by Jeremy Edwards
(12/03/08)

I fell in love with Annie because she was the first woman who made it comfortable for me to be myself. This sounds banal, but I don't mean simply that she accepted my taste for flavored popcorn without rolling her eyes, or that she embraced my fondness for infomercials. I mean that before Annie, I didn't really know how to be myself.

During high school I'd defined myself, by default, as a guy who liked to crank the stereo. Now, in college, I was dressed up in a new identity: the motivated student. This had been a pragmatic shift. And yet this new identity didn't express the "real me" -- whatever that was -- any more than the previous costume had.

Meanwhile, I'd learned that whenever Rick, my best friend from high school, came to stay with me in my dorm, I was, in effect, confronted with a link to that previous identity. And I was immediately sucked back into it. I became, once again, the enthusiastic -- albeit clueless and largely inexperienced -- party animal. It wasn't the "real me" either, but this role certainly had its appeal in the adult world, where horizons could be broader.

That April, Rick hit town again. As always, my whole landscape turned sideways, transforming itself from a set of boundaries that I observed in my shy, ordinary habits into an unbounded playground that was the World According to Rick. All that was at the center of my map became peripheral, while loci that were out of reach and off my radar loomed as landmarks. Rick was an out-of-towner, but some instinct always allowed him to take possession of the city like he might of a woman, one hand on the nape of her neck and one on the swell of her bottom.

Which is exactly what I saw him do on the dance floor at the club he led me to on the second night of his visit. It was a place I'd heard of, but one I never would have felt hip enough to enter on my own. He'd gravitated to a lithe-limbed neo-flower-child type early on; and by the time they'd been grooving for forty-five minutes, his hands had gone intimate and she was grinding her hips against him. I wouldn't be seeing much of Rick for the rest of the night.

As I said, I never would have come to a throbbing, sexy dance club like this by myself. But I was here now; and with a week-long Rick party still mostly ahead of me, I felt like I could do anything. His spirit enabled things, even when he drifted physically out of the immediate picture.

Maybe, I told myself in a sudden rush of confidence, I could even approach that cute blonde on the dance floor -- the one in the watermelon-pink jeans and the tummy-teasing sleeveless black top. The one who'd looked at me a couple of times and blinked, as though she recognized me -- or wanted to.

This was so much better than those draggy high-school affairs where you had to formally ask someone to dance (or wait to be asked). Here, you just got out on the floor and worked your way toward somebody. If things were right, you'd soon be dancing together.

The only problem, at the moment, was that Pinkjeans was currently taking a breather by the bar. She wasn't really sitting, just leaning a bit, so that the 3-D ellipse of her ass grazed the back of an empty barstool. I watched her pulling her fluffy hair away from her face to kiss the bobbing ice cubes in her gin & tonic.

So I did what I thought Rick would do: I went to the bar. Then, instead of doing the next thing Rick would have done -- speaking to the cute chick -- I did the next thing a guy like me does: I froze.

I stammered an unnecessary drink order to an impatient bartender. Pink smiled at me after the bartender had slammed down my two-dollar club soda and skulked away. "He really wasn't into getting you that club soda," she said sympathetically. Her voice was higher than I'd expected, more sweet than sultry.

"I don't even like club soda," I said peevishly. Then I laughed idiotically and explained: "It was the first thing that came to mind."

"You're a goofball," she pronounced, making it sound like it was half compliment. "Do you like g & t's?"

"Yeah," I said. "I do."

"Here." She brought it to my lips. She must have had fragrance on her wrists, because I smelled a luscious mixture of skin and design. Taking a gulp of her drink was the sexiest thing that had happened to me in a long time.

I got a lot of lime juice in the gulp, and my mouth tingled. I passed the drink back to her, and she took a substantially bigger gulp than I had, seriously depleting the ice-heavy glass. She looked blissfully refreshed -- her cheeks, for some reason, got rosier as she cooled down after her dancing. Her breasts, though they weren't large, were tight against the opaque top. The snap of her jeans flirted with her belly button; I wanted to thrust one hand into her waistband, rub the other over her nipples, and make her come in her panties.

Gin and lime juice reverberated in the back of my throat.

"Now I'm hungry," she said. "Know any place around here to get food?"

I shrugged. "I don't know anything," I replied, without feeling that it was much of an exaggeration.

