.
                                                  ::

                                          somewhere (not here)

                                                  ::

Now, Ellie--sex with Ellie was like this: the first time, she
told me she was from another world. The second time, she crushed
my hand in hers and told me she had a terrible fear of
infidelity. It wasn't till the third time that she told me she
couldn't come.

"I just can't," she said. "Stop that. What are you doing?"

"I'm just," I said.

"Well, stop. It's sore. Don't. Just spoon me."

We were in her room, because she had her own bedroom, separate
from her roommate's. Me, I had to share a double with a guy from
Minneapolis who looked like a young Richard Thomas (down to that
fetchingly distracting mole on his cheek), and I never felt
comfortable asking him to go, do me a solid, crash for the night
on the couch in the downstairs lounge, the one that smells
faintly of I think it's mildew, so I can--you know. Not when
Ellie and I could curl up on her narrow twin bed without terribly
inconveniencing her roommate, who always did us the courtesy of
playing her New York Dolls and her Butthole Surfers through
headphones whenever I visited.

Of course, the only way to sleep two people on a narrow twin bed
with any approximation of comfort is to spoon: back to front, the
back of (usually) the smaller pressed to the front of the
larger--which then presents us with the dreaded problem of the
Fourth Arm. She, being the smaller (and foremost) could easily
enough fold her arms against her breasts, even stretch one out
before her to the edge of the bed. Myself (being hindmost, her
buttocks nestled in the bowl of my groin, my nose tickled by her
freshly washed hair)--well. My top arm could curl about her, rest
upon her, careful not to weigh too heavily on the softly fleshy
saddle between hip and ribcage, but my bottom arm, the fourth of
our four arms: where to put it? I couldn't fold it against my
chest, rolling my shoulder forward a little, as my chest was
pressed to her back. No room. I couldn't sleep with it beneath
me--I'm not a contortionist, for God's sake. The best solution
seemed to be to fold it like a broken wing and tuck it under my
pillow, pressing my pillow to my ear as if I were listening to
it. But my fingertips would start to tingle and go numb, and it
felt like blood was pooling in the meat of my biceps and
shoulder, chilling a little from the stillness. Stretching it
without disturbing her was a delicate process at best. Some
nights, carefully, stealthily, I could stretch it up and out
almost to full length beneath our pillows, our sleeping heads.
--This was how I whiled away those muzzy post-coital hours.

"There is another, better world," she muttered. "There has to
be."

"What?" I said.

But she was asleep.

Oh, Ellie! You have hair the color of a freshly fallen autumn
leaf and eyes like the storm that sends it skirling. --Or so I
wrote in the only letter I ever gave her. I had dreamed of that
hair: of lying back in my own narrow bed (I hadn't yet seen hers;
let's imagine the young Richard Thomas is out on an assignation),
Ellie astride my hips, slowly bucking up and down and back and
forth all at once, her arms rising as her breasts stretch and
climb a little up her chest as her belly curls and tautens as her
hands shovel up that hair, that hair, up and back, a Mucha girl,
a shampoo ad, her neck suddenly slender and fragile beneath its
glowering weight. She would coo, and purr, and close her eyes,
oh, my.

Instead: that hair was smeared across her pillow, her chin sunken
a little, wrinkles of flesh along her jawline, her mouth
twitching almost into a grimace with every thrust. "Are you?" I
said, stopping, my weight strutted above her on the heels of my
hands, elbows locked. "Are you okay?" Hoarse with effort.

"Don't stop," she said. Touching the side of my face. So I
didn't.

There are those orgasms you build with brute force, pumping,
pounding, slapping, grunting till you've torn the thing out by
the roots and fall down gasping. And then there are the ones that
sneak up on you: you're stroking along, pleasant enough, and no
real shift in much of anything occurs but nonetheless here it
comes suddenly out of nowhere, and there isn't a power on Earth
could stop your hips now, not until it's had its way with you.
This one was a sneaker, lancing suddenly up from the balls of my
feet through my rigid thighs and pistoning relentlessly into her.
I was so surprised I kept going, reflexively, after it had washed
away, until I dully realized it was more than a little painful. I
fell over. My ears were ringing. "What?" I said.

"Are you okay?" she said, again.

"Um." I swallowed. "Yeah. I just. Let me."

She kissed me, and kissed me, and burrowed her face into the
hollow of my shoulder and kissed me again. "It was like," she
said, her lips against my skin, "you went away. Like you went
someplace else."

"I was," I said, thickly. All I wanted to do--no matter that it
was yet mid-afternoon--was close my eyes just for a moment. Or
two. But she squeezed me and kissed me again and then she said
something about what it was Ben had suggested.

