Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
six
Day 5 Julie and I sit in Loki, drinking already. I’m the new but by now familiar Kiri: depressed, wallowing, overtalky—and drunk.
My eyes shift to the left and, suddenly, there he is. Sitting right near us in the almost empty bar, that presumptuous grin plastered on his face: Rahil. The only guy, besides Aaron, who I’d kissed in ten years.
The three of us are mutually stunned—pleasantly so, on my part. He looks better than I remembered him looking, maybe because I’m microscopically less emotionally dead. Maybe because he’s an Adonis compared to the other early afternoon guzzlers sprinkled around the bar, their eyes glued to the basketball game on TV. But this time, less obvious is his annoying, slightly hyperactive personality; more noticeable is his toned build, wavy dark hair, and blue-green bedroom eyes.
Over the previous few days, I’d decided I was going to take a year to play the field and explore my sexuality. I wouldn’t, couldn’t get emotionally involved with anyone. The idea of even going on a date with a man, having the kind of conversation where we exchanged hopes and dreams, made me weak with nausea. But sex with Aaron, when it actually happened, had always been so predictable: touch here, lick there, orgasm. Like playing connect the dots. This could be a good opportunity. You could get down and dirty with a guy you didn’t really know—didn’t really want to know.
Like Aaron, I was going to separate sex from love.
I ask Rahil to a game of pool. He’s good, but I hold my own. I’m hyperaware that the knocking around of pool balls is just killing time until we kiss.
At the end of the second game, I notice Julie’s disappeared. I make my move, pushing Rahil against the pool table. We kiss and rub against each other. He’s hard. I feel my juices flowing—it isn’t anything I’d felt since the early days with Aaron—and nothing I’d felt Friday night, when kissing him had felt akin to kissing a lamppost.
He asks if I want to head to the couches in the back of the bar, where no one is. “It’s not a back alley,” he offers. True.
We get to a couch and make out like two teenagers in a hormone frenzy. He pushes up my shirt. When his hands get to my bra, I’m a bit embarrassed at the padding and small boobs. Aaron had always said he liked, “No more than a handful”—which turned out to be truer than I ever imagined. Maybe hetero guys only wanted big knockers.
“I’ve lost some weight recently,” I say, hoping that will explain the A cup. Rahil doesn’t seem to care—or even hear me.
It’s nice to be with someone who is enthusiastic and passionate. He kisses my neck and holds my face and calls me “beautiful.” All stuff Aaron hadn’t done in a long time, if ever.
“You know what the worst thing about making out is?” I ask. “It makes you want to do more. But I can’t.”
“I understand,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean we have to stop kissing.”
If anything, this guy is totally unflappable. I could imagine seeing him in a month and thinking, “I made out with that guy?” But right now that’s part of the appeal. He’s everything Aaron isn’t, and I realize this is why I chose him. He’s verbose, flighty, flaky, and sexual. Very sexual.
He insists I put his number in my cell phone. He has somewhere to go and that’s fine by me: I’d done enough grappling on a dirty bar couch. He wants to walk me to the subway, but I wave him off. That would be too much like a date.
“So, uh, please don’t be offended if I don’t call you. I’m in such a weird place right now,” I stammer.
“Kiri,” he says, his voice smooth as an island vacation commercial, “call if you want to call. If you don’t want to call, don’t. If you want to kiss, we’ll kiss. If you don’t, we won’t.”
I didn’t think there’d be a shortage of men attracted to an emotional wreck of a woman who just wanted a little physical interaction. In fact, I was fairly certain I’d never again find myself so attractive to the opposite sex. Wearing an “I’m not looking for a relationship” sign would be as magnetic as having double Ds.
I end up staying at work late. Not working late—I hadn’t done any real work since the breakup—but hanging around. I’m in the office of an editor, Paul, draped over his couch, completely exhausted. We chat intermittently about my “situation.” I mention how my sex life had been lacking for such a long time, that, who knows, if Aaron hadn’t confessed, I might have ended up cheating eventually. Then I’d be the one with the guilty conscience.
“I can’t believe he left the Ferrari idling in the garage like that,” Paul observes.
“He turned out to be the Ferrari,” I grouse.
One of the million things I’m pissed about is that while I’d been frustrated to the point of daily masturbation, Aaron had been out there getting his rocks off for real.
“Now you are free to do what you want!” Paul, married for twenty years, says. I think I detect some envy in his proclamation.
I groan and bury myself farther into his couch. I have a permanent cigarette-and-alcohol-induced hangover. Paul asks if, what with feeling so exhausted all the time, I might be pregnant: “Wouldn’t that be ironic?”
“Look,” I say, “he isn’t gay for nothing. If I’m pregnant, let’s alert the Vatican.”
Still, Aaron and I had sex since he’d started his little Craigslist romps. This meant I had to get an AIDS test, despite him swearing he’d never had anal. I didn’t know if one could get AIDS from a blowjob. Was this a question I could call 311 about?
Without any immediate plans—except the depressing unfamiliarity of an apartment without Aaron—I get a little restless and decide to check Aaron’s email. Sure enough, he hasn’t changed the password. Dummy. The inbox is empty; he’d gotten rid of the evidence there.
But there are a few things in the trash. I check it. As soon as I see an email from “John Doe” with the subject line “Thanks” my heart leaps into a galloping frenzy—cold saliva fills my mouth. My entrails feel like they’re about to slide out my ass.
From Aaron: “John: Thanks for last night. Thanks for being there to listen and allowing me to vent and thanks for letting me stay over.”
Stay over! My heart does a sickening flip-flop in my chest.
“As you can imagine, I’m going through a huge upheaval in my life right now but I would definitely like to continue seeing you in ‘real life’ (versus fantasy). We still have a lot of getting to know one another to do but I look forward to that. I know fuck-all about how to go about this kind of thing but I guess it’s just one baby step at a time, right?”
I become freezing cold. My entire body is quivering with fear, with anger, with a betrayal so absolute that I’m almost literally blinded by it. I’d never had an asthma attack before, but I’m breathing so fast I think I could faint.
John Doe replies that he is glad Aaron is comfortable with him and that he looks forward to getting to know him better. He signs it: “Xxxxxooooo
Okay, first off, a grown man making xoxo’s and a smiley face? A grown man signing off with “Peace”? This guy needed to be taken out of the gene pool. Being gay, I guess he had taken himself out of the gene pool. But maybe not. Maybe he had a wife and kids and was fucking around just like Aaron. Didn’t they realize that their little “fantasy” lives destroyed real lives?
This email said these hookups weren’t just anonymous M4M encounters. I didn’t know if Aaron was in love with this man, but he clearly had some kind of friendship or emotional connection with him. The emotional betrayal kicks me in the gut even more than the physical ones.
A tornado of devastation flashes into