by Alana Noel Voth
(10/24/07)

Seven weeks after I'd begun fucking him and only thirty minutes after I'd asked him over for dinner with me and my son, my twenty-six year old lover fell off an ATV and broke three vertebrae in his lower back.

He wasn't a big guy -- five-foot-six, maybe one-hundred-fifty pounds wet. Broke Back Boy told me later that his father had watched him cut across a gravel road on the ATV from a window, and let his son lie there half an hour before coming to check him. Does a father let his injured son lie on the ground for a reason? I could think of it only as abandonment. Cruel. Like how my son's father left him before he was born.

Broke Back Boy called from a hospital. "I think I might have broken my back, I don't know when I'll call again, I'm scared, this nurse, she said I might have broken my back, fuck I'm scared."

"What?" I said. "What?" I heard him cry. "Where are you?"

"Hospital."

"Who's with you?"

"Dad. Mom."

"Which hospital?"

"Kaiser."

"Which Kaiser?"

"Sunnyside."

"You want me to come? I'll come right now."

"Hex," he said.

"What?"

"Hex," he said again.

They'd pumped him full of morphine. "Honey, I don't understand you."

To my surprise, I started to cry. He was just a boy I fucked.

"My ex is here," he said.

What I knew about her: They'd been together four years. They'd broken up three months before I'd begun fucking him. I'd asked why only once. "We fought," he'd said. She was a medical student. His age. Enough about her. She was there. I wasn't.

Longest I stayed with a lover was two years, and by the time he left I was glad he'd left. I was always glad when a lover left because you push a man away with indifference, and you do this to keep an upper hand, so you don't have to endure the pain of abandonment.

Eventually every man leaves you lying there injured.

I met Broke Back Boy when I was thirty-nine, after I'd earned a master's degree and ended up in an office job, a job which reminded me daily that I'd thought I'd become a writing professor, lofty and revered, except after graduate school I hadn't been able to get a decent let alone lofty job teaching because I hadn't published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, or The Paris Review. Except I was the sort of person who believed you got what you wanted in life, like Broke Back Boy. I wanted him and wrote accordingly:

Thirty-nine year old single mom and former stripper with a master's degree, now working in office, seeks lover, 21-27, cute, literate, and shy.

This boy would become my first lover in five years, and I picked the one I did because his note was short and sweet, and because he was intimidated by me, which would give me the upper hand.

Do you really exist? I'm mid-twenties, and I'm a lineman or a journeyman or just an electrician. Since you have a master's degree you must be smart, which is intimidating and if you were a stripper you must be sexy, also intimidating. Maybe I'll hear from you. If you want, I'll send a picture next time.

First picture he sent had the hex cut out, and her absence made me feel both enflamed and dismissive. I didn't ask about her in letters. We wrote about music, movies, and sexual fantasies. I wanted to tie him up. He wanted me to tie him up. First time we spoke on the phone I felt my body warm with sexually charged euphoria; I laughed giddy laughter. A river thin as thread divides the difference between the tears that roll from your eyes when you're laughing and the tears you experience crying so hard you vomit. I reeled my new lover in like a silver fish, this thin inappropriate boy, this drama in sneakers. No one has ever suited me less.

One month before he broke his back, my lover had to move out of a place he shared with four guys and subsequently moved into an apartment above his parents' garage. A week later he called on his way to Idaho to say his friend had been killed in a bar fight, and he was on his way to the funeral. He didn't cry. He said it was what he'd expected, this violent death for his friend.

Around all this Broke Back Boy called to ask if he called too much. His insecurity made me feel powerful, conveniently detached, and amused. I thought of him only as inspiration, pleasure. This was what I'd been to men my whole life. Yes, Broke Back Boy was selfish; he was reckless too, and in addition to his passion for injuring himself in accidents, Broke Back Boy had a dangerous job manipulating electrical currents with his bare hands. Just waiting to get burned. By the time I'd met him, he had a green card for medical marijuana and ate pain pills like candy -- all before he broke his back. He was a pot-head-pill-popping-functioning-junkie and smelled just like one: weed and nicotine and sweat and the cologne he wore and a wild windy outdoors and hot wires -- a heady concoction, the kind a woman about to hit middle age could inhale like cocaine.