Ben was small and had unearthly long fingers and curly dark hair
cut into what I supposed was really a mullet but somehow never
came off that way. He and Louise had a two-bedroom apartment
off-campus, and he and Ellie would disappear into the spare
bedroom that smelled of incense and was dimly lit by a skein of
Christmas lights. Louise and I would meanwhile sit in the living
room and drink chai or wine and talk seriously about bad fantasy
novels.

What Ben had suggested was--well. "Wouldn't that be," I started
to ask.

"Not really," said Ellie. "Not if it's all at the same time. Not
in the same place or anything." She blushed. "It would mean so
much. He really seems to get it, you know?"

He did, at that. "It's a beautiful image," he'd say, or something
like it, in their living room, after he and Ellie had done
whatever it was they did. Read cards or stars or palms or tea
leaves, gazed into crystal eggs, sniffed incense, rubbed singing
bowls, visualized lights. "All those worlds on a string, like
pearls, hung between two storms, one light, one dark..."

"If I could just," Ellie would say. Frowning. "When I try to
remember--the light is so bright, the colors..."

"It must be hard on you," said Ben once, when we were alone.

"On me?" I said, opening my eyes. He was trying to teach me an
exercise for warding my room against evil influences, uninvited
apparitions, unseen presences: sit, cross-legged, on the floor.
Focus all your attention on the middle of your forehead until it
begins to tingle and grow warm. Visualize that feeling leaking
forth as green light, light that would coat the walls, float to
the ceiling, seep into the floor. I'd gotten the tingle, at
least.

"As a once-born," said Ben. "It must be hard for you to
understand."

"Once-born?" I said.

To his credit, his smile was open and warm. "Born once only," he
said, "and only in this world. It must be hard for you to
understand where she's coming from."

Perhaps. But it wasn't as if I hadn't been trying. Still--another
world?

"It's important," she'd said to me, that first time.

"I can see that," I said. "But--"

"It's something I've known all my life. Ever since I was a little
girl."

"Yes," I said.

"Do you believe?"

"I believe you," I said, after a moment that was arguably too
long. Then: "I believe that you believe."

She sighed.

So one night we went for a walk, the four of us: Ben and Louise
and Ellie and me. Meandering across the main quad, under the
prickly Gothic shadow of Albert Hall, past the Commons, through
the sculpture garden by the art museum. Under a streetlight where
the campus finally petered out, I found myself standing by Louise
as Ellie took Ben's hand in hers.

"Well?" said Ben. And Ben and Ellie walked away towards Ben and
Louise's apartment, while Louise stood under the streetlight, her
hair a golden halo filliping over her dark cloak's lowered hood,
smiling at me. "Shall we?" she said.

I hadn't given this much thought. For one thing, Louise was as
tall as me, and robustly Rubenesque. The joke was (more at his
expense than hers) that she played wife to Ben's Jack Spratt. But
more to the point: swaddled in that dark green cloak as she was,
so big, so tall, I couldn't find a way in: no hand to hold, no
elbow to hook, no shoulder to swallow with my arm. Nothing but
her smile under eyes that slid away from mine much as mine slid
away from hers.

For another thing: I'd somehow thought, vaguely, for some reason,
that Ben and Ellie would go to Ellie's room, leaving their
apartment to Louise and me.

"I, uh, have a roommate," I said. "He might..."

He was. We bought a six-pack of cheap beer in green glass bottles
and drank it on the steps of the library. It was a warm enough
night for November.

"Does he usually," I asked.

"Often enough," she said. "At least this way I know when he's
doing it, and where. And with whom. Plus," she said, grinning at
me, "I don't so much mind, myself."

But our only kiss was sloppy and awkward. I felt bad about
pressing the issue, and she maybe felt bad about not pressing
back, and our eyes started sliding away from each other once
more. We ended up on the couch in the half-lit gloom of the
downstairs lounge, under my coat and her cloak. She was warm and
smelled of something summery.

"He has terrible nightmares," she said, her voice soft and
indistinct.

"Nightmares?" I said.

"Something--it's big, and it's black. With horrible eyes. It's
chasing him. Always." She sighed and settled against me, her head
on my chest, my chin in her hair. "I saw it once, I think."

Now, of course, my cock was stirring, not so much as someone else
might note it, but enough to pull away from my balls a little, to
impinge upon my consciousness as, well, itself, unique, there. I
lifted my inordinately heavy eyelids. "What?" I said. "Saw it?"

But she was asleep.

"You didn't," said Ellie, the next night.

"We didn't," I said, pulling off her jeans.

