All Rondezvous Have to End

But, everyone knows that you never move onto the next one. Your first instinct is to move back to the old one. Last month, I read a New York Magazine article about sex diaries. The editor who compiled all the sex diaries the people of New York posted mentioned “the lover on the back burner,” pointing out that every unattached individual, no matter if they have someone on the front burner that they focus most of their energies on, has someone that they can call, “just in case.” Just in case they don’t have a date on Saturday night. Just in case they need a date for a wedding. Just in case they need a little sumthin’ sumthin’ at two in the morning. Just in case the one on the front burner turns out to disappoint rather than satisfy at any particular moment.

My dude on the back burner, whom I referred to as my “jump off” to friends, proved to be intolerable after a good three months of what can be termed nothing else other than hot sex. Several key factors remained a mystery: name, age, occupation. He was forward, direct, smooth. I guess he was in his late thirties; I never asked because, well, it’s rude, but also because I have a very young mother and I would have creeped myself out before my first orgasm if I knew he was closer in age to her than me. He was short enough so that even I could see the shine on top of his shaved head. I was never a big fan of the purposefully bald until my palm gripped the smooth skin stretched over his skull when he went down on me. The texture of his sweaty scalp on my smooth palm felt slick and slightly morbid, which oddly excited me more than I thought it would. Perhaps it was how well he did everything that made me not care that I technically could not call out his name in bed—-or in the bushes of Central Park where we flipped one night in August. He put so much effort into each stroke of his hands, each kiss of my neck, each thrust of his body. Sweat poured off his well-developed chest, flooded down his sinewy back, slid between his smooth cheeks.

But, sadly, all rendezvous with him had to end. Nothing we did together went wrong. He seemed the perfect hook up until he started texting me. Now, I will fully accept any snobbery associated with being a teacher of English. Punctuation is my friend and if I can’t spell it, then I figure out how to do so properly. Understandably, not everyone has this same drive. My preference, however, is to only surround myself with students who do not have this drive and for me to get paid to help them have that drive. No one paid me to instill the same drive in my hook up, so when it came to a point where I had to say, “Half the time, your texts make no sense,” it also came to the point where I stopped responding to them.