His body shifts and I wonder if it’s automatic, my mind almost on other things. Abruptly, however, a flash, headlong, hurried, intense as something, suddenly, is very, very right. It is like a switch has flipped. I am concentrated. My body becomes fierce and my words slip away, pushed away by this unforeseen, lovely surprise.
(It doesn’t last, of course. There’s never enough time to get it where it needs to go, but that’s another story.)
I read about sex in novels, in science studies, in stumbled little webzines and in You and Your Body books pressed into my hands by worried boyfriends, (hoping, I suppose, that I shall discover how to fix how I am apparently broken), and never do they describe the immediacy I experience, the severity, how fast it happens, how disengaged I can be before. Always they write about sweet climbing momentum, gentle swells, an upward glide into pleasure leading like foothills to some final poignant apex no one seems to have words for, as if sex were oceanic and mysterious instead of a cliff. Or they write about fucking, fast powerful sex that racks the body with rushing orgasms, rapid spasms of keen, overpowering whatever it is. “Waves of exquisite pleasure overwhelmed her body” it says on page 45, but nowhere in my history can I find a similar sugar crumb trail of slow sticky nights or sensuous afternoons. Instead, if I am very lucky, there is an absolute point of sudden, violent desire. A severe, immediate, precipitous change when things get interesting. It is swift and always unexpected, a quickening that hits quickly, and without it, sex is only exciting for other people, something to smile with, about, yet through.
I check the name of the author. Female, same as the last few times. I wonder again, as always, how it is that I have been doing it wrong.
