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  * * *

  After he left, she walked slowly around her apartment, observing it as a stranger would. She sipped the glass of water and touched her books, a photograph on the wall, the dishes dried in the rack beside the sink. She put herself to bed as gently, as lovingly as if she were her own child. She ran her hands softly over every inch of her body, as if she were washing it. This orgasm was a veil that drew over her, and when it ended, she was asleep.

  * * *

  The third time, he was anxious, sulky, his narrow mouth drawn like a tightened stitch. He was leaving the next day, he informed her. She did not feed him. She did not give him a glass of water. She told him to lie on the floor and touch himself. She lay on the sofa, where he only had a partial view of her. “Stop,” she said. Then she masturbated to climax, not caring or even thinking about what noises she might be making. Afterward, she could feel him there, shimmering with desire and frustration. His frustration was not a problem for her to fix, though that idea rung familiar, like a song wafting from the window of a passing car. She sat up and looked at him, there on her floor with his cock in his hand. He was the last man she would ever have fucked.

  He wouldn’t call once he left, she thought. Or maybe he would call incessantly. She didn’t care. Her not caring was voluptuous, sensual. It was a most substantial absence. It filled her like a good meal. She had had enough.

  Best Friendster Date Ever

  by Alexander Chee

  In his profile pictures, he looked like a dirty-minded angel, blond hair sticking up, electric blue eyes, and a pink mouth that pouted beautifully. He was biting his finger, teeth bared, in one. It reminded me of an incident a long time ago, a Pride parade when I ran into an old boyfriend’s old trick with said boyfriend, and while we were talking, the boyfriend turned his back on us. The trick smiled at me and slid a finger up the leg of the boyfriend’s very short shorts, pushing in, visibly past his ring. I could see the finger slow and then slip forward. When he pulled it out, he looked at me and ran it under his nose with a grin.

  The old boyfriend whipped his head around, uncertain which of us had just penetrated him there on the street. He wasn’t mad, but I was, but also, I was completely turned on.

  It was, after all, a championship piece of ass.

  This boy, he reminded me of both of them that day.

  * * *

  I found him on Friendster, the first of what would be many giant electronic yearbooks for the never-ending high school that is life in the United States. On the outside chance you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, you joined the site, linked your profile page to your friends’ pages, and soon you could follow a network out to, in my case then, 156,550 people.

  My life felt smaller than that, though. I was living in Koreatown in Los Angeles in a sublet with friends in a four-thousand-square-foot, five-bedroom apartment, where we could be home and never see each other. One was an old friend, and the other two were his friends, who were now my friends. The building looked so much like a New York building it was constantly used for location shots. In 2004 Los Angeles, people took the Internet really seriously, most people I met had a blog, and my first summer there was the first time I was ever getting hit on over the Internet. I decided to hit back. It hadn’t been a very romantic or sexual summer. The best I’d done live and in person was get blind drunk at a West Hollywood bar on vodka and Red Bull, like a sorority girl, buying someone a rose off one of those people that wander through bars with buckets of roses. Said recipient was said to be charmed, a friend of friends, and as such on Friendster, with some fairly amazing naked pictures of himself on his Friendster page. My birthday was coming up, I was single again, and while it was too gruesome to contemplate writing to the man from my blackout, I began paging through the pages and pages of strangers with their brightly colored snapshots and their witty or not-so-witty profile one-liners, until I saw this one. I sent him a very casual note and said something corny and low-key. This is just a fan letter to say, You’re hot.

  To my amazement, he wrote back. He was twelve years younger than me, just out of college in New York, but he was smart. A California Rimbaud, skinny and perhaps tall, in the photos.

  He agreed to meet me while I was celebrating my birthday at the Silver Lake summer street fair. Sounds like my kind of tragedy, he wrote.

  Fair enough, I thought.

  We exchanged numbers, and I was excited, but on the day of, he became a little hard to find. We kept missing each other. By the time I met him, I was annoyed by seven missed calls, and no longer particularly interested. I finally found him across from an enormous Moonwalk.

  In person, he was a little taller than me, probably about six one, and was dressed like the sort of boys I used to meet back in New York. From his appearance I was fairly sure there was an ex he wasn’t over, that he read the Economist and had intimacy issues, especially after I noticed his glasses and rock-climbing shorts. I was about to give him the brush-off, but there was a flash of something in his eye that caught me, a fishhook notion. And it should be said, his skin was a miracle of smoothness to look at. He had the kind of perfect, slightly gold skin of some blonds.