"That's okay," she said, draining her glass and plunking it onto the bar. "I'm sure we can find something." I noticed the "we."

"What do you want to eat?" I asked as we careened along the sidewalk. I was a bit breathless: Pink walked fast, and though my legs were longer, I struggled to keep up.

"Anything I can slather hot sauce on," she said. Then she stopped in her tracks, because a taco joint had appeared on cue. "Ah -- perfect."

I accompanied her in.

She'd looked chic in the club. But as she eagerly demolished a burrito under absurdly bright eatery fluorescents, her aura was what I'd call "fun." Annie -- Pink's real name -- was built small and slim. Subtly rounded and slightly muscular, she had the face of someone who was generally amused by the world. It was cool to see her put away a burrito at 1 a.m., enthusiastically ravenous like I'd been as a teenage boy. For my part, I steadily depleted the serving of chips that had come with her meal.

"You're drinking my drinks, eating my chips..." she teased. "What do you want from me, Dennis?"

I grinned. "Drinks and chips." She laughed, and I felt good. I wondered if her pussy became slick when I said something funny, in the same way her quips made my cock stiff.

"So, do you want to dance?" I asked after the quick disappearance of the burrito.

She looked around, making her eyes big. "Here?"

I thought I was going to come from her comedy. "Or at the club," I said agreeably.

"Let's talk some more first. It's nice and quiet here."

So I told her about tagging along with Rick. About how I never went out partying except when he was visiting.

"Yeah, I saw you come in with him. Tall guy with the long hair, right?"

"That's Rick," I said with a hint of quasifraternal pride.

"Yep, I noticed him." She furrowed her brow, as if to say she wasn't that impressed. She paused to consume the last remaining chip. I hadn't been enough of a mooch to take that one.

"Listen, Dennis. You're an adult. You don't need an older friend to escort you to a nightclub."

"Actually," I said with a touch of sheepishness, "Rick is six months younger."

"Well, screw it, then." She smiled. "I don't want to hear any more about Rick. I hope he has a nice life, okay?"

It felt a little disloyal, but I smiled back. "Okay."

"Now...I think you wanted to dance with me."

After dancing, Annie invited me to follow her home "to hang out." In the peaceful downtown parking lot, I stood next to my car and watched her as she took time to move a few items from her backseat to her trunk. Why she was doing that at 2 a.m., I didn't know -- excess energy, maybe. But it gave me ample opportunity to admire the tight curve of her little ass as she bent this way and that.

The first thing Annie did when she got me inside her apartment was brush me off. I mean literally brush me off. My retro corduroy jean jacket collected lint like it was intending to resell it on eBay, and this made her frown.

"Hold still." She actually had a lint brush on a narrow hallway table by her door. She brushed me gently; efficiently; critically. Each stroke was a caress, and made me feel that she cared enough about me to want a lint-free version.

She beamed proudly when she was done.

"I guess if I were Rick, I'd know how to ease into a kiss right about now," I said.

"Enough of that. You promised, remember? I did not invite Rick home with us."

"Okay. So does that mean you don't want me to kiss you?"

While her face was busy scoffing at that remark, her hands grazed my collar and grabbed my cheeks. She kissed me with zest, and yet with tenderness. "Come on, goofball. Let's get things underway here."

Like a puppy, I followed her into her bedroom.

"You've brightened my day, you know." It was a funny thing to hear at 3 a.m. on a moonless night.

"You sure I haven't just darkened your doorstep?"

She threw a pink-cased pillow at me. "C'mere, goofball." Was this how I was destined to be addressed for the rest of my life -- or at least the best part of my life? I could get used to it, I decided.

She lunged at me and pulled me onto her bed, complete with the pillow I was now clutching. Before I could get my bearings, she was kissing my cheekbones and chin, giggling.

I rolled on top of her, and did what I'd wanted to do for hours -- namely, drag those watermelon jeans off her butt. Her panties were pink, too, with, believe it or not, little green cartoon watermelons on them.

With a quick, athletic motion, Annie flipped onto her tummy. Her friendly bottom wiggled with a joie-de-vivre that her panties seemed to strain to contain.

I pulled the panties down, exposing the most playful-looking cheeks I could imagine. I began kissing them madly, and Annie giggled anew as she bucked into my face. Then she spun over again, sat up, and peeled herself out of her top. Her small breasts looked like warm dough, sculpted by a chef with especially sensitive instincts.

