The summer I turned 23, I'd been waiting for months. I was floating, aimless, waiting for September to come around even as I dreaded it. That summer, I spent a few stolen nights fucking a guy who lived on Capitol Hill. He was nice, even if he was a bit pompous, and his dad had been in a good band in the nineties--I won't lie and say that didn't make him significantly more interesting to me, even if it seemed like the cool had skipped a generation. It was nice-- casually intimate, long hours in bed when his roommate wasn't home, the whole thing made easier by the fact that he was also waiting (in his case, to start a new job). I was waiting to move across the ocean to what I hoped would be a new life, so we were just floating, killing time together.
He lived in a terribly renovated townhome split into cramped apartments. I would show up at 8 pm or so; he would make risotto for dinner, carefully deglazing the pan with the same shitty white wine we were drinking; we'd watch a bit of some French new wave movie and make out on the couch, ending up with clothes strewn around the entire apartment. I'd lay my head on his chest after, ear pressed to where his heart beat, and pretend that the whole endeavor made me feel less alone. I teased him about the stacks of books on economics or political theory in his bedroom, his golf clubs and lacrosse sticks in the corner, all of the markers of his staid preppiness. He'd kissed me on our second date and fucked me on our third, admitting afterwards that he'd thought I wasn't that into him. I reassured him, but he was right: I hadn't been.
That year, last year, I'd gotten into the terrible habit of going with the flow, seeing what would happen if I gave up control on dates or with men; it led to a lot of mediocre sex with people I wasn't really attracted to. But we'd gone to a punk show on the roof of the library downtown (where I felt embarassed standing next to his button down and khakis and saw a girl I'd matched with on Hinge) and then grabbed a drink, and by 10pm I didn't really care anymore, felt myself willing to be buffeted around, willing to see if it would end in sex. At this point I was chasing sex, still a little drunk on how easy it was for me to find. I could tell he was surprised when I accepted his offer to come upstairs for a glass of water. I didn't surprise myself, really; I was floating somewhere outside of my body. I was no longer driving the boat; I would take sex as it came. It was surprisingly good, when it did. Our chemistry seemed to exist exclusively within the bounds of his tiny bedroom, its air conditioner wheezing six inches from our naked bodies.
The best part of it was driving home at 2 or 3 in the morning, having borrowed my parents' car to make the forty minute drive into the city from the suburbs, counting off the landmarks lit up in the dark as I passed them: the Capitol dome, the National Gallery and its giant blue cock on the roof, the Mall, the African American history museum with its lacy filigree, the Washington Monument. Windows down, late summer air rushing in, music loud enough to hurt my ears, Roxy Music or Lorde or whatever might make me cry, feel like something beyond myself. I gave myself over to sensation for the forty minutes it took me to get back to my parents' quiet house, air shivering through the lush midnight greenery of the Clara Barton Parkway. Pure sensation.
We texted a bit as we eased into our new lives in September and October, but it was clear to both of us that it was just sex. I came home for Christmas and he invited me over; we didn't talk until I got home for the summer in July. We got coffee but he had a girlfriend, and then I went on a road trip with my family and by the time I got back in late August he didn't have a girlfriend anymore. He invited me over and so I went. He told me about his ex and how he'd broken up with her and eventually how he'd missed me, missed fucking me. I took it as the compliment he intended it as; I was unable later to explain to my friends that I understood exactly what he meant, that it wasn't crass particularly but an acknowledgement that we were physically, mentally in sync in a way that was hard to explain, even if we weren't romantically inclined. We had similar instincts, maybe. But I wasn't even that attracted to him, really. I was attracted to the way he talked about me, about my body. We both liked sex, we liked having sex with each other, we found ourselves operating under a tacit agreement. I knew that if I posted an Instagram story from DC in December that he would text to see if I was around; I knew that when I came home for the summer if we were both single the option would be there. So when he invited me to go to a museum, let slip that he'd broken up with the girl he was seeing, and then just asked if I wanted to come over--it was a little uncanny. We operated the same way; it was exactly what I would have done in his place, even if it was slightly unethical and very odd to experience from the other side. He was eager over text and played it cool in person; he told me he'd rearrange his long weekend plans to fuck me the whole time on Friday and then invited me over Saturday and Sunday but not Monday. On Friday we drank a bottle of white wine on his deck and he told me he'd forgotten what a good kisser I was. He fucked me so hard I bled, but failed to make me come. I left at 2:30. It was cold, unseasonably so for the end of August, and I had that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that time was passing faster than I could account for. I had a religious experience exchanging smiles with a stranger in the back of another car and saw a fox cross the road quick as lightning. I got home at 3AM, ate a plum cake cold from the fridge standing up in the kitchen.
On Sunday my sister left for college, I spent the afternoon with my childhood best friend, and then I went over to his apartment. We watched Carrie and snickered about De Palma's shots of naked teenagers, his arm around my shoulders. We had more or less satisfying sex, more or less twice, and I left at midnight.
For all that it was convenient, the worst part is that honestly I found him a little boring, too conventional for my taste. The last time he fucked me, the shape of his body above mine reminded me of any man, of every man in the world, Generic Guy, broad shoulders dripping sweat that fell into my eyes. It was probably the last time: whatever relationship we had had clearly run its course. I drove home along the parkway, Lorde so loud I could feel it in my teeth, in the tiny bones of my ears, and I thought about how much had changed in the last year since I'd made this drive a habit. My skin smelled uncomfortably of sex and sweat and his cologne; I rolled the windows down to try to dissipate whatever lingered. I felt ready to abandon sex for its own sake, to run full tilt into a new idea of intimacy. I felt ready for whatever was next.