  I had friends with me—my roommates—and he had friends with him, and they were each watching us too intently. I said, “Let’s get a beer,” and we walked away from them all. The street fair had seemed like a good idea for my birthday in theory, but now that I was here, I found the bands dull, the people uninteresting, and the goods for sale unappealing. It was like the ugly stepchild of a really cool street fair somewhere else in time and place, just not here.

  His friend group had vanished by the time we got our beers, at which point he admitted one of them was an ex-boyfriend who wasn’t over him. I held back a laugh. My friends left next, saying they were going to go looking for a present for me.

  We were alone. The beer was almost good enough to stay.

  He mentioned a pilot show he was writing. I listened. The idea was pretty good, but he seemed nervous and a bit abrupt. We ran out of things to talk about fairly quickly. By the time my friends returned, I was relieved to see them. With wicked smiles, they tossed a paper bag on the table between us.

  The friends in question, my three roommates, Peter, David, and Leon, had spoken to me about how I’d not gotten laid that summer in a kind of emergency conference before this. I pulled out the contents as they sang the “Happy Birthday” song.

  Lube, single-portion-sized. Rubbers. Restraints, made of nylon and with clasps from a backpack, and Velcro. A few porno mags. Absurd enough to make it sexy. I laughed. It was a fairly direct editorial comment. I looked at their Velcro snaps and plastic hooks. Perfect for hiking and tying up vegetarians. Waterproof.

  “Thanks,” I said as they cheered.

  They laughed and pinched my cheeks like aunties, blew kisses at both of us, and then removed themselves to another table.

  My date reached over for the restraints. He tentatively put one on his wrist. “Hunh,” he said. He seemed blankly quizzical, and I wondered what was going through his mind. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was hard to read.

  All I was thinking was, The real bottoms, you don’t actually have to tie them up.

  * * *

  The street fair mercifully came to an end, and a nearby party was suggested, so we went. I was on a date I knew had no future, but I gave myself some credit. I had just gotten out of a relationship with a closeted man so frustratingly asexual in its nature, and so tortured, I was a bit like a man on a fast who didn’t know how to start eating again. I was trying. I was uncertain, but the terms of things around me were not. At the party I watched my date come in and out of view. I drank a bit, he got more interesting, but noticing this, and remembering the earlier disaster of the summer, I watched myself. He eventually vanished into a crowd of men doing blow in the other room. Boring people were often more boring on drugs, but I followed him in all the same, and after he pulled his face off a plate of blow, he said to me, “This is
the best Friendster date ever.”

  I grinned at him then and thought, Well, maybe now it will be. But it made me sad for what it meant his life was like.

  I took my turn, and when I looked up, didn’t see him. I drifted downstairs. And then when I least expected it, and was thinking maybe I would just go home, he sat down near me and we each smoked a cigarette, him offering how he didn’t normally smoke.

  Check, I thought. Economist, climbing shorts, ex-boyfriend, in denial about smoking.

  He was nervous again, or perhaps it was the blow. I had thought him indifferent to me by now, as I was to him, and while he was sexy, I was thinking right at that moment about how in order to have sex with him I was probably going to have to endure weeks of dull conversations. I was probably going to have to know everything I didn’t want to know about him before we got there. I dreaded the ex-boyfriend story. I didn’t like hiking.

  “I really wanted you to have a good impression of me,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “I just. I just did a bump.”

  “Hunh,” I said. I shrugged.

  “I just,” he said. “I do this.” And he made some kind of sound, like a child makes, and shrugged into himself. It was sweetly awkward.

  “What,” I said. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Whatever it is, just say it.”

  “It’s your birthday. You just got restraints. Do you want to just go back to your apartment… and have a lot of sex?”

  I laughed, surprised. “Yeah, I said. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The first person I ever tied up was my old boyfriend from the beginning of this story, who asked for it. He wanted me to be someone dirtier and more aggressive than I was then. He wanted me to be the person I felt myself becoming now, with my birthday date. Who was about to be the second person I was going to tie up.

  There were twelve years in between these events. The age difference between me and him.

