CALVIN

The first time I ever tried to have sex I was 19, a sophomore in college, and feeling the kind of sexual peer pressure all virgins feel when they’re suddenly surrounded by people they very much want to have sex with.

I was only friends with nerds, but even still, about half of them were already shacked up with similarly nerdy girls, going to town on each other between board games and marathons of Battlestar Galactica. We didn’t have parties, so I was left with shyly trying to impress girls in my Engineering 101 classes. My natural social awkwardness didn’t dissipate in college—it got stronger, and I spent that sophomore year desperately trying to impress a pretty girl named Kayla. She was a little nerdy, and I think she thought my interests were “cute.” At nineteen, mostly my interests were how to get her to take her top off, so I was fine with that—she just needed to be okay with the fact that I had limited sexual experience

But a lot of enthusiasm.

I’d started to feel the first stirrings of dominance then, had fantasies that involved ball gags and bound ankles, but I attributed it to being generally sexless for so long. Too much pent-up sexual aggression. I figured it would intensify your fantasies.

I didn’t do great with Kayla—at 30, I was better, but at 19 I was so stuck in my head conversation was supremely difficult. Everything I said came out wrong, or weird and I’d spend hours chastising myself. Playing the conversation over in my head, continually analyzing.

Either Kayla had a thing for extreme social anxiety or she finally took pity on me, because one night she came back to my room and I practically threw my roommate through the window. Pure instinct took over and half an hour in we were both panting, fumbling for a condom. Which I found, finally, rolling to my side to put it on.

And then rolling right off the top bunk bed.

I landed hard, hard enough to shatter my collarbone and dislocate my left shoulder.

The only thing I remember was the school emergency services picking me up off the floor, Kayla wrapped in a blanket with a sympathetic look on her face, and a wild and desperate urge to call out Wait! Just let me fuck this girl! The pain was nothing compared to how deeply I felt I needed to be inside her.

And then one of the nurses grabbed my arm the wrong way and I practically passed out, erection eradicated.

Another sexless, romantically-hopeless year passed and the fantasies came back, stronger this time. I found BDSM websites, submission porn. Thought about girls on their knees, pleading. Thought about the weight of a flogger in my hand, the power. Not all the time, but when it happened it’d wash over me stronger than a tidal wave, sudden and fierce.

The first time I actually had sex—Rebecca, pink hair and combat boots, punk-nerdy—I lasted for two minutes and 30 seconds and she never returned my calls. The second, third and fourth times were similar, but the fantasies continued.

When I landed my first semi-girlfriend senior year of college, we fucked enough that my stamina improved. But when I broached the idea of some light bondage, it wasn’t her thing. Same with the next woman. My orgasms were good, but not great, and I was left with an unending feeling of missing.

Claire, who I seriously dated for three years, and technically loved, could not have been bothered. Claire had liked a certain kind of sex—lights off, minimal sounds. When I tried to show her images of what I thought we could do together, she blanched. When I tried to dominate her, encourage her to submit a bit, she seemed to do it just to placate me. Not because it was who she was.

It was different. It was…not good.

I was back in the Big Room after an hour of cleaning up the mess Lucia and I had made last night. And this morning. Shelving books soothed me, rain still lightly falling, Max asleep in the corner of the room. We’d had no customers today because of the rockslide and the unending bad weather, which left me ample time to ruminate on what had happened between Lucia and me.

I needed to go through my grandfather’s journals and find some story for Ray to work with, but I couldn’t stop writing in my own journal once night had settled.

I always thought what I wanted from a woman wasn’t “good” or “right.” That it wasn’t respectful. Rationally, I knew that wasn’t true. Plenty of women enjoyed being dominated sexually, but between my lack of confidence and inability to find a woman to explore it with, I tried my hardest to ignore it. To bury it, put it to rest.

Until Lucia. I can’t put into words yet what last night meant to me, except to say I felt fully myself. Alive. I wasn’t nervous or over-thinking; I was driven by pleasure, carnal need. And it felt so deliciously good and so wonderfully right I want to do it again and again and again.

Her stay here had been extended a few more days, maybe even a week—through a combination of fate and natural disaster. Did I know what was going to happen at the end of that week? Not at all. Probably what would have happened if the rockslide hadn’t obliterated half the highway. She would have left, back to her world as a glamorous supermodel. I would have stayed here another few weeks, sold the store, and moved on, back to San Jose. Back to my world.

I’d have a story, although just thinking about telling anyone about it left me feeling cold. I didn’t want anyone to know about a night that was distinctly ours, especially not people who didn’t understand the person I was beginning to see beneath the Lucia Bell armor. They’d think I’d banged a hot, dumb model.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

The landline rung, startling the moment, and the last person I expected to hear on the phone was Shannon, one of the investors.

“Oh, um, hi there,” I mumbled, taken aback. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. I still have another week to get back to you, right?”

“That’s not why I’m calling,” she said smoothly, “although it’s related. We just saw the news about the huge storm and the rockslide and Peter and I wanted to check on the status of the property.”

“Oh,” I said lamely. “Like…”

“Like is it damaged?” she said, as if speaking to a small child.

“Got it,” I said, eyes glancing back at the wall I’d fucked Lucia against. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the things to hang straight, like we’d permanently fucked the wall crooked. “Not that I can see,” I said. “But I plan to do a full walkthrough after it stops raining. My grandfather built this thing to last,” I said, swallowing hard on the last word.

“Good to hear,” she said. “And to be clear, if there is significant damage, it could seriously affect our offer. So please let us know as soon as you can. We’ll be expecting your call,” she said before hanging up the phone.

I sighed, leaning back against the wall, still cradling the phone in my hand. I hadn’t really thought about selling this place since Lucia had kissed me. I was sucked into her orbit now, and everything else felt secondary. But I needed to think about it, needed to put shit in order so I could leave Big Sur and get on with my fucking life.

Maybe if there’s damage…the thought popped up, unbidden, and I grimaced at the feeling of relief that coursed through my body as I briefly—briefly—entertained that thought. I mean, it’d make things easier, wouldn’t it?

I’m sorry, but the storm damaged the property and I’ll need to live here at least another year to make sure everything is fixed before I can begin to think about selling.

I called Max to the bedroom, grabbing a handful of my grandfather’s slender black journals and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. I needed some gothic literature and for my grandfather’s words to convince me to leave this place.

For good.

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I slept fitfully and in the morning, when I opened my bedroom door, there was an index card propped against it. I bent down to pick it up, the now-familiar sounds of the ocean roaring in the distance, my feet automatically taking me to the kitchen to search for my favorite Walt Whitman coffee mug.

It was Lucia’s handwriting, scrawled in blue ink:

Craving, it said at the top, and then a short stanza:

More than what the body needs

It’s what the body wants

Fundamentally changing

Cell structures/blood flow

Neat arteries growing flawed/messy

Raw with damaging desire

And a new pulse: thready, like a heart

That’s crashing.

The words I wrote last night were feeble compared to this: our night together, compressed into eight short lines. The sound of her hips hitting the wall, the sucking, wet sound of my fingers in her pussy, the grunting, the moaning.

The damaging desire.

And fuck. Lucia had written me a poem.

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