The Bartender's Brother Part Deux

*Readers forgive me. As it is now Christmas Eve, this post is late.*

It’s Thanksgiving week and I have a date with John’s brother. John, if you’ll remember, is the bartender whose dick I sucked on Halloween Night in the bathroom of the dive bar where he works. John who still lives with his girlfriend. Whose brother is an incredibly hot trainer I fucked over Labor Day weekend. The brother who lives in the Bay Area, where my parents also live.

I actually set up this date before I sucked John’s dick. I wanted a booty call prepped and ready to go for when I went home for the holiday, so I texted John’s brother in mid-October that I would be up that way the following month and we should “grab a drink.” He responded enthusiastically that he would “love that.” After my encounter with John, I wasn’t really sure what would happen. I was half expecting the whole thing to blow up in my face. My roommate reassured me that, “John is not going to tell anybody about that.” I figured she was probably right, John is probably trying to convince himself the incident never occurred, not telling his brother (whom he knows I fucked) about it.

The brother suggests we meet at this upscale new restaurant where one of his clients works. I check it out on Yelp and notice the three dollar signs indicating this place is pretty damn expensive. This makes me slightly uncomfortable, as I picture sitting across from a one night stand at a fine dining restaurant, when I would have been happy with a couple beers at a dive bar followed by some heavy PDA culminating in a lot of hot sex. But the other part of me—the less cynical, more romantic part—is excited to be going on a real date.

“We’re having dinner!” I exclaim to my mom, who rolls her eyes when I tell her this guy is a trainer at a gym. No wonder I’m such a snob.

I wear less clothes than I should because I want to look sexy, and it’s fucking freezing. I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge with my parents’ Fast Trak in my car, and arrive at the restaurant fifteen minutes early. I park like a block away and realize I’m shaking—I can’t tell if it’s from anxiety or the cold, but I do feel suddenly quite nervous. I’ve only interacted with this guy once, and we were both very hammered, and then we had sex. Will I be able to spend a whole dinner talking to this person?

I’m there before him and snag a seat at the bar so it feels a little less formal, and I can rub up next to him after we’ve had a drink or five. I stare at the cocktail menu and think it’s probably a good idea to get some alcohol in my system before he arrives. I’m still shaking. He arrives right on time and at first I don’t recognize him. He looks different from the Facebook photos I’ve been stalking since we had sex—really my only frame of reference since I haven’t seen him in two months. He doesn’t seem very happy to see me, but I now know this is guy code for nerves on a “first date.” I get up to hug him and it’s a little stiff. He sits down on the stool to my right rather than the one I’d been saving for him on my left. The bartender puts down my drink and I offer him a taste.

“You like grapefruit cocktails,” he teases, I guess remembering from last time. I’m pleased he remembers this detail about me. He orders the same and I say I thought he was making fun of my cocktail choice.

“Simmer down,” he jokes. At least I get a little smile out of him.

We look at the menu and he says, “I eat everything. I’m not picky.” Good, because I hate picky eaters. We order three small plates to share. He tells me he just came back from diving in Mexico, where he swam with whale sharks—“the biggest fish in the sea.” He shows me a photo of how big they can get; they look terrifying. He tells me about his work schedule—he works from 5am to 6pm most days. He says he has to get up the next morning at 5am, he doesn’t have a client until 6am.

“After we made this plan, I thought maybe Tuesday is not the best day after all,” he laughs. I tell him we could have changed it. He shrugs.

We talk about the bar where we met, where he used to work and John still does. I casually ask if John hates his job.

“Yeah, they all do. They’re all musicians and artists and they’re not doing their art—they’re just working at the bar.” I tell him that’s just LA.

He loosens up as he drinks and eventually asks me about what I’m working on. I tell him I’m in transition, looking to do more of one of my jobs and less of the other, that I’m doing a lot of different things right now, and I feel a change coming. He says he’s jealous of that, that he gets bored in his job because it’s the same all the time.

“Oh, I’m bored all the time!” I declare.

He tells me that he didn’t work out for a whole week in Mexico, so the other day he took two spinning classes. I tell him about my spinning-related vagina injury, prefacing the story with, “It’s a little early in the night for this story,” and then diving right in. I leave out the fact that this spinning class was on Halloween morning and that same night I ripped the bandages from my crotch as I was crouched on the floor of the dive bar sucking off his brother. I tell him instead about how I feel that spinning decreases the sensitivity in my crotch area, and that I don’t want that—I want “maximum sensitivity.” He smiles.

We order more cocktails and he starts smiling more and laughing and enjoying himself. The food is pretty good. A couple times I reach under his arm and run my fingers along his bicep, which is big and buff and satisfying to touch. I rub his back a couple times. He grabs my knee and tickles me. I touch his ribs and it makes him squirm. I remember that first night, when I boldly ran my hands over his chest and sucked on his finger, making him hard and begging me to stop. I wonder if he would respond to that behavior now, in this very well-lit and classy restaurant. I wonder if he’s disappointed that I’m not being quite so frisky tonight, but his body language doesn’t invite my touch and when I do touch him, he seems slightly uncomfortable.

