness to answer it. For the first time in a while, I became aware of our surroundings. Although sunset, in the long hours of European summer, was still hours away, the sky’s edges had softened; even the clouds had lost their definition, flattening along the horizon. Near our feet, river foam clung to the reedbeds. Further out, a fleet of beginner sailboats floated listlessly on the windless Neckar. I took another swig of wine, letting it pool in my mouth. It was too sweet, too warm, and bile rose in my stomach. With effort, I swallowed.
I’ve had sex, I said. I’ve had lots of sex. And I enjoyed it, mostly.
Conrad was still looking at me, but I pretended to be absorbed by the view. It was from my peripheral vision that I watched him slip his phone into his backpack, crack each of his knuckles in turn, and stand up unsteadily. Well, I thought, that’s that, then.
Sure enough, there was a note of dismissal in his voice when he said that he was thinking of heading back to his hostel. But then he nudged my sandaled foot with his sneakered one and said, Do you want to come back for a—nightcap?
I tried to sound very casual as I said that I did. Together we walked, weaving slightly, about a mile along the river until we came to the closest tram stop. The tram was crowded with a mix of commuters and Friday-night revelers. There was one seat open and I made Conrad take it, feeling an unfamiliar giddiness that I would someday identify as butch, or maybe just masculine, euphoria. Conrad looped one arm around my thigh and rested his cheek against my hip. As we swayed with the motion of the tram, I felt my drunkenness recede. When Conrad looked up at me as we came to our stop, his gaze again contained a certain sharpness that I remembered from earlier, at the bar.
Still, this impression of sobriety must have been only partly true, given the gaps in my memory. I don’t remember the walk from the tram to Conrad’s hostel, but I vividly recall standing under the fluorescents in the corridor as he fumbled with the old-fashioned lock on his door. I remember thinking that I was standing at the threshold of something monumental, about to slip off my everyday self like a pair of dirty tennis shoes. It was this thought that spurred me, when Conrad opened the door and stood aside to let me pass, to lay my hand on the small of his back and apply gentle pressure. Even now I can feel his back muscles tense beneath my palms, then relax as, dutifully, he shuffled ahead of me into the darkness of his room.
Inside we talked, prevaricated. With Conrad I felt none of the usual boy-girl dance, no coaxing forward or pulling back. Yet the give and take must have happened in its own way, because my memory restores itself to linearity further on, with the image of me moving towards his narrow single bed in nothing but my underwear.
The bed was covered in a thin woolen coverlet the color of day-old piss. I looked down at it as, my back to Conrad, I removed my bra. I caught a movement in the corner of my eye and turned to find myself in a full-length mirror by the foot of the bed. The cheap glass warped my body, ballooning my thighs and breasts, rendering my calves and waist and neck spindly and frail. Conrad crossed the room, and I spun around, trying to jettison from my mind the rippled fun-house version of myself. I hadn’t realized how close he had gotten, and, as I turned, his hand grazed my left breast.
Don’t! I said, jerking back and almost falling onto the bed.
Conrad grabbed my arm to steady me, saying, Sorry, sorry.
The shock of that first touch had bypassed my brain’s usual mediating tactics, and I felt ashamed of my outsized reaction. To defy what I chose to interpret as my own prudishness, I shimmied off my panties and let them drop to the floor. They were mint-green, cotton, with TUESDAY curlicued across the butt. Conrad, after a moment’s hesitation, clambered out of his boxers and held them, bunched, in one hand.
I was thinking . . . he said.
What?
I was thinking it might be, I don’t know, kind of funny? If you tried these on?
Ha!
The sound that left my mouth didn’t even approximate a laugh. I felt horrifyingly sober, hemmed in by a room whose edges had suddenly come into focus. The domed light fixture, protruding breast-like from the ceiling, had seemed weak when we came in from outside; now it felt glaring. Staring down at the faux-wood linoleum that had been polished to a high gleam, I saw a dark, hulking shape that I realized was my reflection.
I mean, I guess, I said. If that’s what you want.
I just thought it might be kind of funny, Conrad said.
I scooped my panties off the floor. You’d have to do it too, though.
Conrad swallowed. Gross, he said.
I held out my underwear. Fair’s fair.
Conrad’s hand spasmed around the fabric of his boxers. He cleared his throat. Fine, he said. I guess.