"But you have to," she said, unshouldering her bra and twisting
it around, "otherwise it isn't fair," deftly unhooking it and
tossing it aside.

"What's fair?" I said, yanking my sweater over my head.

"There has to be a balance," she said, pivoting on one hip,
lifting the covers, folding her knees to her chest so she could
tuck her feet still in those bright green socks under and pull
the covers over and up to her belly. "Otherwise," her hands
diving under, her hips lifting, "it's like I'm cheating on you."
One hand fishing out and dropping to the floor a pair of plain
cotton underwear, baby blue.

"I'm the one to say if this is cheating or not," I said, undoing
my belt.

"And it's not?"

"It's not."

"You're fine with it?"

"I'm fine." I ripped open the condom wrapper, my cock bobbing
with the jerk, full of blood and anticipation. "Did it," I
started to ask as I wrung the condom around its head, clumsily
unrolling it, carefully, but she hadn't heard me. "Still," she
was saying, "You ought to."

"What?" I said, snugging the condom at its base, pinching the
little bubble of air out of the tip.

"Sleep together." She scooted to the other edge of the bed as I
lifted the covers.

"We didn't want to," I said. Climbing up on my knees.

"But Louise is beautiful!" she said, lifting her knees, frowning
as I kicked the covers out of the way.

"And I'm not so bad myself," I said, planting my hands to either
side of her hips. Her teeth nibbling at her lower lip as I
lowered myself for a kiss. "Eh?"

"You should," she said.

"And us?" I said, pulling back. But she grabbed me, her hands
nimble on my rubbered cock.

When I came it felt like a huge gobbet squeezed out of me all at
once, stretching the head of my cock, forcing it open, bloating
the condom in a single sudden burst. It wasn't a sneaker per se,
but the unexpected relief from all that straining effort was so
delicious that I rode it out, eyes closed, jaw set, shivering,
stroking slowly, slowly, nothing at all in mind but the feeling
of being inside her, of Ellie, wrapped around me.

"Nick?" she was saying.

I didn't answer. Stroked into her again, and once more. Eyes wide
under my closed lids. Lips trembling open. It wasn't as if I
couldn't say anything. I just--didn't want to.

"Nick?" Her hand brushing my cheek, my hair. "Nick? Are you okay?
Are you there? Nick?"

I blew out a breath full of half-voiced syllables, nonsense
sounds. Homina, homina, afazza frazzlefass. Let my head droop
suddenly. Held still, above her. Arms trembling. Shivering. Her
hand on my neck then, pulling me down, a weight. I let her,
collapsing onto her, her arms around me, her thigh brushing my
hip as an ankle locked with my knees, squeezing. "Oh, baby. Oh."

I opened my eyes.

"What was it like?" she asked, as I rolled over on my back.
Plucked the soggy condom from my deflating cock like an
afterthought. "What was it like?"

So I told her.

I told her it was as if--as if I'd gone somewhere else. Someplace
grey, empty. Drained. I thought of the time I'd done a nitrous
whippit, at Stu's midterm party, and I told her it was like a
curtain of static had fallen between me and the rest of the
world, all of it. I told her it had happened before, sometimes,
but never--never so much. Never so, so intensely. I told her--

"I think," I said, "I think I'm starting to understand."

"Oh," she said, her head on my shoulder, her arm across my chest,
her leg across my hips, her thigh pressed against the wet smudge
of my cock, her foot still in one of those absurd green socks
nimbly wriggling between my shins. "Oh." Squeezing me, kissing my
throat, my cheek. Falling asleep.

I lay there for a while, not moving.

A week later, she went to see Ben again. Alone, this time. And
again, a couple of days after that. It was helping her, she said.
She was starting maybe to see things more clearly. It wasn't like
she loved him, God no, or like it was something she wanted to
keep doing or anything, but for now, she said, after the third
time, for now it was something important, something she had to
do. I understood, right? And there was Louise. You guys really
ought to. You know?

I'm not sure where Louise spent those nights.

Even so: when we fucked, when I came, I would hover above Ellie,
shivering, eyelids fluttering. Stroking slowly like a suddenly
thoughtful machine. Blowing out that muzzy glossolaly. Trying so
hard to act as if I were really (if only for a moment) somewhere
else.

