Romance

I had sex in an elevator. With a friend, a colleague, a guy who lives with his girlfriend. It was the second to last night of our collaboration on an all-consuming project that had us working long hours and forced us to get close very fast. We had been strangers a week ago and now we suddenly felt like old friends. That’s how it is on these kinds of intense projects. On this particular day, the flirty banter of the day before when we likened moving furniture to trying different sex positions, had escalated to some pretty touchy behavior. While we waited for the rest of our crew, I sat on his lap in the backseat of a friend’s car as he massaged my back and put his arms around my waist. The more he touched me, the more I felt like a cat in heat. My pelvis throbbed and I responded by digging my butt into his lap. He was big and burly and I hadn’t had sex for like a whole month. You do the math.

My friend Adrienne and her boyfriend were also working on the project and our plan was for the four of us to all go out for drinks after work. I heard Burly Man talking to Adrienne's boyfriend about inviting his girlfriend, whom none of us had met yet. I had to run a couple errands before I could meet them at the bar. I called him from the road to ask a work-related question.

“When will you make it to the bar do you think?” He asked.

“Actually I don’t think I’m going to come.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t really want to be the fifth wheel with the two couples. You guys are gonna start talking about real estate and I’m going to be like, why am I here?” Having had my fair share of experience as the only single person surrounded by couples, I now try to avoid this scenario at all costs.

“Well, I don’t think my girlfriend is coming to the bar.” I suddenly found myself in the awkward position of deciding not to go because his girlfriend was invited and then changing my mind now that she was being removed from the equation. Even to me, it sounded like I was trying to fuck this guy. And I honestly didn’t have any intention of actually fucking him, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the attention, the groping, the flirtation, and I wasn’t in any hurry to replace this situation with one in which I would be forced to keep a polite distance while he canoodled with his girlfriend. Who would want that?

I arrived at the bar and he gave me a big bear hug. It was delicious. Everyone else was a few beers ahead of me, so the conversation quickly veered towards sex. As Burly Man massaged my calves with my feet resting in his lap, I wondered aloud why he was allowed to massage my calves but not my breasts.

“Because breasts are sacred,” he said, half-jokingly.

“What if I do this?”

I sat up, took his burly man hand in mine, and put it on my boob. He squeezed. A ripple of energy went through my whole body.

“You better be careful. It’s been a long time for me,” I said.

“How long?”

I looked to Adrienne, who knows my sex life as intimately as I do.

“Like a month,” I raised my eyebrows.

“That’s a long time to you?!” He seemed almost offended.

Adrienne whispered in his ear, asking if he needed a safe word, if he needed to set some boundary he wasn’t allowed to cross. He hesitated, clearly reluctant to make any promises he wouldn't be able to keep.

“There will be no penetration,” I declared.

Between trying to help him set boundaries and safe words, Adrienne egged us both on, encouraging him to spank me while I was bent over the bar. I glanced around the room, which had filled out substantially since we’d arrived in the late afternoon on a Tuesday. Everyone was obliviously chatting away—was no one noticing the raunchy goings-on in the corner of the bar?

I sat on Burly Man’s lap and he grabbed my crotch. This surprised me. It occurred to me this was a new level of crossing whatever boundary he had or had not set for himself. He dug his fingers into me from outside my pants. I wondered if our friends saw this happening and were politely ignoring it, or if they really had no idea. I tried not to moan out loud.

“What’s going on down there? You feel ready to go,” he said.

“I am,” I whispered into his face.

Then our friends started making plans for us all to go back to their place. The guys wanted to invite Burly Man’s girlfriend to join us, clearly intending to put a stop to whatever the hell was escalating between us. I said if she was coming I would probably go home.

“I don’t think you want the two of us in the same room right now,” I scoffed. Clearly he hadn’t thought this through.

“If I’m alone in a room with her, I’m going to have sex with her,” he pleaded with Adrienne, pointing at me, looking genuinely worried. I have to say his lack of self-control was thrilling.

Adrienne made the call: “Why don’t you two come over for an hour, and then your girlfriend can come over. Or you can just go home.”

I laughed. We all agreed to this plan, knowing it was a lie.

Back at their place, we drank more beer and ate some pizza. I was tucked in with Burly Man and when I sat up to grab a slice, he unhooked my bra, bringing his hands around to cup my breasts. I took off my bra and put it on the couch. Adrienne picked it up and studied it, musing that she wouldn’t ever wear a bra that wasn’t padded.

We settled in to watch the latest episode of Silicon Valley and he grabbed my crotch again, again digging his fingers into me through layers of clothing. I wondered if he’d dig a hole in my pants. I glanced over at Adrienne and her boyfriend on the other end of the couch—was it possible they didn’t see what was going on next to them?

