I’m not always the brightest sandwich in the toolbox, but there’s something I’ve come to understand over the years — something that has intensified in the month or so that I’ve been writing these stories. (Has it been that long? Seems like yesterday and forever ago.)
The lesson is that there can be — and should be — value in every encounter, no matter how fleeting. Whatever came before, or after, for a moment two people came together and met a primal human need. That’s worth recognizing and remembering, even honoring.
In Japanese aesthetics, there’s a phrase — “wabi-sabi” that loosely translates to celebrating the beauty of the imperfect, incomplete and transient. It’s not that something is beautiful even though it is imperfect and doesn’t last — it’s beautiful because of those things, because life itself is imperfect and impermanent. I oversimplify from an outsider’s understanding, but I think I grasp the gist of it.
Early March, 2006: Warm for late winter, conditions which will come into play later in the tale. It was 1 a.m., everyone else in the house was asleep and I was just home from work and wide awake. So I hopped on Yahoo chat, figuring that I might at least find some stimulating conversation.
I don’t remember who messaged first, or what was said to break the ice. But the basics were that she was 19 (24 years younger than I) and taking a year off from school, that she lived with her parents maybe 15 minutes away and that she couldn’t sleep either. We talked about the books she was reading, the writing she was doing, and the conversation turned to hobbies.
That’s when she dropped the bombshell: “My favorite hobby is sex.”
Well, hello. I hadn’t seen that coming, but I managed the usual wisecrack along the lines of “Well, if you need to add to your collection …”
“Sure,” she said. “What are you doing tomorrow morning?”
I hadn’t expected that, but I wasn’t going to say no — not with the next day free until late afternoon. So we made plans to meet at a coffeehouse at ten in the morning and go to her parents’ place. By then it was almost 2:30, and I was about to turn in when she messaged:
“Actually, what are you doing right now? I can come pick you up and we can go park someplace if you want.”
It sounded like my kind of crazy: Impulsive, risky, an opportunity that might not come around again. How could I resist?
We agreed on 3 a.m. in a nearby church parking lot, and exchanged numbers so she could call when she was there, if I hadn’t arrived yet. I slipped out a few minutes before 3, and was rounding the corner when my phone rang. It was her: “I’m here.”
She was in a small SUV; I noticed when I got in that the back seat was already folded down flat. She was just like the photos she’d sent: Dark, short, curly hair, fair skin, curves just shy of what you’d call chubby. She was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. I kissed her hello — her lips soft and warm, her tongue bold and languid — and she gave me a wicked half-smile.
“It really turns you on that I’m only 19, doesn’t it?”
“That did occur to me.”
She laughed and said, “I know a place.”
On the way, she told me about some of her exploits, noting that I wouldn’t be her first married man by a long shot or the oldest man she’d ever been with by a good 20 years. “I just like fucking,” she said with a shrug and that half-smile once more.
It turned out that the place she knew was behind the local high school — back by the auto shop, where the cars the students worked on were parked. By the practiced way she pulled in and killed the lights, it was evident that wasn’t her first time there.
She turned on the stereo, popped in Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” I kissed her again, and this time her answering kiss was hard, insistent. I kissed her neck, slid my hand up under her shirt. She wore no bra; her breast was soft, round, heavy in my hand. She broke the kiss, looked me in the eyes, kissed me again soft and quick.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get in the back.”
We climbed over the console, between the seats, and she lay down on her back. We kissed some more, and I lifted her shirt and bent my mouth to one breast, then the other. Her nipples were pale, almost indiscernible in the dark. Each one stiffened under my tongue, and her hips began to move as her breathing quickened.
I unbuttoned her jeans, unzipped them, slid them down and off. She wasn’t wearing any panties, either.
She opened her thighs, and I got on my hands and knees between them. She was warm, slick, sweet on my tongue. I buried my nose in her soft dusting of hair and took her clit gently into my mouth, sliding in a finger as I did so.
I’ve heard all sorts of things come out of a woman’s mouth. Not before or since have I heard the word “fuck” whispered so fast or so many times as when I was going down on her. She bucked her hips and put both hands on the back of my head, never stopping that frantic chant of insistent and compelling obscenity. Then “fuck” became “faster,” and before long I was pistoning two fingers in and out of her with my lips locked on her clit and my tongue lashing it. She arched her back — hard — and let out a long, thin whine ending in one more “fuck,” this one drawn-out almost screamed.
She pulled away from my mouth — or, rather, pulled away and pushed my head away at the same time.
“I want you in me. I want you in me. I want you in me.”
The repetition again, a litany of want this time. I didn’t need so much as a touch from her to be hard and aching when I undid my pants and slid them and my boxers down to my knees.
“I want you in me. I want you in me.”
I moved into her, and she wrapped both legs around me and started bucking her hips again. I was on top, but she was taking me as much as I was taking her. But before long, my hips found her rhythm, and I was matching her stroke for stroke. I knew in the back of my mind that a police car could show up at any time. I didn’t care. I was beyond caring. This was animalistic.
It’s a good thing I was a bit fatigued from being up so late, because it takes me longer to get over the top when I’m tired. Even so, I could feel things building inside me after just three or four minutes. Apparently she could too, because she suddenly raised her legs all the way up so I could get deeper inside her.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” — and then the whine again, the hard arch of her hips, her fingers clutching my shirt so hard that I saw two wrinkled spots when I took it off that night.
Then it came, that half-screamed “FUUUUUUUCK,” and I passed the point of no return. I buried myself as deep in her as I could go, pulled halfway out, pushed in hard once more and let go. If I was making any noise myself, I don’t remember it.
We kissed for a bit longer, then got dressed and got out of there quickly. Police response isn’t always speedy in that part of town, but we didn’t want to be around in case someone was having a slow night and felt like checking on the school grounds.
We were both too wiped to talk on the way back to the church, where she dropped me off. I just had enough energy to confirm the morning meeting was still on. (No way was I going to turn down a second round, if she was in the mood.) I kissed her good night, staggered home, stripped down, sent the clothes down the laundry chute and fell into bed.
She didn’t show up the next morning at the coffeehouse. She didn’t pick up her phone when I called.
So, after an hour, I went home and logged on to see what had happened.
I don’t recall the exact wording of the message, but the upshot was that she never saw a lover a second time. Each encounter was a one-off, a moment never to be repeated.
And so, it wasn’t — and, perhaps, paradoxically, that frenzied backseat coupling on a suburban weeknight is likely all the more memorable for that.
Wabi-sabi, indeed. Imperfect, unfinished, short-lived by design — and, thirteen years later, still haunting in its brief beauty.
Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/cati45/warm_impermanence_true_story_xpost_from