Four Erotic Tales (7 page)

I returned to college a much happier man than I’d left. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about my grandfather’s impending death and had come to some kind of peace with it.

And I thought about Rachel.

Back at school, Cindy was suddenly much more interested in spending time with me, now that I didn’t have that whipped puppy dog air around me. “You’ve changed,” she said.

“Yes, I have,” I replied, and walked away from her for good.

When I picked up my mail that first day back, there was a letter from Rachel. It read,

Thank you for showing this belle a wonderful time in a wonderful old city. All of my orifices are dripping with the thought of you, wishing they had you here in fact, and not just in memory. Here’s something to remember me by.

Love,

Rachel

In the envelope was the string of plastic beads that I had placed around her neck on our first night together.

Dear Allison,

I’m sitting here at my classroom desk in the theater, getting ready to send you this latest tale of my sexual adventures, such as they have been, and I’m finding myself staring up at the stage, thinking of you. Of you, playing Juliet and breaking my heart, even as you made me incredibly hard.

Actresses. What is it about actresses? Well, a lot of things, actually: they’re passionate, emotional, and expressive. Sexy as hell. Beautiful. Like you, in fact – though that was true before you ever took an acting class from me.

For most of my twenties, they were also the women I spent the most time with, since I was working as an actor myself — first as a non-union semi-pro, then as a member of Equity. I actually tried to be anything but an actor, actually – stayed in college an extra year to pick up an MA in English, thinking that I’d apply to PhD programs, become Professor Ken. What a laugh.

In any case, it was the summer between my senior and MA year that I met my next actress — and my only other Juliet.

Love,

Ken

A vision keeps coming back to me: Veronica lying in my bed as the sun rises over my windowsill and onto her naked, love-marked body, lighting her tangled mass of hair on golden fire. I woke up beside her — beside other women — so many times, and yet that is the image that keeps occupying my mind’s eye. Why?

The summer after I turned twenty-one, I played Tybalt in a local semi-professional production of
Romeo and Juliet
and was just recovering from the damage that my two-year relationship with Cindy had done to me. I was dating widely, but not very deeply — at some point during the run, I saw every available woman in the production, except the one I wanted most: Veronica, who played Juliet.

She was six years older than I was — another actress, another older woman — but looked just out of high school. She had a heart-shaped face dusted with freckles, a halo of fine, flaxen hair, a tiny cupid’s-bow mouth, and a body that was soft and cute though she had the mouth and the strength of a dock worker. She inhabited that body fully. It was a pleasure just to watch her walk. To watch her dance. To watch her stretch on the floor of the greenroom.

I couldn’t help wanting to inhabit it with her.

We were performing in an outdoor theater-in-the-round, and I got to watch her during the famous balcony scene every night, because my next entrance came from directly across the way. I’d stand there, looking through curtains at that glowing face and think just how much I wanted to kiss it.

One night, late in the run, Veronica threw an after-show party at her place, which was an hour’s drive away from the theater. I trooped on up with the rest of cast, including the lady I was dating at the time, Rose, who was playing Lady Capulet. (This made for great fun during my death scene: she would smoosh my supposedly dead body against her very lively one during the speech where she was screaming about how Romeo should be executed. My makeup would get smeared all over her bodice and across her cleavage; I had a hard time breathing, let alone keeping from getting a hard-on, knowing I would be sucking and fucking those tits as soon as the show was down – or, once even, right under the bleachers during the interminably slow scene with the Apothecary.)

The young man who had been Veronica’s nearly constant companion during the run of the show, Michael, was there too, as was Jenny, a gay techie who had been pursuing Veronica mercilessly throughout the run (Veronica was very open about her bisexuality, but never showed any interest in poor Jenny). We all sat out in Veronica’s back yard, drinking beer and smoking weed, sharing theater stories and flirting like hell with anything that moved.

At one point we ended up in a very intense conversation about some of the more personal aspects of theater, of being an artist and of having a life too. A bunch of us were talking to begin with, but pretty soon everyone had wandered inside to the kitchen, and it was just Veronica and me. The conversation got more and more passionate, until we suddenly looked up and realized that everyone had gone home, including Veronica’s and my respective sweeties.