He asks if I want another drink and I tell him if I order another one I’m not going to be able to drive home. As it is, I’m going to need to sober up a bit if I plan to make it back to my parents’ place alive. He says tentatively, “Well, my house is nearby. You could come hang out there for a bit or whatever.” I can’t tell if he wants me to do this or he’s just being polite. I wonder if he’s worried about pressuring me, as the first night we were together when he suggested we go back to my place I held him off, not sure at first. He had said at the time that he felt “creepy” to be pushing it. I wonder if this guy is just really sensitive and is taking everything I say really to heart—I wonder if he’s worried about pressuring me to come over and have sex, when all I want to do is come over and have sex. At the same time, I can’t really tell if he likes me that much. I remember him mentioning that he moved to San Francisco for his girlfriend at the time, and I wonder now if he got his heart broken and that’s why he seems so guarded.

We agree that we’ll go back to his place. We walk outside and it’s fucking freezing. I shiver. He says, “I’d give you my jacket but it’s not that warm.” I drive us the two blocks to his house and I really shouldn’t be driving but it’s not far and he tells me he’ll “point out the stop signs.” His place is nice—it’s a house he shares with two siblings, a boy and a girl, and another girl who is Airbnb’ing it. We go into his room that has his bike from when he did the AIDS Life Cycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He turns on the overhead light and it’s really bright—I wish he had better lighting. He takes off his shoes and I take off my shoes. I don’t know if he’s expecting that we’re just going to sleep next to each other and I’m not sure he would have made a move if I hadn’t swooped in on him. I put my arms around his neck and kiss him. He reciprocates, grabbing my body. I love kissing him. He pulls my pants halfway down and takes off his shirt.

“We need to do something about this lighting,” I declare. He hits the light and it’s suddenly pitch black. I think this is fortunate because I just got my period today and had been debating whether or not to tell him—now with the lights off, I don’t have to! I have light periods anyway, and if he’s the kind of guy who won’t screw a girl on her period, I don’t want to find out right now. I take off my shirt. I can feel he’s already hard and I move down, pulling his briefs down as I go. I take him between my lips and he grabs the back of my head, thrusting into my mouth. The aggressiveness of this act turns me on, as it belies a need he has been so careful not to show me all evening. He fucks my mouth and I take him all the way in. It’s a much more satisfying blow job than I gave to John’s at half-mast.

I come up to kiss him again and he moves me back onto the bed, pulling off my panties. He starts going down on me and it’s hard for me to fully enjoy myself because I’m thinking about getting blood in his mouth. At the same time, I don’t want to discourage him from doing this because not enough guys do and even he didn’t the first night we were together. He moans as he eats me out, which I find incredibly hot because it means he’s enjoying himself, and guys who love eating pussy are the hottest. I let him do it for awhile and then I tell him to “fuck me.” I pull him up and wet my hand. I reach down and am thrilled to discover he’s still hard. I put him inside me and he feels so good that after just a couple minutes of thrusting, I feel like I’m going to come. I wrap my legs around him and moan louder, but I guess this is too much for him and he has to back off, bringing my feet to his chest so he can thrust from more of a distance. The impending orgasm dissipates, never to return, and I think how unfortunate it is that, as a woman, if you want to keep the sex going, you have to sometimes forfeit your own orgasm in favor of making it last longer because, if you come, it might make him come and then it’s all over.

He moves my leg down across my body so he’s now thrusting into me from behind but with my body twisted so my chest is still facing him. Then he turns me over completely and fucks me with my stomach flattened against the mattress. He then lifts me up and fucks me doggy style and whips out this very cool move whereby he intermittently, between thrusts, darts his tongue into my pussy. I cringe a little bit as I imagine his tongue dipping into my bloody vagina like a pen into a red inkwell. Regardless, I love this move and don’t want to discourage it. After awhile, he says if he keeps going he’s going to come. I know by now I will not come, so I tell him I want him to.

“Fuck me,” I whisper, guiding him to orgasm. He pulls out and comes on my back. I collapse on my stomach and he gets a towel to gently mop up his splooge, like a true gentleman.

As we lie down, I laugh in a way that’s meant to sound apologetic and say, “I think I might have gotten my period while we were having sex.”

“Oh, I didn’t taste anything,” he says.

“You like ordered a steak medium and it came bloody as hell and you just decided to eat it anyway,” I weirdly say.

He laughs.

“So did you just forget or…?”

“Well, I knew it was coming but was hoping it wouldn’t come right now.” I guess he believes this lie, and doesn’t seem to care that much anyway.

“I guess we’ll find out in the morning.”

I go to the bathroom and indeed he has fucked some blood out of me. I hope I didn’t get it all over his white duvet cover. When he returns from the bathroom, I ask if he had blood on his dick.

“A little,” he says and lies down.

I don’t sleep well and neither does he. We both toss and turn. I wake up after a couple hours of fitful sleep to find he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over, trying to rally himself.

“Is it five?” I ask.