The boxers were softer than I’d expected, made out of the same nylon-blend material as women’s underwear, only thicker. I fingered my flesh where it spilled over the top of the elastic waistband, then smoothed my hands over the fabric, thrilling at its encasement of my thighs.
I felt Conrad’s hands on my shoulders, and I let him wheel me around until we were both facing the mirror. The elation I’d felt vanished when I saw him behind me: my small stature and wide hips—I had, and still have, what women’s magazines call a pear-shaped figure—accentuated against Conrad’s long, lean body, which was almost a caricature of the triangle-torsoed icon on a bathroom door. He was reaching around my waist, stooping slightly. I closed my eyes, preparing for the moment when he leaned down and kissed my neck, cupped my breasts.
Instead, his hands brushed my hips. Opening my eyes, I saw them hovering at the waistband of the boxers. He was holding something in his hand: one of his white athletic socks, rolled into a ball. He started to insert it into the pouch at the front of the boxers, then paused.
Is this okay? he said. I just thought . . .
I nodded, hardly able to breathe.
His hands withdrew. I looked at the bulge at my crotch and felt a dizzying elation, which dissipated as my eyes traveled up to the twin bulges of my breasts. I had the sudden sense of my body—of both our bodies—as nothing but an array of protrusions and depressions, circles and triangles and squares. I longed to reach through the mirror and rearrange us both.
I had the sudden sense of my body—of both our bodies—as nothing but an array of protrusions and depressions, circles and triangles and squares.
My bra was still on the floor. I picked it up and turned to Conrad.
Look, if we’re both going to play dress-up . . .
Oh, I don’t know . . . Conrad said.
But when I held the bra out he looped his arms through it, then turned so I could fit it to him, loosening the shoulder straps and fastening the band circling his ribs on the widest setting. I told him to get on the bed and he did, rolling onto his back. As I climbed on top of him, the wool of the blanket lisping at my knees, his hands rose towards my waist. I pressed them down, pinning his wrists to the bed. Conrad made a soft, deep noise, drawn from the back of his throat by shock or pleasure or both. Placing my palms over the cups of the bra, I crumpled the fabric inward until I was kneading his chest.
God, I love your tits, I said, and Conrad moaned, pushing his chest up to meet my palms.
I told him to roll over, glancing down as I did so and seeing his dick outlined rigidly against the thin fabric of my underwear. The sight of it surprised me—I had forgotten, somehow, this basic fact of his anatomy—and made me thrill: it demonstrated, more starkly than his face ever could, the hold I had over him.
I’m going to fuck you up your ass now, you little sissy, I said.
Where did these words come from? I hadn’t watched all that much porn. Yet I intuited that we were racing towards the same goal, that of Conrad’s abjection. I knew the words I spoke to be the right words, and I spoke them roughly, and was rewarded, once again, by the arching of his body against my hands. I pulled the crotch of the underwear to one side, crumpling the brown letters—TUESDAY—that now felt jarringly banal. Finding the pucker of his anus, I probed it with my index finger. I had imagined the inside to be analogous to a vagina’s—slippery and smooth, an excess of indecency. But Conrad’s asshole was grainy and dry. It didn’t give easily, and, as my finger pressed deeper, my calm state was disrupted, for the first time, by the fear that my finger, when I pulled it out, would be covered in shit. I forced my finger further in and then pumped it in and out, trying to dislodge my queasiness through this act of brutality. But my paranoia only grew, and after a few more seconds of this I pulled out.
My finger looked exactly as it had before, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of having been contaminated. Beneath me, Conrad shifted inquisitively. I swung my legs off him and stood, hoping he wouldn’t notice my index finger pointing stupidly at the floor.
Um, I said. I have to pee?
Conrad turned to look at me, pulling his legs to his chest. The sight of his long limbs, curled fetally, was bizarre and somehow endearing.
Is everything okay? he said. I didn’t—do anything, did I?
God, of course not. I just—I really need to pee.
Oh, Conrad said, shifting onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. Okay.
The bathroom was a shared one down the hall. I took the key and slipped on Conrad’s large t-shirt, hurrying down the brightly lit corridor and praying I wouldn’t run into anyone. Inside I scrubbed my hands, then examined myself in the mirror, expecting to see some kind of change. But it my face staring back, determinedly the same.