It was three or four in the morning and we had a matinee the next day. The prospect of hopping in my car seemed more than a little daunting after all that beer, pot and talk. Veronica started to walk me to the door, but then turned and said, “You know, you could spend the night here, and head back down in the morning.”

My heart thudded in my chest.

It was a generous, innocent invitation — Veronica could load a statement with sexual subtext when she wanted too, but this sounded simply like a friendly gesture. I realized in that moment, however, that if I spent the night at Veronica’s, I was either going to end up in her bed, in which case I was going to feel like shit for sleeping around on Rose — casual as our relationship was, it is something I’ve just never done — or I was going to end up on my own, in which case I was going to feel incredibly sorry for myself. Hesitantly, not believing what was coming out of my mouth, I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She looked at me, her sparkling blue eyes suddenly very serious, and said, “I’ve really enjoyed our conversation tonight. I know the show’s closing next week, but I’d love to get together with you again, okay?” Then she leaned forward and gave me an almost-chaste kiss on the lips.

I rode back home with my heart racing and my nerves jangling.

Before the show closed, however, Veronica found out that she’d been cast in a show out of town, and then I went back for my last year of college. We kept in touch, but it wasn’t until the spring that we saw each other. I was in an Irish play at the same theater company where we had met, and I invited her down to see it. She accepted enthusiastically.

I made the mistake of telling Jenny, who was stage-managing the show. She got very excited about seeing Veronica again.

The night she came, I had a hard time keeping my mind on the performance. The ghost of that friendly kiss kept playing across my lips, and I found myself daydreaming about seeing Veronica, even as I was going through the scenes on stage. Fortunately, the character I was playing was a love-sick idiot, so there was no problem there.

The tradition at that theater was to have the cast go out front after the curtain call to greet the audience — depending on the show, it felt like being on a receiving line either for a wedding, or for a wake. This show was mostly the former; people loved it.

As I talked to an old couple who were saying something very nice but long-winded about my performance, I looked up and saw Jenny, who was laughing very loudly and touching a gorgeous, petite women in a blue dress on the shoulder over and over again.

It was Veronica.

As soon as I saw her, I knew I was in trouble. Veronica’s day job was construction, tiny as she was; her usual garb was baggy jeans and a tight t-shirt, a look she pulled off quite nicely, thank you very much.

That night, however, she was in a blue silk flower-print dress, and her hair was up in a chignon. She looked ready for a Broadway opening, not a random Friday night at a tiny regional theater, and the sight of her kicked the supports out from under the trapdoor in my stomach.

I caught Jenny’s eye, and she paused her flitting and flirting. Veronica followed her glance, and her eyes opened round and wide. Squealing and bouncing in the girlish way that had made her Juliet so delectable, she bounded over, threw her arms around my neck, and pulled me down into a warm hug.

She went on and on about how wonderful I had been in the show — pausing to tell the other cast members that they had been wonderful too. She began quietly to talk to me about where to go next when Jenny strode up, face full of hope and barely veiled desire.

“How’d you like to go out for some drinks?” she asked.

I was about to invite her along — I was trying to keep myself from deciding for Veronica what the rest of the evening was going to look like. But Veronica said breezily, “I can’t stick around tonight.” And as she said it she squeezed my hand.

Disappointed, Jenny touched Veronica on the shoulder one last time, smiled, and wandered off to finish getting the theater ready for the next show.

As she left the lobby, I said to Veronica, “It would have been okay with me if she’d come along for drinks. She’s been excited to see you.”

Veronica looked up at me with that serious expression again and said, “I don’t want to see Jenny. I came here to spend some time with you.”

“Oh.” This time, the sexual subtext in her statement came through loud and clear. “Well, if you’d like, I have some nice homebrew back at my apartment. If you’d like.”

“I like,” she said brightly, and gave my hand another squeeze.

