If I spread apart your thighs,
will you save your sated sighs
only for me?
I say a quick good night to Craig on our porch, and by the time I hear his feet ascending the staircase and his apartment door shut, I’m already wearing my hardwood floors smooth with my pacing. Thankfully I’m on the first floor, so he won’t know by the creaking of floorboards that I’m emotionally and physically spiraling. What just happened between us on that street corner? He definitely leaned. Full frontal leaning. Slow-motion nipple brush. There was contact. I felt it zing ing straight to my damp panties and circling wildly through my bloodstream. If that guy on the scooter … if we hadn’t been interrupted … was he about to … was I about to???
I flop on my navy faux-velvet sofa with a loud sigh and slip out of my boots, letting them thud softly against the inexpensive blue-and-white area rug I picked up at Target when I realized the duplex was outfitted in hardwoods. I still haven’t bothered with lights. There’s a full moon shining through the slats of my blinds, painting everything an ethereal blue, pale enough to see my way around. My phone buzzes, and thinking it might be a text from upstairs, I check it, turning the screen light way, way down. But it’s only an email. Instead of closing out, I listlessly scroll through Instagram, not really taking in the images posted by people I wouldn’t recognize if I encountered them on the street.
Another zing of awareness breaks through the inattentive fog. He’s posted. Not on his account, but on his other account. The poetry one. I wish I knew if it was scheduled or if he wrote this after leaving me … I settle against a cushion to read.
And read again. And again.
I probably have every one of his poems imprinted in my memory. What makes his account so popular, and likewise his lyrics, is the uniquely sexy accessibility of his words.
Blah blah blah, now I’m horny and he’s literally just upstairs. What fresh hell. I try to shift mental gears, but all I can come up with is the accidental nipple brush from an hour before. Which makes me even hornier.
My eyes slide shut and my head is full of traitorous thoughts, images conjured within and filling the spaces between his written words. I imagine them precisely chosen to trigger a reaction in me. Which, honestly, is so unfair, and the next time I’m drunk, I might tell him, because, right now, inside the hidden walls of my mind, I see only him, his dark brows drawn together, his newly shaven cheeks flushing, his breath panting between us.
I think of the way his air traded places with mine on that street corner, twining and covering us in things unspoken. In my imagination, we’re not interrupted. Deep inside the secretive hollows in my mind, his long fingers reach for my waist and tug me close. Close enough that our hips meet and sparks fly. And it’s with intention. There’s nothing accidental about it. His blue eyes dip, just long enough to be followed by his hands.
And like that, I lose control.
My imagination takes over, or maybe my memories. Behind my closed eyelids, I watch as he unbuttons my shirt （because of course I’m wearing a button-down—way sexier than a tee）， popping each individual button through its hole and placing a cool, open-mouthed kiss on the feverish skin left bare by the effort. On my couch, in my apartment, only one floor away from him, I clench my knees together, but his words echo inside of me and spur me on … if I spread apart your thighs, and I let them fall open. My skin is aflame in nerve endings and sensation and I quickly unzip my jeans, my fingers ghosting inside my panties to find the exact spot where I’m soaked and aching. I imagine his hands, his mouth, his breath all over me. I imagine him hard and thick inside the cradle of my legs and I press and tease and expertly dip the way I wish he would. My free hand finds my breast and I cup and pluck and roll until I cry out into the silence, shattering against wave after wave after wave of real release.
But when I finally open my eyes, wrung-out and half dreamy … the room is dark and still. My body is left unfurled on my navy couch, the moonlight slanting through the windows and my phone discarded on the floor.
I’m completely alone and he was only words.
* * *
The following morning I wake up in my bed, grumpy and a little dehydrated. For the dehydration, I guzzle a tall glass of tap water before popping a pod of caffeine in the Keurig. For the grumpiness, I text my best friends on my walk to my favorite rock-climbing gym.
LORELAI: How do I make someone want to have sex with me?
MAREN: Is this rhetorical?
SHELBY: No, I bet this is Craig Boseman.
LORELAI: I’m positive he almost kissed me on a street corner last night. There was definitely leaning. Maybe even nipple brushing.
SHELBY: eyeballs emoji
MAREN: NOT NIPPLE BRUSHING!
LORELAI: Ha-ha, laugh it up, Beauty Queen.
SHELBY: So lean … more. Seal the deal, Jones.
MAREN: He wrote another poem last night.
LORELAI: OH I KNOW
MAREN: smirk I’ll just bet you do.
SHELBY: Does he know you know he writes those? （whew that’s convoluted） LORELAI: NO. And I don’t know if I can tell him.
LORELAI: It might make him feel weird that I know.
MAREN: Weirder than you knowing makes YOU feel?
LORELAI: Doesn’t make me feel weird. Unless weird is a euphemism for “excessively turned on.”
SHELBY: I’m with Mare. He posts on Instagram. It’s not like he’s writing it in a locked diary or something.
SHELBY: Are you sure you’re not reading into things because you’re actually looking for a repeat of history?
SHELBY: Because it sounds like you might be.
MAREN: No judgment, obviously.
SHELBY: Absolutely not.
LORELAI: Ugh.
LORELAI: See, it worked last time because it scratched multiple itches （ie: Fuck off Drake and also that whole “wonder what it’d be like to have sex with Huck?” thing） LORELAI: with the benefit of getting on a plane the next morning and never having to face him again …
MAREN: No strings attached.
LORELAI: Exactly. The cleanest of breaks.
SHELBY: But now you work together and see each other all the time and also you’re very single, so rebound sex isn’t a thing.
LORELAI: Right. So this would be a fuckbuddies sitch and I saw that movie.
LORELAI: Twice.
LORELAI: It’s super messy. And I don’t want things between Huck and me to ever be messy.
SHELBY: Well, you could, you know, date him. Like for real.
MAREN: Ope!
LORELAI: hyperventilates Not happening.
MAREN: The way I see it, you have two options: Find another fuck buddy to call after Craig’s poetry gets you all hot and bothered or invest in more batteries for your vibrator.
LORELAI: Are those my only choices? Surely we’re forgetting something.
SHELBY: Yeah, you’re forgetting that you could just DATE HIM. You get the orgasms, you get the friend, you get the feelings. It’s win, win, win.
LORELAI: I also get the insecurity, the jealousy, the battling careers, the abandonment issues, the commitment phobia …
LORELAI: Y’all, I can’t go there.
MAREN: RIP your nipples, I guess.
SHELBY: sigh “Hey, Alexa, add ‘send rechargeable batteries to Lorelai’ to my to-do list.”
* * *
Full disclosure: I’m not a stranger to sexting. Back in Michigan, before my last album and before returning to Nashville and before … whatever this is, Drake used to sext me on occasion. And if those occasions lined up with a night I was feeling especially horny or lonely or maybe just empowered because I knew if he was texting me, he wasn’t hooking up with someone else … well, I’d respond. I knew damn well nothing was ever going to come of it. It’s true I thought I really loved him once upon a time, but it turns out I was young and influenced and I don’t know. What I thought was love just faded? Turns out, being left at the metaphorical altar really just squeezed out all the love I had inside of me.