That was November, and most of December. Winter break came and
went: Dad and Lola were in Portugal or maybe it was Norway;
wherever it was, a plane ticket wasn't forthcoming. The dorms
being closed, I managed to convince Stu his off-campus house
needed sitting. This despite the fact that the town would be
practically deserted, two-thirds of it up and gone for the
holidays. So for two weeks I slept on his ratty futon and ate
Campbell's soup out of the pan over his tiny electric stove and
worked my way through a couple of his bottles of Old Grand-Dad. I
watched too much Matlock and Star Trek and read a half-dozen
books I can't remember and never once saw someone I knew.
Christmas Eve I went to a second-run move at the Apollo;
Christmas morning was just another day to sleep in.

Stu came back shortly after the New Year, a couple of days before
the dorms re-opened, but my routine didn't vary: bad TV, bad
books, bad booze before lunch, only now I was sleeping on the
floor of his quasi-dining room. I remember Stu unapologetically
watching a porn tape in the living room, the lights off, bathed
unmoving in the flickering bluish fleshy light. Me curled up in
the sleeping bag, half-reading Eric Van Lustbader or maybe it was
Diane Duane, oddly--comforted, I guess, by the wet sounds coming
from the TV speakers, the thick voices, oh, oh God, that feels so
good, shit yeah please oh yes.

One of those night before most everybody else came back some of
us--it was at least me and Stu and a guy named Howie and what was
her name, Lisa, we all went to the Inn for a general
welcome-the-fuck-back party. I was drinking White Russians, I
don't know why, maybe because it was cold or I thought it was
sophisticated or something. Anyway: this woman came up to our
table to say hi to Howie. Short, or on the short side, not quite
zaftig but on her way. Hair-colored hair--too light to be brown,
dark enough that calling it blond would be pushing it. Dishwater,
I guess, or ash, if you're feeling charitable. "Kimber," said
Howie, "this is Stu, and Lisa, and Nick."

"Hi," said Kimber.

I couldn't take my eyes off her. All the rest of her aside, it
was her eyes: green, bright green, unearthly green, crinkling at
the edges, lighting up at one of Howie's stupid jokes. At some
point she got up--to go to the bar, take a piss, something--and
somehow bumped the table or my chair as I was setting my glass
back down and before I knew it I was kicking my chair back with a
lap full of cold wet White Russian glop. "Shit," I said, and
"fuck," and I started, absurdly, to giggle. And then her hand was
on my shoulder.

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer lap," she said, and she
squeezed, and off she went.

"God damn," said Stu, smirking.

"What?" I said. "What?"

Now that I think about it, maybe this was just after the dorms
had opened, because I think Ellie and I had our welcome-back sex
later that same night. She never did like Stu, so she wouldn't
have wanted to go to the Inn. --Because what I remember is
looking down at her but thinking of those eyes, those green eyes,
that too-bright, screwballing green.

So: when I came, I held myself rigid above her, eyelids
fluttering, feigning far away. Zaffazza fabblerazz. Mamminna. Oh.
Oh, baby.

And it was two weeks after that, or maybe three, that I showed up
early one morning at her room looking for something, not even
her, a notebook I think, and Ben looked up at me from her pillow,
blinking owlishly.

"Kimber's throwing a party next weekend," said Stu. I was
drinking more of his Old Grand-Dad. Q was flirting with Captain
Picard.

"That's nice," I said.

"She told Howie to tell me to tell you to show up, if you
wanted."

"You should tell Howie I told you to tell her I have a
girlfriend."

Stu snorted.

I went by myself to Kimber's party. It was an off-campus house
full of people I mostly didn't know, and I did what I usually do
at such parties: grab a beer and find a corner and sit and drink
and watch and every now and then get up and get another beer. The
music was loud and self-consciously eclectic: a Bitch Magnet EP,
some Nico, Frank Sinatra in his prime. I came back to my corner
with my fourth or fifth plastic cup to find some guy was bobbing
there, long blond hair and a Viking beard, yammering about
horoscopes over the music into some girl's ear. "When were you
born?" he yelled.

She said, "June fourteenth," and she turned, and grinned, and
there were those goddamn eyes.

"I knew it," he said. "A Gemini. You're so engaged, engaging.
Extroverted. You're so open to new experiences."

"You're so full of shit," she said. "I was born in September.
It's Nick, right?"

"Yes," I said.

"Let's dance, Nick," she said.

Short, shorter than Ellie, but the curves were something to hold
onto. Something other than the beer was bubbling through my blood
as her hand brushed the small of my back, under my shirt. We were
both already drunk enough that it didn't matter we weren't
exactly in step. It was funny. "You know," she said, "what really
sucks?"

"What?" I said.

"I really am a Gemini," she said, and then we kissed. It wasn't
like a first kiss. It was like we'd been kissing all along, and
just punctuated it with a little conversation, come up for air
and then dived right back into it, deep, rolling kisses, the kind
you get lost in. The Digable Planets were skit-scatting along,
and then I think U2, something epic and drippingly romantic, and
I didn't say anything until I felt her hand tugging my belt
through its buckle. "Hey," is what I said.

