The Form of Lust, #229

When you begin wondering, What is their sleep pattern? What do they lay in bed thinking about? What is the quality, what are the contours of their dream life?—you know you’ve taken a step deeper. You know then how much you want to know. Their private landscape is secret from you, still. The machinations of their existence, not for your eyes, yet.

Then, perhaps, you cannot go back to thinking about them in any other way.

There was a night, hard rain falling, when my living room was full of people, their voices cutting through the scent of coconut chicken and rain-soaked cement. Wine, beer, and the cigarettes taken by the window. Friends brought friends to sit in my small quarters, and one man was there to play music.

So he played. Closed his eyes, played guitar, reminded me of my Olympia days, when I didn’t participate in such things but knew they occurred any given night of the week. But here in Hollywood it was a Saturday and I was steamy from cooking and nursing bottles of Pilsner.

I think every het woman in the room leaned in like flowers toward sun when he sang his sex life to us, shared his lust, lollipop lyrics, lungs, and I know, for myself, I wished for him to notice me, to overlook that my lover was in the room, to notice me leaning in, then out, out when I wanted to appear non-chalant, in when I sought the contact of his eyes.

He is used to that. I figure.

And I wonder how men respond in similar situations. Do they bend like flowers, or do they take root. I did, still do, both.

Libidos bounced around the room. The eyes of the other men present seemed to note the women’s reactions until they themselves seemed simply lost in the sound with a hard rain backdrop.

But what I’m really trying to write about: that lust. When I want to seduce a man in a small room of people with even my lover present. The red flags of bad behavior. The dripping inappropriateness, the stickiness of what is real and what is wished for.

The crux: there is something life-affirming about a strange man undoing my braids, slowly, as he stares me in the eye, knowing our needs are equal.

Comments

[Emily]

Wow, whoever wrote that knows seduction.
Everything Kitchens