You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen

I thought. Aren’t older guys supposed to have taken a few courses in foreplay? He hauled me on top of him, but when I tried to turn around to face him, wrap my legs around his waist, he put his hands on my hips and guided me so Ilay facing the ceiling, confused and disappointed, on top of him as though he were a mattress. My head hung down on one side of his neck, our hips lined up, and my legs fell on either side of his. His hands glanced over me and nudged my fingers down to touch myself. His fingers stroked my breasts, his tongue touched my neck, and he slid a hand down over my wrist to be sure I was still stroking myself, and then he was inside me. It was like being fucked by someone you couldn’t see, only feel, and after a while I was pushing back against him with my hips, my knees raised up and my hand cramping as I moved my fingers as fast as I could, until I came.
    When I turned around and looked at him, and his expression was so blurred, so rapt, that I felt my breath catch all over again, I pushed his legs apart and lay between them, reached around to cup his ass in my hands, and instead of doing any circular, seductive figure-eights like I thought you were supposed to do but which most guys seemed to grow bored with pretty quickly, I pumped up and down on him. The hell with slow gyrations—I was aware that this was a man’s motion rather than a woman’s, which must be why it had a strange edge of playacting and excitement to it.
    After he’d left, I remained in bed, having retrieved the covers from the floor. I would never have admitted this to Liam, or even to Jill, but the encounter made me feel very adult. I didn’t own perfume or pricey lingerie, but right then I felt as if I’d earned the right to both, like getting a license or turning twenty-one.
    Yet at the same time, in the humid cloister of the room with the waning daylight and oniony scent of drying sweat, I had a sudden, insatiable urge for salt and something creamy—melted cheese on something, on anything—the same way I once had in high school after coming home from a long night with someone. I had the sense that I’d moved up a level, like the period just after my friends and I all started sleeping with our boyfriends as a matter of course rather than debate. (In retrospect, we seemed to have done this en masse, as if by silent vote.) Except now I seemed to have gotten some idea of what I was doing. Maybe this was why people had affairs—to reexperience all the novelty once you’d actually learned how to have sex.
    I really did feel as if I got it now, the same heady realization I’d felt when I realized I had done a handspring in gymnastics before I’d even taken time to think it through. It wasn’t as though I was a virgin, but I was never as confident as I had always tried to present myself. As I lay there I thought perhaps I should never see him again, because I didn’t know if I could duplicate it. But I dismissed the notion almost instantly out of greed and excitement, certain that I’d climbed into a new body, a fresh skin, and there was no slipping out of it now.
     
    BY THE TIME LIAM and I clambered out of the dewan and left the restaurant it was almost five thirty. “Shouldn’t you be getting home?” I asked. “And what will you do, eat another full dinner?”
    He linked his arm through mine as we headed up the walk to my front door. The windows were dark; Jill was still at work.
    “I’m at a department meeting,” he said. “I’ve ordered the Californian sub to eat at my desk. Besides, I have the cell phone on in case she calls.”
    “Oh.” I was feeling strange; too much spice, too many protein-rich mashes of chickpeas and eggplant. We were at my front door. “Well,” I said, “no more time to spend on chitchat.” He pushed up against me while I unlocked the door. I had reached to take in the mail, but then he lifted my hair up, leisurely twisting it off my skin, and ran the tip of his tongue up my