One night Broke Back Boy arrived at my apartment after I'd put my son to bed, and took a seat in a chair in my living room like he'd been born there. He'd talked into his phone. I'd stood a few feet away sipping wine and studying the lines of his face, amused and detached, but then I'd inhaled him so many times I became intoxicated by his sweet and sour smell and went down on my hands and knees to crawl across the gray carpet before I knelt between his denim-sheathed thighs; I wedged myself between his thighs and then laid the top half of my body across his lap before pressing my face to his chest.

I became delusional, a girl in daddy's lap. Snug. Happy ever after. With one hand, he'd touched my hair, petted me above my ears, and I'd lifted my head to look in his eyes and saw a boy with a funny smirk on his face.

On December 21 a doctor performed surgery on Broke Back Boy to repair his three broken vertebrae. Later, my boy told me the actor Edward Norton had undergone the same surgery. Experimental, the doctor had told him. No one knew what happened when the cement in his back dissolved, if he'd be paralyzed by the time he was forty. Broke Back Boy told me this after we'd fucked, our bodies like two strings of pasta after an appropriate boiling on the mattress in my bedroom, candles burning, candles that smelled like sugar cookie and cinnamon rolls. Like home. Like a kitchen. And you wouldn't have thought he'd broken his back five weeks before unless like me you'd run three fingers of your right hand across a bruise above his right kidney and then touched each of the tiny incisions around three vertebrae in the small of his back. I stroked his face, his left arm, and then the knobs of his spine.

He smiled and said, "You have a calming touch." His battered body enflamed more than a lover in me. I wanted to fix him. Like a mom when my son fell off his skateboard and cried. I could fix him. Except I never asked Broke Back Boy why. Why were you going so fast the day I invited you over to dinner? I didn't want that answer.

New Year's Eve, on the phone, Broke Back Boy asked me, "How many men have you been with?" And I laughed -- my reaction at a moment like that. Because this wasn't a question brought on by desire or even curiosity; I heard an accusation. So I laughed. Anything else could bring on madness. Like when you had to claw the sides of your sanity as a gulf opened between you and a man, like the night I told my son's father I was pregnant, and he sat on one end of a couch arms folded across his chest fastening his eyes to a wall, and I sat on the other end of the couch hands shaking in my lap while I fixed my eyes on him. Waiting until finally I couldn't wait anymore because it felt like waiting for death. Like a clam tossed to the beach and laid bare in my half shell. "Get the fuck out." I hate you. You, you don't see my pain.

My irritation that night with Broke Back Boy, however, was turned soft like white bread in brown gravy by alcohol; in other words, I'd had several glasses of wine by midnight on New Year's Eve.

"I can count the number of girls I've been with on two hands."

"Good for you, I guess."

I was older than him, had a history. Experience. Scars. No regrets. I repeat. Scars.

"Why didn't you ask me to come to the hospital?" That was what lovers did, turned the tables on one another. I lay there out of wine now, dangled across the cushions, one limb hanging over the edge of the couch, my eyes turned to a poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall.

"Because you have other responsibilities," he said, and I heard resentment in his voice, that he resented everything, that I was a mother.

"Yes, I do."

"Besides, the ex was showing up, and I never knew when."

"That's the real reason you didn't ask me."

"I care about her. I don't know what my feelings are for you."

Lovers were good at this, volleying pain back and forth, except you didn't want the hurt to settle in your court. Knock it back, fast.

"Look, it doesn't matter," I said.

"Know how many times I wished it was you instead of her?" His voice had softened, repentant. Very high on dope and pills.

I began to cry, because lovers were good at volleying pain, and I was drunk with it. Fury replaced by wishful thinking. "I miss you."

"I want to see you," he said.

"How?" He was high on pain pills, dope, sleeping pills too.

"I don't know."

Lovers wished for physical proximity to heal all wounds. Yes, sex, so I could consume him like a meal. "I'll come get you," I said.

"Really?"

"Yes."

"I want you to."

"OK."

"You're serious?"

"Yes."

"You'll come get me?"

"Yes." I moved to a standing position and then blinked my eyes at the Christmas lights. How could I wake my son in the other room and then drive after all this wine?

"You're serious, baby?"

"I don't know." I retreated to the couch, confused. "What if you call me tomorrow?"

Silence, like the kind to fall over a jungle when the prey has turned the tables on its hunter, and so the hunter pads away pretending she was never hungry for it. Doesn't care. Fat on denial.

Last time I saw Broke Back Boy, I knew it was the last time. I knew by how he fucked me. He fucked me for over an hour. And the way he did it, the flick of his hips, a particular shove, it all said there, take that, and then there again. At one point my cunt cried "Uncle."