“It’s 5:15.” He grabs my foot affectionately as he walks naked out of his bedroom and heads for the bathroom. I watch his beautiful, spinning-class toned ass as he goes, then I lie back down to get a couple more minutes of shut-eye. He turns the light on in the living room outside his bedroom so as not to bother me, and gets dressed out there.

I drag myself up and collapse facedown on the foot of his bed, moaning. He laughs at me.

“How do you feel?”

“Like garbage,” I say.

I look down at his bedspread in the light shining from the living room, and am pleased to see there’s no blood.

“There’s no blood!” I report.

“That’s a good thing,” he says.

I drive him to work at the gym, and ask if I kept him up last night.

“I don’t know if it was you or me. I like to spread out in my bed. At one point, you moved over and I was like, yes!”

“Oh, you could’ve told me to move.”

“I didn’t want to like kick you out. Maybe next time,” he laughs.

“I was trying to get closer to you because you were warm,” I say.

As I write this exchange, I realize it sounds a little sad.

I stop outside the Coffee Bean where he’ll fuel up on caffeine for the long day ahead, and he hugs me goodbye. I go in to kiss him and he makes it short. I drive an hour and a half home, crawl into bed and go back to sleep. A couple hours later, my phone rings and it’s a San Francisco number I don’t recognize. I don’t answer it, but have a feeling I know who it is. There’s a message and it’s from him. He left his phone in my car.

I put on a sweater and some shoes and head into the kitchen, where my dad is emptying the dishwasher.

“Hi honey,” he kisses me.

“The guy left his phone in my car,” I explain as I put on some shoes and head outside into the freezing morning.

Sure enough, his phone is between my seats and I fish it out. There are five missed calls from the gym where he works and three from another number. The Find My Iphone app has been activated.

I get back in bed and call the number back and the receptionist at his gym says he’s with a client and is there a message. I say no message and give them my name. The receptionist says, “hold on” and I can hear him telling John’s brother that it’s “your friend with the phone.” He gets on the line and feels terrible and stupid for doing this. I ask how he found my number; he says the iCloud. He doesn’t have a car and isn’t sure how to get his phone back.

“You weren’t planning on coming back to San Francisco were you?”
“Uh, not today.”

I suggest he meet me halfway. He’s not sure how to do that. I know I’m being overly accommodating when I say, “Well, if you can that would be great, and if not I’ll do what I have to.” I guess I like this guy. There is a part of my female brain that is excited to have an excuse to see him again. After all, I’m on vacation and running out of things to do at my parents’ house. He says he’ll try to borrow a car and will call me back in a couple hours.

I spend the day not doing much but anticipating this call. I’m very tired and hung over so I sleep for awhile. I feel petulant and teenage-like with my parents and I think there’s something about the contrast of having sex with a guy and then having to come back to your parents’ house that feels rebellious and like high school. My parents keep asking what my plan is and my mom gets mad at me that I can’t make plans with her because I’m “waiting on a galloot.” I say I don’t mind so why should she. He calls me in the afternoon and we make a plan to meet at a Starbucks halfway between us at 6pm. I have to find the address for him because if he gets lost there will be no way to track him. What the fuck did we do before cell phones? I get on the road and he texts me from a random number, saying he borrowed his friend’s phone and car and he’s running fifteen minutes late. Still, he beats me there. I arrive and he’s sitting at a table with just one chair at it, the one he’s sitting in. I approach and stand over him, handing him his phone. He doesn’t stand to hug me or get me a chair. He just looks at his phone as I awkwardly wait there, and then awkwardly pull over a chair and sit down. He says he feels terrible and wants to treat me to dinner. I say, “yeah, I’d like to see you again.” I can’t tell if he wants to see me again or just feels obligated because of the phone thing. We hug goodbye, I kiss his cheek and he half-heartedly kisses mine back. I think to myself, we’ve had sex dude, a little affection wouldn’t kill you!

I drive home and kick myself for not saying, “don’t worry about it, there’s no obligation” when he offered to buy me dinner. But then I realize I only would have said that trying to get a response out of him, and “I’d like to see you again” was actually more honest. Which is good, I think. I vow to not be the one to text him first, to let him come to me.

The next day at 11am, I text him. “Hey! You busy tonight?” I’m in the car on the way to hike with my parents. I’m expecting he’ll text me right back. He doesn’t. We go on the hike and have a yelling argument overlooking a beautiful vista when I tell them about the time that I met this cool male celebrity whom I really felt I connected with and muse on why I don’t meet more guys like that, and they explode back at me with, “but he’s a Scientologist!” I then try to explain that just because Scientology is a creepy cult doesn’t mean everyone in it is an evil asshole. To which they think I’m defending Scientology, and it devolves from there. We return to the car, and I can’t wait to get away from them and into the bed of John’s brother. But there is no text from him. I then start to have a panic attack that he spoke to John on Thanksgiving and that John has told him about the blow job and warned his brother that I am this crazy slut who is trying to fuck both of them. I think about how I would react if they accused me in this way, and am disappointed to find that I think it would actually hurt. I thought I didn’t care what they, or anyone, thought, but I suddenly find myself feeling vulnerable when faced with the very real possibility that someone I had sex with and have a crush on would think I was being vindictive by trying to fuck both him and his brother. I think about how I would explain this to him. That I am a single woman and free to have sex with whomever I please. And that I am attracted to both brothers and don’t think it’s my problem that they’re related. I feel better once I reason this out with myself, knowing that I am still within the parameters of my own moral code.