"What," she said, slipping the end of the belt free.

"I'm not," I said. "I mean. With everybody. All around. I."

"Who," she said. "There's no one left," she said. "We're it," she
said.

I looked around, blinking. Swaying. She was right. We were all
alone.

"No one around for miles," she said, and my belt slithered to the
floor, clank.

It was as I was unbuttoning her jeans that I realized I hadn't
brought a condom. I hadn't thought this through at all, really;
then, I hadn't come to Kimber's party thinking I was actually
going to be unbuttoning her jeans, you know? It was all more than
a little unreal: three sheets to the wind and busy hauling up a
fourth, slipping my hands into the pants of someone I'd said
maybe a dozen words to, total--it was all distant, hard to grasp,
happening to someone else entirely, something I was hearing about
after the fact.

"Hey," she said, bucking against my hand.

I shook my head and said "Nothing," and popped the last button
and yanked off her jeans and underwear and socks pretty much all
in one go. And she didn't say anything at all when I stepped out
of mine, my cock heavy, full, bobbing as I sat down with a thunk
on her living room floor, my fingers oily already, smearing along
her flank, her heavy tit as she crawled without hesitation into
my lap, knees to either side of my hips, and her fingers were as
shockingly cold on my cock as her cunt was scalding. "Oh, God,
damn," she said, breathily, her weight sinking lower and lower
until she'd taken all of me in, her nose brushing mine, and when
we kissed this time it was hesitant, awkward, the first time,
bumping teeth, hissing. But our hips knew what they were doing.

If either of us came I don't remember it. It was all so fluid,
formless, flirting to dancing to kissing to stripping to fucking
with no real boundaries, no discrete steps from there to here.
And somewhere along the line, sleeping: there on the floor in a
litter of plastic beer cups, my head under the old school desk
she used as an end table.

I'm pretty sure we fucked again, early that morning. I remember
seeing a beam of sunlight crawling into her outflung hand on the
dark wood floor.

When I jerked awake to the sound of bells down the street, she
stirred and rolled to one side. She'd half-covered herself with
her flannel shirt, her bare hip ballooning out from under it. My
head ached and my gut was sore and my eyes were bleary and there
was still a bubble of something wet and sticky in a pocket of
foreskin. My cock was dusted with something faintly yellowish in
the weak wintery light, something that flaked lightly off at a
touch. It took me a moment to realize it was hers, like the tang
still on my thick, numbed tongue, the musky hint in my nose, this
delicate scum on my cock, lightly matting my pubic hair. These
ghosts of what we'd done.

I couldn't find my underwear and caught myself reaching out to
her, my hand over her shoulder, absurdly, Honey, have you seen
my--? I nearly burst into laughter. I frowned instead, still
hanging my hand in the air over her. I ought to have awakened
her. Said something. Anything.

But it seemed an imposition.

"Where were you last night?" asked Ellie.

"A party. Where were you?"

"Ben's. Louise was wondering if you ever wanted to hang out with
her again, or what."

"Ellie," I said, and I sighed. "I already did."

"What?" she said. "Did what?"

"Only it wasn't Louise."

"Oh," she said. And then, "Did you enjoy yourself?"

"Yes," I said, a little too quickly. "I mean," and then I
stopped. "Yes. I did."

"Who was it?" she asked. After a moment.

"No one you know," I said.

Oh, we fucked again, Ellie and me. Three or four more times, at
least. But I didn't bother to close my eyes when I came, and she
didn't reach up to touch my face. That last time, lying there in
her bed, spooned against her, my arm began to ache, and slowly,
slowly, I sat up, sliding it carefully out from under her pillow.
She murmured something in her sleep as I slipped out from under
the covers. I found my pants and my shirt and my shoes and got
dressed in the darkness.

When I got back to my own room, the young Richard Thomas was
curled up against his brand new boyfriend, who looked like a
less-creepy Kyle Maclachlan. I stood there looking down at them
for a long, long time.

"What?" said Richard, sleepily.

"Nothing," I said, and I went down to the downstairs lounge and
stretched out on the couch and fell, after a while, to sleep.

                                                  ::
                                                  
                                          somewhere (not here)
                                                 
                                                          --n.
                                                  ::
                                                  
http://www.asstr.org/~nickurfe/
http://www.ruthiesclub.com/
nickurfe@yahoo.com

This story may be freely circulated by anyone, anytime, anywhere.

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