She followed me back in her own car. I was excited and frightened, the taste of that long-ago kiss back in my mouth. Having been trashed a few times when I was younger, I was always very timid about making being too aggressive in those days, so I was trying desperately to decide whether I should make the first move or not.

I needn’t have worried.

When we got back to my apartment, I plopped on some music — Dire Straight’s
Love Over Gold
, I think — pulled out a couple of bottles of my homebrewed ale, and sat with the still-elegant Veronica on my beat-up couch.

“Have you been seeing much of Michael recently?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He moved back up to Seattle. That was pretty relaxed anyway.” She tilted her face, and her blue eyes caught the light. “Still going out with Rose?”

I laughed, and told her that Rose and I had very amicably gone our separate ways not long after
Romeo and Juliet
had closed; I’d told Rose I was going to be heading off to a graduate acting program the following fall, and — after one last night of fucking each other to exhaustion — she had said it was time for us to call it quits. It had been a rebound relationship for both of us, so once the damage had healed a bit, we were happy to move on from each other.

Veronica asked me what I had been rebounding from and I told her the sad tale of my relationship with Cindy the latent lesbian, who had shrunk from my love while accepting my sex, emotional support, and money for two years while she wrestled with her own sexuality. I’d had a few lovers since — Rachel (with whom I’d had a wild weekend in New Orleans), Rose, and a few more — but I was just getting used to the idea of actually being in an intimate relationship again, one that wasn’t just about sex, not that sex wasn’t nice too.

That Cindy had dumped me to be with a woman had been irrelevant. That she had trashed me utterly and then walked away had left me walking around like a shell for a long time.

Veronica’s eyebrows pulled together. “It’s funny, what you said about who she left you for. People always assume because I’m bi that I’m a slut. But it isn’t that I want to sleep with everyone all the time; it’s just that their gender isn’t the thing that decides who I’m attracted to.”

“What does decide?”

She just smiled at me, her eyes suddenly half-lidded and cat-like, and I laughed nervously.

Sipping on homebrew, we launched into a very intense discussion of love, life, and the pursuit of happiness. The deeper the conversation got, the quieter I became. I found myself wanting to drown in her, to lose myself in Veronica’s body, her mind, her heart.

She sat back at one point and fixed me with the look of a scientist trying to identify a new species. “Sometimes,” she said, reaching out and touching her palm to my chest, “I wonder what’s going on in there. I want to rip your chest open and let everything out.”

My breath caught. “Sometimes, I wish you would.”

She smiled, and her hand drifted down and took mine. “Ken, how would you like have a nice summer affair? Just till you go off to grad school?”

I smiled as dashingly as I could, leaned forward, and kissed her.

Her mouth was as sweet as I had remembered, and this time her small tongue snaked into my mouth and set me on fire.

My hands ran up the silk of her dress from her round hips to her champagne-glass breasts, which I cupped lightly. My thumbs circled her hardening nipples and she gave a gratifying soft gasp.

“How’d you like to start right now?” I asked.

She looked at me, flushed with desire. “I… I have to be at a job tomorrow morning….”

I smiled. “I’ve already used that excuse.”

She gave a high chuckle and a smirk, then stood and held her hand out, saying, “Come along, little boy.”

“
Little
?” I too stood, a foot taller than she, and I took her hand. “Where?”

“To get my kitty yarmulke.” My face must have communicated my confusion, because she laughed again. “My diaphragm.”

“I’ve got condoms — “

It astonished me that someone with a face as cute and as sweet as Veronica’s could take on an expression that was so downright nasty. “Ken, if we’re going to fuck anywhere near as much as I want to fuck you right now, I don’t want to spend all of our time swapping spent rubbers.”

With that, she pulled me out off of the door and we walked toward her car, our hands straying all over each other.

It was a warm spring night, and late. Another couple approached out of the gloom, as lost in each other as Veronica and I were. The four of us stopped, blinked, and then laughed in mutual recognition. The guy happily shook his head and gave us a thumbs-up as we continued past each other. I wasn’t the only one who was going to have his brains fucked out that night.