When I reentered the room, I found Conrad in the same pose I had left him. He had unhooked the bra, but inertia or something else must have overtaken him, for it sat on his chest, shrunken in on itself. He had taken his dick out and was playing with it idly, switching it back and forth, letting it flop and then picking it up again. I used to play this game with boyfriends, delighting in the organ’s animal twitching, the way it swelled and hardened into something entirely new. But his motions weren’t having the same effect now, he remained half-erect. When he saw me, his hand paused.
Should I stop?
No.
I sat on the side of the bed. With my forefinger, I traced the grid-like grooves of his abs, the undersides of his pectorals. I tweaked his nipple. He gasped, and the hand around his shaft sped up. Then, out of nowhere, his hands fell to either side of him.
Whatever, he said, defiantly.
I paused with my fingers splayed on his chest. But he looked up at me with eyes that held some wild plea, so I said, Roll over.
I straddled his ass, pressing down on it with my groin. I thought I might try to finger him again, perhaps with two fingers, using the sunscreen I had spotted in his toiletries bag on top of the dresser. But in the next moment the idea of doing that, or anything at all, became impossible: all conviction seeped from my mind and left behind a shell that, as I watched, collapsed. My body, divorced from intention or directive, followed suit. I slumped on top of Conrad and lay there heavily.
I’m sorry, I said, and my cheeks burned as though what I was about to say really was true. I’ve gone soft.
Conrad mumbled something, but I couldn’t hear him through the pillow. After a moment I pushed his legs together and set mine on either side, locking my ankles over his. His arms were spread like goal posts and I laid my arms over them, curling my fingers into the spaces between his fingers. Again, the vague impulse to do something—to thrust the bulge of my sock-dick into his ass—came over me, then evaporated. I felt I could remain like that forever; and it’s true we laid there for a long time, neither of us moving, Conrad’s face pushed into the pillows so deep I wondered how he could breathe.
A clattering noise pulled my mind from that narrow bed, from Conrad’s body prone and hard beneath mine. Farouk’s ex-roommate was using the cabinet handles to lever himself to his feet, and he’d yanked one so hard that he almost upended a drawer full of silverware on MJ’s head.
You good? MJ said.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said, clinging to the countertop with one hand as, with the other, he pushed the drawer back in with exaggerated care. His face was white beneath its alcoholic flush. His red button-down was soaked through with sweat.
Lisa looked annoyed at the interruption. So? she said. What happened next?
Honestly, I said, casting an uneasy glance at the ex-roommate, nothing much. I think we fell asleep for a while, but then we got up and got dressed, and Conrad walked me back to the tram line.
That was it?
Yeah. We never talked again.
But you’ve looked them up? MJ asked.
I noticed the pronoun, although I don’t think Lisa did. Its implication made me annoyed, mostly at myself—because of course I had fantasized about the same outcome. I had looked up Conrad, along with any feminine iteration I could think of, many times, always without success. In retrospect, I wondered if Conrad had changed or obscured some part of his last name or hometown from me, the instinct to protect himself present even through the blur of alcohol and weed.
No, I said, shortly.
It kind of breaks your heart, doesn’t it? Lisa said. To think of both of you like that, your full selves just . . . unable to come out. For a moment she looked on the verge of crying, but then she gathered herself: I’m so glad, she continued, reaching out to touch my knee, that you chose not to hide yourself like that.
I looked down at her small, white hand and realized that I no longer found Lisa so compelling; perversely, this made me want to sleep with her more.
Two things happened then: the door to the balcony opened and the smokers flooded inside, and the ex-roommate lurched towards the sink, bent over it, and vomited.
MJ, Lisa, and I started to get up to help, but the smokers were faster. By the time we were on our feet, one guy had brought a cup of water to the ex-roommate and was coaxing him to drink. Like the ex-roommate, he wore a formal button-down and chinos; they must have come straight to the party from some professional event.
I told you, I’m fine, the ex-roommate said, almost knocking the cup out of his friend’s hand. But the friend was having none of it; propping the ex-roommate up, ignoring his belligerent claims to sobriety, he hustled him towards the door.
I hope he’s okay, I said, as we watched other partygoers trickle out the door behind them.
I’m just glad he didn’t vom on my coat, Lisa said, picking it up from the floor. I remembered her demonstration from earlier, the frantic churning of her hips against the faux fur. She looked at me, and I had the strange sensation that she’d just read my thoughts. So, she said. Do you still top? Or was that a one-time deal, the humiliation, the name-calling, all that?
