The Thing Is

(This was written for Libido, a Chicago-based journal of erotic stories and artwork. I ended up chickening out, however, and never sent it to them. By the way, don't show this story to my mom.)

I have this thing. I'm not sure whether it applies to everyone, or if it applies to other males, or maybe if it even happens to ANYONE else. The thing is: sometimes I'll see someone across the room and I'll recognize them as attractive, as someone who is physically pleasing to me. And from there I can do my whatever, I can do my flirtation or my idle fantasizing or what have you.

But the thing is: sometimes I'll see someone across the room and immediately, in incredibly graphic terms, I can immediately imagine what it would be like to have sex with them. Like you, right now.

I don't mean like in a fantasy situation -- this is not me deliberately thinking of kinda dirty, kinda kinky masturbatory situations that you and I could get ourselves into in a perfect world. I mean, I look at you, I glance at you, and I can immediately feel and smell the exact way that your hair would feel and smell if my head was pressed against it, my torso lying heavily on your back, my arms wrapped around your stomach as you support both our weights with your hands and knees, me fucking you from behind.

When I look at your face, I am immediately presented with a mental image of your eyes closed, eyebrows furrowed into a deep frown, short breaths coming out of your mouth, as I have my face down in between your legs. Whenever I glimpse the small amount of tan skin showing above the v-neck of your t-shirt, I can immediately see your entire body, naked, standing in my shower, the crevices and bends and other tiny delicacies which are usually hidden from view. When I watch your hand grip a pen and write in your notebook, I can immediately see that hand gripped tightly around my cock, furiously pumping up and down because you are so excited and tingled from the extended foreplay of just previous.

And, the thing is, I don't know why you provoke these immediate, tactile, physical images in me, just like I don't know why any of the other women I've glanced at across the room over the years have produced this. After all, you're certainly not any MORE attractive than any other random attractive woman in the room (and, considering that I'm in Urbis Orbis, you know there are many). There are women I've encountered who are, in fact, more beautiful than you, more stunning, more supermodelish, who nonetheless provoke only a simple "Hmm, she certainly is attractive" from my subconscious. You, however, like these small selection of other random women over the years, give me an instant erection everytime I look at you, make me blush everytime I realize I'm staring, get me completely distracted from writing everytime I glance.

There are small details of you, details that you might not even think of, that are just excrutiating for me to look at, tied in as they are to my libido so closely. The way that your short hair hangs at the very ends of the strands into their own individual locks, the way you have to push them back from your eyes every so often. The way that your medium-size breasts swing in a not-quite-free-but-not-quite-constricted rhythm with each change of your posture, each trip to the bathroom. The way that your lips curl over your teeth each time you chew on your pen, the exact curl that an old girlfriend of mine used to get when she would perform oral sex on me. Even the clothes you wear are a virtual checklist of my various fetishes about incredibly sexy women -- men's pants, white v-neck t-shirt, tasteful choker around the neck. It is almost as if you somehow knew what exactly to wear in order to make me sit and squirm in my seat.

And part of me feels a little guilty thinking of you in this way, talking to you in this way, just barely twenty feet away from you, you blissfully unaware of my existence, poring over some notebook or another with your friend who is also attractive but doesn't give me nearly the same feeling. It's lecherous of me, I know. It's objectifying. But isn't it the point of erotic literature to never apologize? Isn't it the greatest thrill as a reader of dirty stories to voyeuristically watch the writer fully throw themselves into their own sexual perversities, follow them as they unabashedly drive into their fetishes and fantasies like a tank stuck in "crush" mode? Watch them walk that dangerously thin line between horniness and obsession, without ever acknowledging the fact that they may in fact be slipping over that line? And that you're following them? And that you LIKE it?

I'm not sure. All I know is that in the day world, the world of human interaction and niceties and politics and creative expression, I am sensitive, I am caring, I make every effort to respect the women around me and to treat them as the complex humans that they are. But I swear to God, every time I look at you here, in the night world, all I want to do is walk over, stand behind you, pull you up, reach my hands around to your front, undo your pants, slip them down, bend you over the table, and give you a fucking like you've never had before.

And do you ever have these fantasies? Will you just be sitting in a coffeehouse or a bar or a movie theatre and just have this... GUY walk in the room and immediately stop your heart? And before you know it, all of a sudden your entire frontal lobe is completely filled with thoughts of "DICK DICK DICK DICK MUST HAVE DICK?" Do you ever run across men who just make something between your legs start humming and singing a tune everytime you look at them? I don't know. I don't know if any women ever have this experience. I've been too embarrassed to ask.

In times of more fanciful thoughts of whimsy, I like to imagine that there must be a corollation here. After all, this does not happen to me very often -- perhaps once every nine months or so. Perhaps, I like to sometimes think, the standard device from the trashy romance novels is true, that there are those 'fated loves' floating in our universe, that our bodies, our minds, sing to each other in compelling but unconscious ways when we near each others' physical spaces. But in this case I guess the more appropriate term would be 'fated fucks.' Perhaps there are x amount of people in the world with whom we were fated to have the most incredible sex of our lives with, two bodies out there who exactly enjoy the same touches, the same rubs, the same electrical devices. And the bodies themselves know it even as the brains do not, and they scream at each other from across the void. They scream loudly and incessantly, the yell eventually becoming tribal in its ferocity -- "Yo, over here! Look at me! Fuck me! Whaddya waiting for? FUCK me! Over here! Yes, you! FUCK me! FUCK me! FUCK me! FUCK ME!!!"

I don't know. Like I said, the thought only occurs to me when I am in one of my more light-hearted moods. But sitting here, tonight, watching you, feeling my heart suddenly race as you catch me looking at you, me catch you looking at me, a glance that lasts exactly one millisecond longer than a random glance should... I wonder just how whimsical the notion really is.

Copyright 1996, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.