At 5pm, he texts back, “Hey! So sorry to leave you hanging! I was sailing all day and just got back to shore. How was your day?” I tell him that sounds lovely, that my day was chill, we hiked, and that I’m planning to leave the following day.

“Well shit, I’m in Santa Cruz and we’re hanging out here for a little while. What time are you leaving tomorrow?”

I tell him I will probably leave early. Then I say, “I wanted to get you in bed once more before I left.” Hoping to entice him back to the Bay.

He responds, “Haha. Well if not I should be coming down to LA soon enough.”

I leave this alone and go to bed early, thoroughly disappointed to not be getting a follow up booty call, especially because my period is now gone.

The next morning, I decide to try one final time.

“Hitting Tartine on my way out of town if you’re interested.” He doesn’t write back. I do drive past Tartine but the line is long and out the door and I can’t face it. It’s cozier standing in a line like that when you have a warm body to rub up against.

Feeling like I want one final adventure before leaving the city, on a weird whim I text Childhood Crush. He texts back right away that he is out of the city for the day, but how long am I in town. I explain I am driving back to LA now and just killing time before getting on the road. He says he’ll be in LA soon and that “it would be fun to say hi.” “Word,” I respond noncommittally. The last time he was in LA and texted me, I basically ignored him and was proud of myself for not allowing more of the mediocre sex to occur. Now I’ll have to cross that bridge all over again. I hope I will lose interest in the whole John situation soon, as I have with Childhood Crush. It feels good to be over it.

I start to drive out of town and immediately feel better. Amy Winehouse blasting, I feel lonely and liberated. I get a text from John’s brother: “Oh man, I really slept in today. Feel kinda shitty. How are you?”

I tell him I got loads of sleep and feel great and am en route to LA. To which he responds, “Awesome! It was good to see you and have a smooth drive down.” Do I detect an air of glad to be rid of me?

Back in LA, I get drunk with my roommates and we head out to the local dive bar where John works. But he’s not there. I play dumb and tell the DJ it seems like the usual staff has changed. He says, “oh there’s just one guy that’s usually here and isn’t tonight. John.”

“Oh yeah, I know John. Where is he?”

“He just drove down from spending Thanksgiving in San Francisco and wanted the night off.”

What?! John was in San Francisco when I was?? Is it possible that John’s brother spent Thanksgiving with John and when I asked what his plans were, he said he was having a Friendsgiving and essentially lied by omission by not telling me John was with him? I can’t believe it. Why would he not tell me, unless he knows about me and John? In which case, why would he still want to see me? I haven’t seen John since Halloween night and am also very curious to know what information he does and doesn’t have. Does he know I went on a second date with his brother, that I fucked him again?

The DJ invites us to sit in his “VIP area” and we proceed to get wasted. I am wearing a skimpy tank top with no bra because I was hoping John would be here. Instead, I’m approached by a boring RN who keeps stopping me from dancing to ask, “what do you do?” over the incredibly loud music, and a grumpy looking guy who tells me I’m “rude” when I don’t take the hand he extends to me.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I text John, “Where you at fool?” Which I think is neutral enough that it wouldn’t be terrible if his girlfriend saw it. He texts back right away.

“Home.”

To which I send the emoticon with two lines for eyes and a line for a mouth. Unimpressed, nonplussed, bored. This emoticon perfectly suits my mood.

Childhood Crush: Part Two or How I Got My Gold Back

I see Childhood Crush once more before he heads back to San Francisco. He comes over on Sunday afternoon for a couple hours before he’s due somewhere for dinner. Again, I feel unclear about what he’s doing here. He doesn’t want any coffee; he doesn’t want to sit outside even though it’s a beautiful day; apparently he wants to hang out in my room. He seems anxious, like he’s waiting for something.

He sits on my bed and tells me about his fucked up family. He calls his mother, “the neediest woman in the world.” She is always broke and asking him for money, and she never pays him back.

“Once I had to borrow $10,000 from my dad to give to her,” he tells me. “She is not his favorite person.”

His dad is a pretty famous writer who remarried a much younger Chinese woman and now has two kids with her. I wonder how his father could hate the mother of his first born child, and also see how that could really fuck up said child.

“Me and my dad don’t get along,” says Childhood Crush, but it’s also clear that he really looks up to his father. I know from my mom (still living in the small town where we grew up) that there is also a history of neglect there.

I can’t help but draw the parallels between Childhood Crush and Gaffer Guy. Another wayward Man Child, Gaffer Guy also didn’t respect his mother and had a kind of hero worship/loathing for his rich and powerful father. This I see is a recipe for disaster with young men.