Adrienne got up to get some blankets. She put one on herself and tossed one next to me, as if to say: ‘Now you can have some privacy.’ The second the blanket was on us, his hand was down my pants and his fingers were buried inside me. I could hear fabric ripping, so I quickly and quietly unbuttoned and unzipped to make it easier for him. I tried not to moan as he dug into me. My breathing involuntarily quickened. I held the blanket aloft in an attempt to mask the aggressive movement going on underneath. I reached over and felt his crotch. His cock was hard in his pants. We continued to laugh at the appropriate moments in the show, but I honestly don’t remember a single thing that happened in that episode.

When the show ended, I reluctantly re-zipped and buttoned my pants.

“Okay, I’m gonna go,” he announced to the room. I went to the bathroom and prepared to leave myself. I got a text from a coworker with some annoying news and I was back in work mode. Well, that was fun while it lasted, I thought. We hugged our friends goodbye and the two of us walked towards the elevator, me staring at my phone, wondering aloud how I should deal with this issue. The second the elevator doors closed, he was on me. He kissed me, and I remember thinking that kissing was the biggest boundary crossed so far—one I thought we wouldn’t cross. He reached down my pants again and pulled up my shirt. I had left my bra off. He started sucking on my nipples as he fingered me. We hadn’t pressed any buttons in the elevator, so it just sat there. I waited for someone to walk in on us. He took his penis out. It was pink and beautiful and I wanted it the moment I saw it.

“We can’t do that,” I said.

“We’re not going to,” he replied.

And then he tried to stick it in me. Facing one another with my pants around my thighs wasn’t working, so he bent down to take off my boots, and I thought: fuck no, there’s no way I’m going to be the one who's completely naked if and when we get caught fucking in this elevator. Instead, I turned around to give him easier access from behind. He pushed on my low back, holding me down as he fully entered me. My face flushed hot and I felt filled with that old familiar feeling. After probably about five minutes, he pulled out and came on my back. I still had my purse hooked around my arm, and for some reason decided this was the moment to let it drop. I reached down into the convenient bag of clothing I had left at my feet and took out an old sweater. He mopped his cum off my back and then, seeing that some had spilled onto the floor of the elevator, I wiped that up too. 

I buttoned my pants, he pressed the Ground Floor button on the elevator, and we walked out of the building, stunned and grinning.

“So, that happened,” I said.

“No, it didn’t,” he said.

“What happens in elevators, stays in elevators.”

“I’ve never done that before… Cum that fast.”

I laughed. “Oh, I thought you meant had sex in an elevator.”

“Yeah, that too.”

He walked me to my car. We kissed goodbye.

“Okay, see you tomorrow. Bye!”

The next day at work, he asked me if I planned to tell our friends. He told me not to write about him (Adrienne had told him about my blog—I’m hoping he forgot the name of it). He told me we should do it again sometime. I asked if he wanted to go find an elevator. He told me I would meet his girlfriend that night. He laughed when I told him I thought she was probably really cool.

“That was like a dream. It’s like it never happened,” he said. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I thought.

We finished our all-consuming project and we all went back to our normal lives. I went back to my nights of watching TV in bed by myself, and was suddenly struck with a strong sense of loneliness I don’t usually feel. I watched a sad, romantic indie flick on Netflix called Beginners starring Ewan McGregor and just bawled my fucking eyes out.

On Saturday night, I went to Best Guy Friend’s apartment for our weekly ritual of getting high, eating dinner, and having deep stoned talks in the hot tub followed by watching a movie. In a stoned stupor, I told him about how I realized watching this film that I feel really starved for romance in my life, and that I’m suddenly craving it. I struggled to articulate what it was about Ewan’s portrayal of the character in Beginners that had so affected me. How the way he is with the French girl he falls in love with in the film is how I want a man to be with me.

“When he looks at her, he really sees her. He listens. He sees her whole self and appreciates everything about her. He wants her fully and completely. He’s sensitive and sad and sexy.”

We mused on whether this character was in the writing, or was it just the quality that Ewan brings to every role he plays. Then we tried to find a female equivalent for Best Guy Friend—a famous actress who brings something to all her roles that he could actually see himself in a relationship with. We continued down this stoned rabbit hole for awhile.

“Well, you can have that,” said Best Guy Friend. I didn’t hear him, and he pointed that out too. “You could fall in love next week.” I thought about whether I believed him. “I don’t know if that’s actually what you want though. You’re so busy. Do you have time for it?”

I don’t know if I have time for it, if love would derail me from my life mission right now. But I want to feel that again. That feeling of being in love. That all-consuming, I want you every minute of every day feeling. I don’t know if it’s healthy, and my logical mind says it sounds codependent, but there’s no doubt I’m craving it. It's been awhile for me. Sometimes I worry that my biological clock has started ticking, and that these feelings are connected to a deeper yearning. I am suddenly at an age where several of my close friends and colleagues have babies, and when I'm around said babies, I do feel a persistent throbbing in my ovary-area that’s slightly alarming. Every time it happens I have to remind myself, there’s time for that and now is not the time.