TENDERLY NOW, BEFORE I EXPIRE

We lay on the bed, his pink toes lined up like a pimento garnish beside mine, plump, hairless, and ripe. Neither of us had particularly nice looking toenails, though we both kept them trimmed. Aside from our boots and socks, our clothes were still on. In fact, I was wearing my coat, and his hands were inside thick leather gloves, the kind with the fake sheep-fluff lining.

“I suppose we should get this over with,” I sighed. We had been looking at the ceiling for some time. A black spider crawled out of the corner and then disappeared into an invisible crack. The knuckles of my left hand grazed his gloved hand, and our fingers curled like the arachnid’s legs. “I don’t want you to think I’m not excited. I’m very excited. Terribly so.”

“Of course you are. Me too. Who wouldn’t be? It’s the thing that we as humans get most excited about.”

“Yes, well.”

“Good,” he said. And then neither of us said anything for a while and the silence was like one of those rescue blankets inside a CPR kit, so thick that you could suffocate a person quite by accident. I felt that even my breath was an intrusion. I began to modulate my respiration so that I exhaled when he exhaled, and likewise with breathing in. After a time, I noticed that he was breathing less, and I thought perhaps he was modulating his breath with mine. I wanted to ask if he noticed our synchronicity, but to ask would’ve been to shatter the silence, the silence like an enormous old urn between us.

We were in a hotel, the kind with the same framed piece of burlap on two of the four walls and a view of the bricks of the neighboring building through the gray glass. If I’d wanted to, I could’ve leaned out the window and licked the grime off the edifice.

The silence broke when he coughed. And then I giggled. And then he giggled, still coughing, his coughs mingling with his laughter, and once we’d begun it was like convulsions, our bellies contracting so fast that I worried some about the rapidly diminishing blood supply to my internal organs.

“I didn’t mean for it to be like this,” he said, finally.

“Sex has never been easy for me,” I told him, and it was not a lie.

He asked if there was anything I liked, anything I wanted to request. I told him that there wasn’t much I could think of, that I liked it regular, I supposed, but he had more questions, wanting to know if I was into power play, if I liked biting or being tied up.

“I can’t say I’ve ever tried those things,” I replied, “so I can’t say.”

“Perhaps that’s something we should explore.” His voice got low when he said this and it reminded me of the disconcerting way some old appliances hum right before they stop working, in a puff of black smoke.

I agreed that it might be fun, and that because I hadn’t tried any of the particular activities he had mentioned, I didn’t even know how deep the well of my hypothetical masochism was. I told him, in the mild mannered way of a Christian, that I was an open-minded person and that I’d be willing to explore.

After we determined this, silence fell again upon us, though it was easier this time, his belly rising and falling and the cardboard blanket wrinkled and no longer a cruel desert beneath us.

His fingers inched towards mine until we were holding hands. I pulled his glove off and noticed a pleasing stumble in the steady rhythm of his breath. I wrapped my fingers around his wrist. His palm was not unlike a toad I once held, wet and throbbing with life, able to leap away, but inexplicably staying put. My heart beat in my throat. I began to question whether or not I remembered to pluck the mole on my left shoulder or shave those persistent hairs on the inside of my ankles the last time I showered.

“You don’t punch, do you?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” I said, sounding at once too formal for the bed.

“In the sack,” he paused, “when you’re, you know—”

“Oh,” I said.“I see.”

“Because I had a friend who had a girlfriend who did. Three times in the face. Pow. Pow. Pow. Right at climax.” He said climax with a sort of reluctant vigor that made it impossible for me to tell whether or not he liked this.

“I make faces,” I offered, not wanting him to be either disappointed or frightened. “Faces that will make you ask me if I’m okay.”

“Well everyone does that.”

“Well, so do I. I’m like everyone.” There was a silence and then I asked him if he did anything weird.

“Like what?”

“Like kick? Or sing?”

At this point he rolled over on his side so that he was facing me, and I could feel his breath on my chin. We must’ve been further apart than a foot, but not much further. There was the sensation of all the little hairs on my body standing at attention like a small and useless army.

“Do you want me to?”

I shrugged. “I have a low tolerance for pain.”

“What do you have a tolerance for?”

I heard the ping of water dripping in the bathroom. My throat felt fuzzy and closed up. “Lots of things,” I said.

“But is there something you want me to do? Something specific?”

I couldn’t speak.

“You must have something you do, then. A signature? A flourish? Something so your partners don’t forget you?”

I shook my head again. I couldn’t tell him. It was too shameful.

“You can tell me,” he said, but I couldn’t. My cheeks were hot. I could picture my face, bright red. Imagining it only made me blush more.

“You’re hiding something,” he said, leaning in. “You tiger.” He curled his upper lip and growled softly.

“Oh, it’s not what you think.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “I get up and I run around the room three or four times right afterwards. I get so giddy.”

“Really?”

He sucked air into his cheeks, inflating them like balloons.

So I said, “Sometimes I find myself inspired to commit acts of domesticity right afterwards, like baking a cake or scouring the bathtub. Once I just scooped up the clothes from the floor and sewed them together and bang. Quilt.”

He smiled and touched my elbow with his hand and I bent my leg so our knees brushed, or rather our pant legs brushed at about where our knees were. He took in a deep breath. “I’ve been known to lose control of my faculties,” he blurted out all of a sudden and quickly. “Not always, but sometimes.”

I smiled at him to let him know that I am not the judgmental type, and then, so he’d know that I was perfectly unfazed, I said out loud, “I am not the judgmental type.”

“Number one,” he said, “and sometimes, number two.”

“Shit!” I said, before I could help myself. I put my hand over my mouth, but he laughed and then he looped his leg over mine so that our legs were tangled, but not so tangled that we couldn’t untangle them.

And then I told him that we could use a tarp and just hose him off afterwards and he laughed at that too, though not as much as I would’ve liked. So to make up for it, I told him my secret.

“I bleed from my eyes,” I said, “when I, you know—”

“You bleed from your eyes?” he moved his head back so that his hot breath was no longer on me.

“As a matter of fact,” I said.

“Always?”

“Always, but it doesn’t hurt.”

“Oh,” he said, and I thought it was going to get silent like it did before, and I thought that the night might last forever, and I was beginning to pray that the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling would fall down and murder us, but then he spoke.

“I go deaf,” he said so quietly I had to concentrate to hear him, “for about thirty minutes afterwards. I never know if my hearing will come back. So far it has.”

“Jesus. That’s awful. You must hate doing it.”

He shrugged. “Does it make me a freak if I say yes?”

“I’m not the judgmental type,” I said. And then I told him how sex makes my skin go jaundiced and he told me about his traveling knee cap and it turned out that we both have the problem of vomiting.

“I can’t tell you what a relief this is,” I said to him. “I’m always so nervous. It’s not like in the movies.”

“Nothing is.”

He looked into my eyes and I looked into his and his right eye twitched the way an almost dead mouse on a glue trap might twitch its one free leg, and his pupils were the blue color of Valium pills. I sighed and he sighed and I told him that it might be okay if we didn’t and he said that he felt exactly the same way about that too. Then I told him that I’ve never felt so understood before, and he asked if he could put his glove back on again. I handed it to him. We lay there and I thought the spider might crawl back out of its hole but it didn’t. It was almost midnight. I told him it was getting late and it might be a good idea if we just went to sleep and so we did.

by Ayna Groner