Apartment Stories – Chap 5 – by ktmccoll
“Stop with the fucking labels already. Hearing you describe your sexuality is like standing behind some obnoxious twat in Starbucks ordering something that most definitely isn’t coffee.”
“But I want you to understand, Alice. If you cared, you’d want to understand.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but the conversation was to be the death knell of my longest and most serious relationship. Otherwise, I might have tempered my words. Maybe.
“No, I don’t want to.” I said. “I’ve had it with the navel gazing. I’ve had it with the labels that sound like an impossible recipe. Just be, for fuck’s sake.”
I was never the touchy-feely type, obviously. He knew that going in, back when he still used a pronoun that worked grammatically.
At any rate, following my outburst of intolerance, he said he needed to escape the tyranny of the cis (presumably me) to explore what it meant to be him (presumably non-cis). And honestly, that was fine. The relationship had become exercise, like a brain teaser designed to prevent one’s grey matter from atrophying. Or like Twister, where touching any area outside the well-defined dots represented some horrible personal affront. Pronoun preferences strewn about like mines in no-man’s land (if it could still be called such). Sexuality occupying a spot on some ineffable spectrum, the “this” and not “that” that had to be honored somehow.
I wasn’t equipped to deal with this. Or that. I had a degree to finish. I wanted my sex uncomplicated.
I didn’t have time to play pin the label on the jackass.
And that was how I found myself alone. They (because they did not use singular pronouns for themselves anymore) decided to be elsewhere.
And so they took their penis away from me. That was bad — the loss of the penis. I’d grown fond of it. The rest of it, the large endlessly talking bit that the penis was attached to, was less of a loss. Of course, the loss of their half of the rent was bad too, particularly as it necessitated roommates to make up the shortfall. The best I could do was a mediocre mature student and an off-putting yet sexy goth pinup who exuded wantonness like a filthy aura.
I didn’t believe in reincarnation, but sometimes it felt as though an eighty-something year old curmudgeon had been inserted in my twenty-something year old body while I slept. At my age, I should have been all over the issues my cohorts were so earnestly exercised about. Like pronouns. Like micro-aggressions. But I wasn’t. Sure, I demonstrated for the big things like environmental issues, reproductive rights, and obscene income gaps between the rich and the poor, but I just couldn’t get excited about everyone’s individual struggle with whatever. There just wasn’t the time.
I was raised to treat private things were private. If you dabbled or were confused or got your freak on with someone as bewildered and indefinable as you, you didn’t have to prattle on about it. Or worse, blog. You did what people did in previous, less enlightened generations — you filed the experience away and brought it out when you were old and decrepit and needed to prove to yourself that you were once alive and capable of delicious recklessness.
At any rate, the missing penis. I liked sex. The problem was that I didn’t much like people and there were obvious limitations to having sex by and with myself. For one, I knew myself too well for me to get turned on by my own company. And I knew all of my moves like the back of my hand.
And so I was at loose ends. For a change, I was alone in the apartment. Having just turned in a term paper that morning after pulling an all-nighter, I was grateful that Helin and Matthew were out so that I could decompress in peace. I didn’t mind my roommates, though it irked me that I needed them at all.
Decompression took the form of a middling Chardonnay even though it was before noon and the guilty pleasure of a romance novel enjoyed on the balcony. Maybe later I would masturbate. Then I would nap.
I settled on a chair and moved it to the sliver of sunshine that would traverse the balcony over the course of the afternoon. I closed my eyes and raised my face to it, hoping that it would do something for my pallor.
The breeze shifted and brought with it an aroma that I knew from my occasional attempts to misspend my youth so that I’d have stories to tell.
Weed. Newly legal, the politicians having determined that they could derive tax revenue from the reefer madness that was such an existential peril before.
It was now a legal smell. Evocative of past misdemeanor naughtiness.
It wasn’t particularly annoying but it was an invasion of my personal space, like a passenger farting in my car.
A muffled cough from next door. The weed cough. I knew the culprit.
For reasons I didn’t consider too deeply, I set my book and my middling wine aside and wandered next door to unit 3F. I knocked tentatively on the door.
Bryan was Chinese Jamaican. When I first heard that accent coming out of him several months ago, I’d done a double-take. It was like Bruce Lee possessed by Bob Marley.
I hadn’t exactly fantasized about him, but I had daydreamed because that’s where my head went when confronted with something unusual and exotic. And fit and sexy.