“No wonder you’re so angry,” I say, playing the therapist. I actually enjoy hearing the more personal details of his life. It’s far more interesting to me than the laundry list of his professional achievements. I realize we are both in a transitional phase of our lives, we are both bored and wanting change, and we are meeting one another at this specific moment for that very reason. Perhaps to show us both what we don’t want anymore—letting go of old habits.

He gets up and starts pacing around my room. He eventually sits down in my desk chair. He asks me to close the blinds because the sun is shining in his eyes. It’s very warm and I can feel myself getting sweaty. My face feels hot and I think it must be bright red—it gets redder as I think this. He tells me about the friend he’s staying with, who is at this very moment getting dumped by his girlfriend. He won’t tell me how his friend knew he was going over there to get dumped.

“Man, I told him he should just break up with her first.”

“Maybe you’re not the best judge right now,” I laugh. Considering he’s still reeling from getting dumped himself eight months prior.

“He’s my friend but he’s kind of a pussy.” He tells me about how his friend can’t fix anything around the house.

“Men should be able to fix shit,” he says. I have to agree.

“Just like women should be able to cook something,” he goes on. I laugh.

He says his friend is “stuck on the models.”

“You should know about that,” I say.

“Nah, I’m done with models.”

I have to say his history of dating models makes me feel weird despite myself. He seems generally obsessed with hotness and youth. He talks a lot about “hot girls.”

He opens my bedroom door.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

While he’s in the bathroom, I lie down on my bed. When he comes back, he lies down next to me. It’s almost time for him to leave for his dinner. He stares at my breasts.

“How big are your boobs? D cups?”

I laugh.

“No, C. I actually wore a 36-B most of my life and then I got fitted a couple years ago and the lady told me I was actually a 34-C. It was awesome. I gained a whole cup size that day!”

He continues to stare, unamused by my story.

“Was that uncomfortable?” I think he means being told I was a cup size larger than I had thought my entire life leading up to that point, and I start to respond when he interrupts me.

“No, I mean wearing the wrong bra size.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. They’re pretty similar.” I realize we often have moments like this, lost in translation—on a fundamental level, we don’t understand what the fuck the other is talking about.

“If you want, after your dinner you can come back here and we can have sex in this bed.” I smile at him.

“Fuck later. How about right now?” He chuckles.

He remains next to me and puts his arm under my shoulders. We start to kiss and he takes my breast out of the top of my dress, sucking on my nipple. The exchange feels oddly sexless, as though performed from a sense of duty rather than any real impulse. He awkwardly crawls on top with his arm still under me. It feels like a lazy choice—exerting as little energy as possible.

He gets between my legs.

“It’s pretty sweaty down there,” I warn him, half-jokingly, but actually I’m serious. I can feel the heat and moisture between my legs.

“Oh.” This seems to interest him.

I go to pull my dress over my head and he says, “No leave it on, I like the dress.” He fingers me a little bit and then takes a condom out of his pocket and starts fucking me without taking my underwear off. He buries his face in my neck and pounds into me. I try to slow him down—he keeps pounding. He kisses me, his whole weight pinning me to the bed. He doesn’t look at me. Eventually, without a sound, he comes. And it’s over. He rests his face in my breasts for a moment, and I pat his back. He gets up and takes off the condom, tying it off and dropping it in the trash. He pulls on his jeans and heads for the bathroom. I fish the condom out of the trash and wrap it in a tissue. That familiar feeling of post-coital disappointment washing over me.

“Sorry to bang and dash,” he says when he returns. I walk him downstairs and kiss him goodbye.

“I’ll give you a shout later,” he says and bounds up my steep driveway.

I don’t see him again before he leaves. When he’s back in San Francisco, he texts to ask if I used the rest of my fancy condoms yet. I realize he thinks, probably from things I’ve said, that I’m constantly fucking random guys when the truth of the matter is he probably has a lot more sex than I do. I wonder if this is the reason the sex felt like he was masturbating inside of me and also why he didn’t go down on me at all—because he thinks I’m a slut, and not necessarily in a good way. My response to his text is to send him a picture of my boobs. I can’t explain this except to say it turns me on to do so.

I’m on a hike with my forty-something friend Paula and I tell her about Childhood Crush.

“Did you get your gold back?” She asks.

I just stare at her, a quizzical expression on my face.

She explains: “When you’re young, you admire people and look up to them because you think they’re special. But it’s actually not them. It’s you. You’re projecting all your good stuff onto them because you’re not ready to hold it yet. So, I wonder if you got your gold back from him and realized what you thought was special about him was actually you.”

This idea had never occurred to me before. She explains it's from a book called Inner Gold by Robert Johnson, and offers to lend it to me.

“I wish I had known that for the last 28 years of my life.” She nods.

“And the answer is no—I didn’t get my gold back from him.”