I scrambled off the bed to undress. Annie stood up on the mattress. She did a bend-and-shuffle to escape from her panties, which she placed, sentimentally, on her pillow. Then she made heavy eye contact with me and slapped the fronts of her thighs: Come and get me.

I tackled her, throwing myself onto her as if I were throwing myself down for a tantrum. And Annie and I soon became our own happy tantrum of libido, locked into a quaking mass of pure fuck. I hadn't even had time to think if she'd like my fingers in her pussy first, or my lips between her legs. Annie was on fire, and everything was happening fast. I gave up on thinking as I fell into the chaos of pleasure that she was creating.

When she came, her cry was more a shout than a scream, an exuberant expression of her lust for life -- and for me. She claimed the moment for her own. And I? I was pleased as punch, squirting blissfully into her, toes curling...but I can't take much credit for any of this. I'd been had, in the best sense of the word.

I felt disloyal, again, in more or less abandoning Rick for the rest of his visit. But I knew he'd understand -- and I also didn't think he'd really miss me. We were pals, but to some extent I was just an excuse for him to come paint my town red, using my dorm as a campsite on the rare nights he didn't have a better offer.

Annie put me at ease more than anyone ever had. And whenever I started to stiffen up -- above the waist, that is -- she told me to relax. "You don't have to impress me," she would say. I began to feel as if there might actually be some convincing, authentic version of me, the "real" me, which she could perceive. And like.

While she was busy at the stove with a noisy stir-fry one evening, I tried to visualize myself alone, away from any outside influence, attempting to hone in on what that essential self looked like...but the image of myself in a vacuum made me want to fall asleep, like stuffed animals presumably do when the kids are all out playing. Did I even have an intrinsic personality? Maybe I was congenitally missing one, like my little sister having only nineteen baby teeth instead of twenty.

That couldn't be right.

Or maybe my "me-ness" was, from my vantage point, a colorless, odorless given, in the context of which everything else happened. Perhaps I was, to myself, a mere baseline, too flat and thin to have any perceptible texture. And yet I might, when seen from another angle, be a unique and interesting picture.

"What are you thinking about?" The stir-fry had settled down. Annie had her back to the stove, and she was gazing at me benignly.

"I'm wondering if I'm missing a personality."

"You mean like you were in the other line, getting seconds on dimples?" She came over and tickled me between the ribs. Then she ran back to turn the burner down, returning once more to sit on my lap. "I can feel your personality, Goofball."

"That's not my personality. That's my cock."

"That, too," she said. "Damn." She kissed me with a loud smack. "I wish I hadn't started dinner."

We compromised -- we ate the stir-fry, but Annie sat on my lap while we did so, her skirt fluttering courteously away from our center of gravity. I could feel her softness directly through her cotton underwear as she pressed onto me. Eventually, I felt wetness too.

While I made a slowly increasing furrow in the crotch of her panties with my rigid, jeans-encased prick, I thought about some of the false starts I'd had with women. Declined date invitations. Evenings out that went nowhere -- nowhere near laughter, let alone sex. A few gropey, forgettable nights of perfunctory coition.

How had Annie made this so easy? I wondered if I had somehow made it easy for her to make it easy.

I squeezed her and set aside her plate so I could feed her hunger with my own hunger. I bounced her till we were so worked up that we raced each other to get the local pussy and cock out in the open.

The aroma of sautéed onions receded as I went down on her in the kitchen chair, my dick wagging out the fly of my jeans. I savored her sweetness and teased where I tasted. I held her legs, wanting to enable her passivity this time, wanting to show that I could take initiative and deliver pleasure -- that she didn't have to do a thing but sit there and weep pussy juice and squirm and moan. I may or may not have a personality, I told myself, but I had a tongue and a loving interest in exploring every twist and turn of her pink flower until she went numb from ecstasy.

Once, there were no mirrors. You saw your lover, and she saw you, and that was enough. You didn't need to see what she was seeing. All you had to see was the love in her eyes.

Right then, I wasn't looking into Annie's eyes; I was looking reverently at her fluffy blonde bush, while my tongue made aerobic love to her salt-tangy clit. But I knew those loving eyes were up there somewhere. Somewhere in the vicinity of the mouth that was screaming my name: "Oh, goofball, fucking yes. I'm fucking coming, goofball, I'm coming..."

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