"You want me to stop?" he asked.

"Yeah, uh-huh." I felt madness getting closer. Really, everyone was close.

Broke Back Boy pulled out, cock still hard. Every glorious inch of it. Shining with remnants of me. My longing. My weeping. Wet kiss in the rain.

He put his hands on my knees; my legs wouldn't stop shaking. "Hey, baby, hey -- you OK?"

"No." I fell sideways on the mattress on my bedroom floor then gripped a pillow to my face. Broke Back Boy lay beside me.

"Hey."

I felt the weight of his five-foot-six frame behind me. I turned my face from the pillow to look at him. He was a pale whip of a boy with a down of hair on his ass. His young man's body was old. The hair at the top of his head had already begun to thin. Something caught my eye in the glow from a string of holiday lights and for a moment I mistook a glimpse of his scalp for a halo. His eyebrows slanted in a wicked way. I pressed a finger to one of his sideburns and let that finger ride his cheek peppered by new growth. He had a slim, pale face. I loved it. That face. I saw my future right there in his face.

"Fuck me some more," I said.

He got on me, shoved himself inside and began to thrust. His sweat rained in my bangs and kissed my forehead. My body was coated with Broke Back Boy sweat like one of those potions they sell on TV guaranteed to add luster to your skin. I wanted to languish in it and raked my hands up his back to get sweat under my fingernails. I hugged him just to feel the slide of our skin. The stick. He apologized. "Sorry I'm sweating so much." He stopped fucking me to wipe himself off with his shirt.

I said, "I like it." Fucking sweat on me. He sweat on me some more. And didn't come. So I began to wonder if it was because he was so high on dope and pills he was numb.

"You want to pull out and come in my face?" I asked, testing him.

"Hmm, yeah, would you let me?"

"Yeah."

He pushed a little harder inside me.

"You want to flip me over and fuck me from behind?"

"Yeah."

"You want to fuck me up the ass?"

"Ohh yeah, I do."

"I'll let you."

"You will?"

"Uh-huh, go ahead."

Broke Back Boy was small in stature and wished he were tall and broad enough to overwhelm me, so conscious of his inadequacies he couldn't come. And me, so afraid of one thing, I demanded only one thing from him.

"Fuck me. Don't stop. Fuck me." I felt overwhelmed. "Wait," I said.

Behind every scar is an episode of suffering. In the right light, a soft ethereal glow, no one could see my scars. I looked flawless. But my body, if anyone looked close enough and in enough light, blossomed with scars. Some were the result of cruelty, like the scar on my leg from when the Ferguson boys tossed a lit stick of dynamite at me at the bus stop in eighth grade. "Because your friend's fat, and you're ugly." Others were the result of injury, like the scars from a bike accident in 1982, the one that sent me to the emergency room where my grandmother told a doctor, "Don't you dare shave her head," when he wanted to shave my hair off to clean the gravel from my scalp. I still had gravel in my scalp and scars on my forehead, my elbows, left thigh, my knees.

The rest of my scars, dozens of them, were the result of self-inflicted injuries; I dug at my own skin with my fingernails and then wore long-sleeved shirts to conceal the sores and then scars. Once my sister-in-law noticed my arms in the sunlight and said, "Are you breaking out in hives?" No, scars. I didn't want Broke Back Boy to see them -- my vulnerability, the insecurity; things I didn't trust him with; what I'd wished for and didn't get.

"Wait." I rolled him over so I was on top. I rode him while watching us in a mirror, the sliding glass doors behind us. Alice walked right through the looking glass. I fucked in front of mine, lifted my body so I could see the muscles in my thighs straining, my dark bush, the heavy sway of my breasts, the fall of hair in my face. I looked spotless in my reflection, this soft deceiving light. I looked vast and detached.

Broke Back Boy groaned beneath me. He gripped my hips with his hands. He said, "Damn." He said, "I don't want to come, I don't want this to end." He said, "Your pussy feels so good, baby."

"You feel me?" I said.

"I feel you," he said.

Broke Back Boy lifted his head off the mattress. I hit him hard in the face and he gasped. I gasped too.

He widened his eyes at me. "Baby, fuck, why'd you do that?" He dropped his head backwards. "I'm gonna come."

I heard a sound, high pitched helplessness. Right. He shuddered beneath me. Come. Rabbit between my legs, wings of a hawk. I met my eyes in the mirror. Sort of. It started inside before it ricocheted out, like a jumper right through a window.

Our permanent collection of erotic stories