When I was younger I remember my mom warning me about sleeping with guys too fast, not for any punitive reason but because she said, “one tends to fall in love with men when you have sex with them.” At the time I took this to be a very old-fashioned idea, and until recently I’d considered myself immune to this cliché notion of sex-induced female attachment. But I suddenly understand what she means. I think there’s something chemical that happens to a woman when she has sex with a man. Maybe because they literally put their things inside us, inevitably some remnant is left behind. A glue that binds us to them, despite ourselves. It must be biological, because it feels completely out of my control. It makes sense—in nature if a male has sex with a female, it is to impregnate her and her impulse then would be to keep him around to help provide for the baby. Right? This is the only explanation I can find for the fact that after I have sex with a guy, I can’t stop thinking about him. No matter if the sex is good or bad or whether I like him or not. I find that it takes a couple weeks for this to cool off—and often the more I don’t see him, the more obsessed I become. When I see the guy, usually it’s disappointing. By that point I’ve made up so many stories in my head, his real life presence can’t possibly live up to my expectations.

Now that I know there’s perhaps a biological reason for this cycle, I can stop being so hard on myself about it. Or perhaps, practice not having sex right away. This could be the solution to my problem—if I don’t have sex with douche bags, I won’t think about them so much. It’s too late for Childhood Crush, but a good lesson for the future. I’ve had my fair share of bad sex, and as I age, it too gets old. It’s no longer worth the emotional roller coaster it causes. I feel like at this point my expectations are so low that if I met a man who was interesting, attractive, funny, and remotely good at sex, I’d fall in love instantly. Now that’s a scary thought.

Childhood Crush: Part One

I'm sitting at the bar of Night + Market, a popular Thai restaurant on Sunset Blvd, next to a guy I had a crush on in Middle School. He was 25 then. He’s 40 now. My 12-year-old self is doing cartwheels.

Childhood Crush and I grew up in the same tiny hippie beach town in Northern California. Recently when I was home watching the 4^th of July parade with my parents, he cruised past with his crew of local kids on motorbikes. I spotted him instantly, as I always do, and felt that old familiar pang of a 15-year crush. He nodded in recognition, my name on his lips, and continued on in a cloud of exhaust.

In seventh grade I played Demetrius in our school’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (there weren’t enough boys and I was tall). Childhood Crush was friends with our director and filmed us doing the play. I think that’s when we first met and the crush was instant. He was at NYU film school and to me represented the glamorous world of filmmaking I so longed to be a part of. He was also short and wiry and blond and had that kind of white-rapper-ish aesthetic that is still totally my jam. He was a fast talker, a hustler, confident and energetic, and even as a kid I felt he would be successful. And he was. He went on to make several well-received documentaries, one about the modeling industry that I watched when I was considering making my own documentary about actresses in Hollywood and body image. On that project he collaborated with his girlfriend at the time, a gorgeous runway fashion model. I was very impressed with their work and reached out to him for advice about my own doc. That was 2011 and the last time we interacted before I saw him on the 4^th of July.

On the night of the 4^th, as I laid in my childhood bed, I did some lite stalking on Facebook and decided to message him.

“Hey! It was good to see you today. I was hoping we’d get a chance to catch up—I wanted to hear what you’re up to! Hope all is well…” Pretty benign, but I felt a flutter as I hit Send. Not long after, he wrote back. Apparently he was going to be in LA the following weekend helping a friend write a script. We made plans to meet.

“I’ll take you to Soho House,” he said.

“Fancy,” I replied.

So here we are, pre-Soho House, sitting at the bar of Night + Market. When we finally get the waitress’s attention, I order a lychee and vodka cocktail and he gets a Thai iced tea (he’s not drinking because he challenged himself to stop and now he’s seeing how long he can keep it up.) Apparently he likes to challenge himself—he tells me how he enjoys running up the incredibly steep hills of San Francisco, where he currently lives. He orders Pad Thai and I joke that he’s having “the white man’s special.”

“People have said I’m the whitest person they know,” he smiles. “Also the straightest.”

I order fried pigtails and he asks, “Wait, are you seriously ordering that?”

As an icebreaker, I ask him what his perception of me was when I was twelve.

“That in fifteen years you’d be hot,” he jokes. “No, you were bold. You called me and asked if you could be in this silly little student film I was making.”

“I had a crush on you, you know.”

“Really?” He seems completely shocked by this admission and it suddenly occurs to me that I wasn’t on his radar at all. This might sound obvious, considering the significant age gap between us, but when you have such an intense crush on someone as a child, it’s hard to imagine they don’t feel the same way. At least for me it was hard to imagine. I always assumed my crushes were reciprocated. Maybe because one of my mom’s big lessons to me growing up was that all the boys were in love with me and all the mean girls were just jealous.

As we talk, I’m struck by the fact that I don’t know this person at all—I don’t think we’ve ever actually had a real conversation. I had thought he’d be sophisticated and academic, and had even been nervous about coming off as not smart enough. This fear is quickly assuaged.

Childhood Crush lived in New York for eight years and now lives in San Francisco, and yet he is still someone who uses the word “fag” in all seriousness. (He only does this once, which is enough.) He also calls women “chicks”—I bring this to his attention and he seems to not realize he’s doing it. He calls me “dude” a lot and I’m reminded of Gaffer Guy, who used to call me “man.” This is not the only aspect of Childhood Crush that reminds me of Gaffer Guy. He talks a lot about his last girlfriend who dumped him out of nowhere, or at least that’s how he puts it. He qualifies this by saying, “I neglected her, I didn’t pay enough attention.” I can tell by the way his eyes dart around the room that this is probably true.

