I love him but he’s one of those men who can’t sleep at night until he’s exhausted himself with pornography. It wears on me; I wasn’t born that woman. I can’t fuck with my shoes on.

This doesn’t mean I don’t try.

He persuades my body to a new position and I wonder what affects his decision. How does he choose when to stop rotating me? Is it the way my limbs pinch my lips around his prick, or does he think this feels best to me? Perhaps it’s something simpler: the view. Can he better witness my changing expression, the flop of my hair, the swing of my breasts? (Do they ever consider the way they look to us? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man blush when he was inside me--never turn away with a sudden flash of self-consciousness. I decide to make it a goal, a resolution: make his face red with a glance, a caress, a word. But what word? What caress? What glance?) He turns me again, stopping when it’s just right.

I say his name and he comes back with mine. We’re like call and response singers with a limited vocabulary. A cappella, too: our grunts and groans horns and percussion, the silence alive between our glances like long or quaver rests, disturbed by our mutual thrusts.

For reasons beyond my grasp of logic, I remember something Susie Klorr said to me in grade school as she clutched a journal to her chest and we eyed Jason Forrest: “I can’t wait to be an adult. When we grow up, we can kiss all night.”

His face is out of sight, now. I close my eyes and picture it, flush with blood.