It was the coldest winter we’d ever
been through. It was my first in New
York and I wasn’t used to the cold,
but my boyfriend had lived there
forever and even he had a special kind
of trepidation when checking the forecast that was usually reserved for
setting an appointment for a root canal.
The streets were empty, for once, no
one could bear to be on them. People
took taxis they couldn’t afford from
the subway stop to their apartments and abused seamless instead of
venturing out for groceries or a meal at
a restaurant. We made a game out of trying not to
be miserable: stuck in New York over
Christmas, missing family celebrations,
and bored of not being able to leave
the house. We took the money we
weren’t spending on traveling home, or on going out to eat during the Week
Of Extreme Cold and figured we’d
spend a little more on our heating bill
so that we could walk around
comfortably in various states of
undress. My boyfriend knew it drove me crazy to look at his back. Every
woman has a thing, and this was mine
— watching his broad shoulders
moving as he typed at his desk,
unaware that I was watching him
obviously stop, stretch, and scratch every quarter of an hour. For my part nothing felt more luxurious
than prancing around the apartment
and looking out the frosted windows in
a tiny cotton sleep dress. It was
effortlessly comfortable, but so small
that any movement at all drew my boyfriend’s eye because it was riding
up or down and exposing some sort of
flesh that was usually very well
covered up. It was a novelty, to be
holed up together and a stretch of days
with nothing to do except for linger and lounge. We’d been dating for awhile
at that point, so novelty was good,
healthy. The game made it even better. The game began with teasing, when I
told him I wanted to do something with
him we’d never tried before, but I
wanted him to guess what it was
before I did it. This drove him crazy! He
kept saying all these possibilities with varying states of enthusiasm and it
was a raw glimpse into which of them
he really, really was dying to try and
which ones seemed a little more
commonplace to him. There was this
kid-on-Christmas-morning quality to him as the guesses slipped out of his
mouth. Do you want to dress up like a sexy
maid? Do you want ME to dress up like a sexy
maid? (He laughed). Do you want to try a new sex toy? Do you want to film ourselves? Eventually it became more formal. We
each had 10 questions and if you
didn’t figure out exactly what the
other person was asking, they didn’t
do it when the game was over. Does it need to take place on a bed? Does it have to do with my mouth? Does it have to do with *your* mouth? He’d paw at me sometimes, before
we could get to the end, rubbing my
shoulders or caressing my neck. It
made it hard to think straight, to finish
the game, but he’d force it out of me.
At that point it didn’t matter if we started hooking up, he had know the
answer, too. He had to know what I
was wanting him to do to me. They say
the mind is the biggest sex organ in the
body, and if that’s true then it’s
source of energy is curiosity. One night the wind was so loud it filled
the apartment with a low-grade whine.
I was laying on the couch, reading a
book when I saw him out of the corner
of my eye standing over me, wearing
only boxers and a look of hunger. He launched into the middle of a match we
hadn’t started, Does it happen above
or below the belt? It depends on whose belt. I set the
book aside. He laid on top of me, his skin somehow
warm on top of mine. I could feel his
cock come to rest on my bare thigh, his
lips grazing my neck as he asked,
“Does it involve your mouth?” His lips were working now, kissing the
space above my collarbone the way I
liked. I answered, “No.” He slid his hand down my body and
cupped me between my legs before
slipping inside my panties. With one
finger teasing me, making me wonder
if he intended to inside me or just make
me want him to. “Does it involve my mouth?” And it wasn’t what had
come to mind when he started asking
questions but his fingers there and his
mouth on my neck were dulling my
brain in order to enliven my other
senses so I couldn’t stop myself from answering yes. Just like that he had removed my
panties and his head was between my
legs. This wasn’t our everyday sex
life, he didn’t usually go down on me.
But we’d been nearly naked all day
and our heads were fill will all kinds of new ideas about who wanted to do
what and where. He’d been working
or whatever and seen me on the couch
and known that I was available to him,
it was too cold to do anything else,
anyway. He turned his palm on me now, and stretched a finger inside,
pulling it up along the anterior wall as
he kissed me. I shifted my hips down
toward him, eager to give him better
access. He was kissing my thighs and fingering
me and then kissing my clit again, this
time punctuated by his voice, ending
the game. “I guess I don’t care
what it was you thought you wanted. I
can’t read your mind but I can read your body and this is what it needs.” With that, his mouth returned to my
clitoris and I laid back to enjoy the
welling up feeling of pleasure growing
in me. It was the warmest I’d felt in days.