It wasn’t a one-time deal, I said.
And that, MJ said, with an archness that surprised me, is my cue.
We watched them make their way through the dwindling crowd. I turned to the countertop and began stacking empty cups while Lisa checked her phone, both of us seized by a sudden shyness. Finally I said, You only live like ten minutes from me, right? I’d be happy to walk you home.
As we walked, rounding our shoulders against a December night that was unusually cold for Southern California, our talk reverted to the superficial: deadlines, problematic faculty members, OC beaches that we wouldn’t visit once in the next six years. But the conversation was stilted, each of us had to labor to keep it going. The things we had admitted, cocooned in that other realm, hovered in the air between us, and Lisa didn’t seem at ease until she could return to that confessional mode. She expressed her surprise at the ex-roommate’s drunkenness, cajoled me into speculating about the number of drinks he’d had, related yet another story—this one about the time she’d vomited while going down on a guy in a movie theater. She complained about MJ’s reticence, their inability to share fully of themself, then praised my openness.
I actually wanted to thank you, she said. That was honestly a really powerful story you shared tonight. But can I ask you something?
Aren’t you tired? I said.
Of what?
All this excavating.
Lisa laughed. It’s just that I keep wondering, she said. What impact did that night have on you? Like, what meaning did you make from it?
The truth is that my night with Conrad had no immediate impact on my life. If I thought of it in the years that followed, it was as one episode in a series of disquieting sexual encounters. Only years later, when I began probing my memories in the hopes of finding proof that I “deserved” to take testosterone, did I remember my night with Conrad and, as Lisa said, make meaning of it. Yet here she was, angling her head towards me as we walked, her eyes wide, admiring, and it came to me that I could make up any story I wanted, could craft my image into whatever shape I desired. In sharing one true part of myself, I had created the opportunity for other falsities.
And so, for the remainder of our walk, I told the story of the next six years as if it had taken six months, shuffling disparate events into logical order: a shadow-life in which I awoke the next morning feeling like I’d tapped into some true and vital part of myself. Revelations bursting one by one from the muck: first, that I wanted to be with other women; later, that I wanted not to act the man, but to be one; later still, that I was okay sleeping with men as long as I was one too. Across them all, that unmoving star in my personal firmament, sought out and consulted whenever I wavered: my night with Conrad.
When we reached the stairs of her apartment complex, Lisa paused with her hand on the railing. I have some whiskey in my room, she said. Want to come up for a nightcap?
I wondered if her evocation of that word—the same one Conrad used—was intentional.
And I did allow myself to imagine it. My hand curled around the whiteness of her throat. Me calling her a stupid whore, a dumb cumslut, a little fuckdoll. Her pain, our mutual pleasure, driven and directed by me. But who, in that moment, would be possessing who? I remembered the way she’d brought herself close to tears in Farouk’s kitchen. And I realized that whatever desire I’d felt for her had seeped away with my drunkenness. I didn’t want to be with someone who confused being truthful with being known. Who could hear of two strangers remaking the world together and feel only pity.
I’m actually pretty tired, I said. Maybe next time?
Oh, okay, Lisa said, in a voice almost childish in its hurt. Yeah, next time.
There would be no next time, of course. Lisa would never again seek me out, instead attaching herself to, then alienating, a string of people in the engineering department. A year later I would meet the person I’m with today—someone who I can surge forth with when I want and recede from when I need; who taught me not to dominate or submit but to do what is so much harder: trust. My ability to accept the nature of this give and take began, I think, on the night I stood at the foot of Lisa’s stairs and watched until she had disappeared around the corner of the building’s second-floor balcony. Yet I remember walking home through the deserted Irvine streets feeling less triumph than a nagging frustration. This was why I’d never told the story of Conrad to anyone, I realized, as I crossed from one yellow pool of lamplight into another: not because I was ashamed of what we had done, but because I was afraid I would fail to make my listeners feel the astonishment that I still feel, to this day, whenever I remember me in Conrad’s boxers, Conrad supine and beautiful in my bra. My imagination, and his imagination, carving away or supplying flesh for the other where that night there had been none. What act could be kinder? Than to see another as you can’t yet see yourself?
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