Mostly what I enjoy about his company is that we come from the same small town so he gets references that no one in my contemporary circle of friends would ever understand, and he knows all the same people from my childhood. He tells me about how he lost his virginity to this beautiful girl I idolized when I was a kid. He explains how she summoned him one day so he stole a rowboat and rowed across the channel from our town to the neighboring beach town, and then pretended he wasn’t a virgin when they had sex for the first time. He was thirteen. She was sixteen. We talk about the other kids we grew up with, about the ones who are married with babies now, the ones who went to prison, the friends of his I also had crushes on.

“Did you ever consummate any of them?” He asks.
"Unfortunately, no."
We talk about what a unique childhood we had because of where we’re from. Boys and girls played outside together, we biked everywhere, we climbed trees, we smoked weed. He expresses that he could see raising kids there. I’m not sure if I could go back.

Inevitably, we start talking about sex and it’s soon revealed that we’re both pretty big sluts. He tells me about how he had a threesome with his last girlfriend and a friend of hers.

“A woman?” I ask.

He scoffs, “That’s the only kind of threesome as far as I’m concerned. Two guys and a girl, I don’t know what that is.” I ask if he’s homophobic and he tells me that he’s not, he doesn’t care what other people do, but the thought of having his penis next to another guy’s absolutely disgusts him.

“Is that coming from you or the culture, though?” He seriously thinks about this.

“No, it’s coming from me,” he says finally.

He tells me that when his girlfriend went out of town, she told him he could fuck her friend. And he did. On Skype, so his girlfriend could watch and give him instructions. He beams.

“Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about monogamy,” I say, “I felt really different about all that stuff the last time I was in a relationship so it’s hard to know how I would be this time. I don’t know if it's for me anymore.”
“Well, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t want any chick I’m with to be fucking other dudes. No guy wants that.”

“So, you’re allowed to fuck around, but she’s not?” I ask.

He shrugs. He asks how long I’ve been single.

“Four years.”

“Why, no one will have you?” He laughs out loud.

Wanting to match his threesome story, I tell him about the Sex Club in Portland. He seems very interested and asks a lot of questions, but I also get the sense it’s making him uncomfortable hearing me talk so frankly about sex. I somehow feel like he doesn’t think it’s cool for women to be as big of sluts as he is. Regardless, I find myself unable to stop telling him things. I don’t know how to justify this except to say that the fact that he’s known me since I was twelve and that he’s from my hometown makes me feel oddly comfortable around him. I tell him about how I cheated on my first boyfriend with a 43 year old man who had a kid. He seems to deduce from this disclosure that I am incapable of being faithful and asks if I “cheated on [my] last boyfriend a bunch.” When I say that no, I never did, he doesn’t appear to believe me. He mentions cheating on a past girlfriend (the top model no less!) but concludes that she was probably cheating on him too.

He makes several joking remarks alluding to the fact that I’m a slut, but when I reveal my insecurity that he’s gotten the wrong idea about me, he says, “Girls are always so worried about that.”

“Yeah because guys are allowed to be as big of sluts as they want but if you’re a woman and you talk openly about sex, you get shamed for it.” He agrees that this double standard is “fucked up.”

He catches on pretty quickly that I’m a big sex-positive feminist, and seems wary of this. He says he grew up surrounded by feminists and it’s not that he doesn’t believe in it, but he doesn’t seem to understand quite what it means.

“You know all it means is equality between men and women, right?” I try to clarify.

“Yeah yeah, I know,” he says, sounding tired.

We leave Night + Market and walk to Soho House, where he is a longtime member. We squeeze through the incredibly loud, schmoozy crowd in the main bar and head into the quieter, plant-filled dining room to sit on one of the couches with views overlooking the whole city. He has a nonalcoholic beer and I’m sipping a Campari and soda slower than I would be if I weren’t drinking alone. At this point in the night, now on my second cocktail, I’m in the mood for some heavy canoodling. Unfortunately, any sense of flirtation we might have established in the restaurant seems to dissolve the moment we step into Soho House. He seems to have pivoted into “workin it” mode and, as his eyes scan the short skirts that surround us, I find it hard to keep his attention. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to come here after all.

Even as we sink side-by-side into the couch, I can’t tell if this is a date or a business meeting. Ostensibly, one of the reasons we got together was to talk about work, and Soho House feels perpetually like the place you go to “make a deal.” But if we were going to talk business, I feel like it should have happened earlier in the night. I mean, we’ve already established that we’re both sluts and I had a crush on him when I was twelve. What more information does one need to get this thing going?

Instead of leaning over to kiss me, he decides it’s time to start telling me about The Biz. He proceeds to monologue at me for a good twenty minutes about film festivals, sponsorships, how to get your movie funded, commercial viability, blah blah blah. I stare into space as he talks, leaning back on the couch, and consider closing my eyes. I play a game of how long I can go without saying a word to see if he’ll notice. He doesn’t. I’m not exactly sure why he’s telling me all this, but he seems to think it’s stuff I need to know—it might very well be useful information but I’m too bored and confused to really listen. While he’s talking, I decide to give up on the idea that my 12-year-old self is going to have any satisfaction tonight, and resolve myself that it’s time to go home. I finish my drink and say, “Shall we get out of here?”

