Tales from Brooklyn: Short Stories About Love (Actually Sex): Part 9

by T. J. Clarke

“Did you know that Jason was engaged?” Dree is still on my sofa, feet and legs in the air, toes flicking against an invisible target. Her empty wineglass sits on the window ledge, the glass dirty with finger and lip prints.

“Yeah. I remember him mentioning a fiancée, but then I’ve never met her.” I am sitting at my desk, reading e-mails. Nan wrote to ask how the bar prep is going and included a picture of her and Devon, looking happy and content, on their bicycles. She wrote: We will be back this weekend. Come over for dinner on Sunday if you can. She signed the e-mail with “kisses from Stowe.”

I have been so occupied with studying-and Dree-that I haven’t thought much about Nan since she and Devon went away on vacation. I suppose this means I don’t really miss Nan. I can’t spare the time. My life is a shrunken outline of what it once was: review, instead of learning. For weeks I haven’t been past Clinton Street. Sahadi’s is the farthest I ever walk down Atlantic. Spicy hummus and pita are good at any time of day.

“I mean, engagement.” Dree sighed. “That is so big. I mean, I like him, but is that what he is looking for? Marriage?”

The prospect of Dree marrying Jason makes me laugh. They will be so unhappy. “I think you should ask him about it, if you are so concerned.”

“I am not concerned about anything.” Dree turns to face me. “I know I love him.”

“What makes you so sure?” Certainty begs inquiry.

“You’re going to laugh.” Dree sits up. “It’s the way he kisses me. He does this thing where he holds my head with one hand and wraps his other arm around my waist. It makes me feel so safe.”

“Sounds like you are being groped by an octopus. That’s romantic.” I am disappointed and relieved at Dree’s high-school-girl-in-love description. “And the sex?”

“Oh, very funny.” She lies down on the sofa again, this time curling her body in an S-shape, still facing me. “The sex is amazing. He is very big.”

I am too drunk to hide my smirk.

Anyone can kiss and fuck like they are in love. Lips and skin and roaming hands create heat all on their own. Emotion is the additional burden, the imaginary cargo that weighs down the airship. Sex is air; love is dirt. And dirt is messy. Or at least that was what I always felt dealing with cocks. All of it, the sex, the fake courtship rituals, the awkward “are we still dating” break-up conversations, all of it acted out with a barely veiled threat of violence. I felt, always, that if I didn’t go along, give blow-jobs, get on my knees and moan, then something worse than a stone-hard penis in my face would have been the result. But the threat wasn’t just slaps and kicks, it was being made to feel like a freak, an ungrateful thing who doesn’t know just how good she’s having it. Even the shy boys who let me undress them and wanted nothing but to hold me and kiss my lips, even then there was always the final, Thumper send-off and the self-satisfied smile. Those were the moments I knew sex was just sex, not love. Never will be.

“Are you dating anyone?” Dree asks, in a quiet voice that is almost a whisper. Maybe she is thinking about Jason and too wrapped up in dreaming of his kisses to speak intelligibly.

“It’s too early to tell,” I say.

T. J. Clarke is the pen name of a struggling writer. She lives in Brooklyn.