He opened the door and the aroma of weed emanated from him like an aura.
“Alice!” He seemed genuinely happy to see me. I wanted him to talk more, to bathe me in that accent.
“I was just outside and noticed that something on your balcony reeks.”
“My balcony?”
“I assume so. I checked the direction of the breeze and it could only have come from your side.”
He grinned. “What did it smell like?”
“Skunk. In fact, I thought it was until I remembered that we’re three storeys up and skunks are definitely earthbound.”
“Must be the weed then.”
“You think? I never understood what would possess someone to smoke something that smells like the air behind a skunk’s ass.” Why was I being so churlish?
“Some eat ripe Limburger. You just never know about people.”
He had me there.
“Not that I’m a prude or anything…”
“Heaven forbid.”
“…But I haven’t smoked in years.”
“Ah, so you’re not an innocent.”
“Hardly.”
“Have you ever made love stoned?”
The guy must be totally baked, asking a question like that to a near stranger standing in the hallway. TMI. Too much indica. Still, I answered, “Ugh. No. I like to have my wits about me.”
“Don’t knock it till you try it.”
Was that an invitation? “So what makes it so special?”
“What?”
He was going to make me say it. I crossed my arms beneath my chest and gave him my iciest stare. “Stoned sex.”
“It’s languid.”
“Languid lovemaking.”
He closed his eyes and inhaled, like a sommelier experiencing something rare and sublime. “It’s the best.”
“Maybe later,” I said, because lovemaking, languid or not, was something one had to consider. Particularly with a stoner stranger, if that was indeed what he was suggesting.
“Want to come in? Maybe partake?”
Or maybe you didn’t need to consider. The way he said it in that accent. Partake. Weed or languid sex? Or weed and languid sex? Either alternative or both seemed okay in that moment.
He sparked a blunt and I watched as his face emerged from the smoke. He passed it over and I took a tentative hit, proud of myself that I didn’t cough and gag like a noob.
I passed it back and it occurred to me that we were sharing trace amounts of saliva in addition to the weed. That was something intimate, surely.
Another back and forth. The room was foggy so he opened the patio door and I watched wraiths of smoke blow off to the right, to my balcony.
We didn’t do that hold-your-breath business that we used to do in high school to maximize the benefit at the lowest possible cost. When the joint got down to the nub, Bryan tossed it into the ashtray. No roach clip or burning your lips. I felt sophisticated. In the hands of a master.
We chatted about this and that and eventually I wondered if I seemed as stoned to him as I felt. Everything was gauzy. My attention wavered. He said that he was a programmer and was taking the day off after a release. I pretended to be interested. I told him I was a grad student and he pretended to be interested too. Or maybe he really was; I couldn’t tell.
All I know is that one moment we were talking about nothing in particular and the next moment, he was behind my chair and had his hands on my shoulders. A small pang of concern met his touch and was then rubbed away beneath his fingers.
“You’re tense,” he said as he massaged muscles that I didn’t know needed the attention.
Bliss. I was pleasantly buzzed and relaxed. If he thought I was tense, who was I to argue? Maybe he was a renaissance man — programmer, weed sommelier, genius masseur. The latter for sure. His hands felt wonderful. He pressed spots that shot tingles down to my toes. My ex would never had done anything like this unbidden. He would have asked permission because spontaneity was rife with imagined danger, personal space being sacrosanct even though we’d invaded each other’s countless times before without incident.
Brian’s thumbs kneaded knots. Fingers awakened skin. My head lolled. A spark of possibility smoldered and caught. There was fuel enough for the fire to grow larger. Months of abstinence but for one episode a week before that I wanted to forget. Mostly all work and no play. I’d become a dull woman.
“My breasts are tense too,” I said after a few minutes. The words were out of my mouth before my brain could parse the consequences. The weed seemed to have numbed my mind while awakening my body.
A pause. Then his hands descended, squeezing and weighing. “I can feel it.”
More bliss.
“Let me help, if I may,” he said.
I said nothing as he pulled my t-shirt up over my head.
And I helped with my bra because I didn’t want him fumbling endlessly with the clasp.
His upper body leaned against mine, imparting his warmth to my back. Fingers teased my nipples to attention, enough to etch glass it seemed. As disembodied as I felt, he still managed to evoke a low, distant humming in my core. Anticipation, I figured. Nature’s programming.