He wants to show me the members-only screening room so we walk along a couple of abandoned corridors and enter a small-ish David Lynch-esque room filled with red velvet arm chairs and chests full of cashmere blankets. We lean back in the chairs facing the screen and talk some more, and I wonder why we haven’t called it a night yet. We both seem to be waiting for something to happen, and for whatever reason neither one of us apparently wants to leave the other’s company. I consider reaching out and taking his hand, just to do something different. But his energy is strangely uninviting. We just sit there, enjoying the quiet of the room, until another couple comes in and we leave.

As we walk back to my car, we pass a Jaguar dealership, and like a little kid, he jumps up on the cement block and bounces excitedly. “Jaguars!”

I laugh,  watching his tight, compact little ass move in his jeans. We get in my car and he asks, “what now?” I just assumed I was taking him back to his friend’s place, considering how he’s been saying he’s tired and he seems quite bored. Again, I’m reminded of Gaffer Guy.

“Wanna go up to Mulholland and look at the view?” He asks.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“I’m tired but life is short,” he says.

I laugh. “You should make a T-shirt.”

“I’m gonna put that on Facebook,” he announces and takes out his phone.

 I find myself irrationally happy that the night will not end here.

We get up to Mulholland and I park at a lookout with a view that’s blocked by bushes. He leans way back in his seat so it’s almost horizontal, and stares at the ceiling of my car. I do the same.

“What are we doing?” I ask, laughing.

He closes his eyes. Eventually I decide to make a move, so I reach over and start stroking his hand. He smiles, keeping his eyes closed. After awhile, I ask if he’s asleep. He wakes up. I wonder why he hasn’t tried to hit on me all night, I wonder what we’re doing up here. I take his hand and put it on my breast. This enlivens him somewhat and he starts stroking me. He gets his fingers under my shirt and pinches my nipple. He tries to undo my bra but can’t from this angle so, in one quick move, he swoops over me, unclips my bra, and lies back down. He fondles my breasts, but when I glance over he still looks like he’s sleeping. Eventually, as though resigning himself to the task, he leans over me and starts sucking on my nipple. He doesn’t try to kiss me and I wonder if he’s got a Pretty Woman thing about kissing. Too intimate for this seedy car encounter with someone he remembers as a child. Finally he does kiss me. And then his hand is down my pants and he’s fingering me. Then his cock comes out and I’m sucking on it.

“Do you want me to come in your mouth or fuck you?” He asks.

“I want you to fuck me.” Duh.

We move into the back seat and try to find a position that works.

“It has to be from behind,” I say and pull down my pants. A condom materializes and I appreciate that he’s taking care of that so I don’t have to worry about it for once. He fucks me for a bit, awkwardly trying to position himself. The windows steam up and it gets very hot and sweaty. He stops suddenly, throwing the car door open.

“I need to take a break,” he busts out of the car with his jeans around his ankles.

“It’s so hot and cramped in there,” he says, pulling up his pants. “I mean, not like I have a cramp, it’s just small.”

“So you didn’t throw your back out then?” I tease him.

We return to the car and I unearth my purse from the wreckage of the back seat to retrieve one of my Skyn condoms. We get into position again, but this time it’s even more challenging and he’s losing steam.

“I’ll just finger bang you for awhile,” he says.

“Let me get on top of you,” I move around, but he’s already out of the car. Too uncomfortable and needing air. This time we don’t continue. We laugh about what a high school moment this was—fucking in the car at make out point. I lament wasting one of my good condoms.

I drive him home and pull up in front of his friend’s house. He still doesn’t get out of the car. We keep talking and then he shows me some YouTube videos of Chris Rock doing standup. He thinks I won’t like some of them because I’m a “wretched feminist” (his words). I give him a head massage as we sit there—he still seems tense. He closes his eyes and enjoys it. I tell him that I’m trying to stop attracting men-children, but I guess I have this maternal instinct that continues to attract them despite myself. I tease him about dating younger women. We both know we have a problem. He says he’s never dated anyone his own age, that that would make him uncomfortable. I tell him it’s probably because he’d have to stop calling them “chicks.” It’s after four a.m. and we’re still sitting there. I wonder why. At some point, he says, “why am I looking at YouTube?” And he leans over to kiss me. It escalates. I suck him off and he comes. He smiles at me as I wipe my mouth, “Well, you’re not twelve anymore.” I tell him I need to go to sleep—he still doesn’t seem to want to leave my car, even after the blowjob. I wonder what more he wants from me tonight. He doesn’t seem to want anything, except to not be alone. I suddenly realize he is painfully lonely, and it makes me feel for him despite his abrasive personality. Underneath it all, he’s so vulnerable, and I’m still drawn to him despite myself. Eventually I say, “you have to get out of my car now.” And he does. We kiss goodnight and I drive home, finally getting to sleep at five in the morning.