  The absurdly large apartment’s layout matters to the story. For this to really work, you have to understand that me and my three roommates had taken rooms all on one side of our five-bedroom apartment, and then on the other side off the kitchen there was what had once been servants’ quarters: two smaller bedrooms that now doubled as offices. In between was a library, a dining room, a living room, a butler kitchen, and a pantry, and each bedroom had walk-in closets. The West Wing, as we jokingly called it, had its own bathroom. One of us could easily have had a guest there without the others knowing. We usually never heard one another when we were in our rooms, which were technically suites right next to one another. It was an incredible apartment, and I don’t know if I’ll ever live in another as odd and amazing in sheer spectacle.

  I showed him around. The roommates were still at the party. I took him into the West Wing last, and in the room at the end of the hall, which I used as an office, we mutually realized the tour was over.

  We stood for a moment in the dark. A futon was on the right, a desk on the left, books stacked on the walls where bookshelves should be.

  I realized he was waiting for me to take control. That there was someone each of us didn’t normally give ourselves permission to be. And that here was where they’d meet.

  “Take off your clothes,” I said.

  He blinked and began immediately in a way that was touching, for how quickly it happened.

  “Turn around,” I said. He had a slim body, angular but athletic, almost completely hairless. His beautiful skin glowed blue in the sodium-vapor streetlights from outside the windows.

  I fastened the restraints to his wrists behind his back and raised his arms lightly, to make sure they were loose enough to allow him to move. I turned him back around to face me.

  His dick was already hard. I tapped it with my finger and watched it bounce. His breathing was already rapid, from the calm of a moment before.

  “Close your eyes,” I said.

  He did. He stood there, chest moving, eyes closed.

  “I’m not going to fuck you in my bedroom,” I said. “Just in case there’s shouting.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I turned and closed the door and went back to him. It was incredibly moving to see him like that. For all that the restraints were ridiculous, they did work. I stood close to him, close enough to feel the heat coming off him, his breath. I leaned in and ran my fingernail across his nipple. He jumped and gave a huffing kind of cry and I slid the nail down along his skin to just above his pubic hairline, where I pressed in again. “Hu-uh,” he let out. And then I reached and pulled him in against me, reaching around to hold on where his wrists were joined. I hadn’t taken off my clothes.

  “I’m not going to take off my clothes,” I said. “At least, I don’t think I’m going to. But I don’t think that’s what you get this time. This time I’m not sure you even get to touch my dick,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I put my face near his and ran the tip of my tongue gently along his lower lip. His mouth opened with another gasp. His tongue met mine, and I pulled the cool wetness of it into my mouth, sucking for a moment. I pulled back slightly so that just our mouths touched. He lunged forward to keep the contact.

  I pulled back again, and spat into his open mouth. It was halfway down his throat before he knew. He gasped and gulped on it, and his dick banged up harder. He opened his eyes to catch his balance, and I said, “Eyes closed,” and knocked him backward onto the futon couch.

  I pushed his mouth open and leaned down and licked the lower lip again. The magenta pout of him. I bit on it lightly. It was the only part of me touching him. He was breathing hard still. I let the lip go, sat back, and from above let the spit drizzle out of my mouth, like a fishing line in the streetlight coming in. He gasped again—“Hu-uh”—opened his mouth wider, and I just let it fall for a moment in a straight line, him gulping on it. Drinking me.

  He was now completely fascinating. I leaned down and kissed him, and he reached back hungrily, noisy. “Uhmmm,” he hummed into my mouth. I sat back and opened a condom, pulled it over two of my fingers, lubed it. He opened his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What,” I said.

  “I’m not usually this turned on,” he said.

  He was apparently embarrassed of his emotions and responses. It made it even more fun to play him, then. “Can I have a drink of water?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I went to the kitchen and looked at the lubed condom on my fingers. I filled the glass from the fridge dispenser and returned.

  “Stand up,” I said as I entered, and he struggled to his feet. He looked expectantly at the glass of water. I held it waist high, so it wasn’t too hard to stick it over his dick.

  It was cold. He jumped in place. “Fuck,” he said. He almost lost his balance and I steadied him as I thrust his dick deeper into the water. He was panting again. I held the glass to his mouth, letting him drink from it. When he was done, I put it on the desk. I kissed him hard again, and as I did reached underneath his balls and slid my finger back and forth gently across his hole, getting it slick. He was breathing as hard as a runner. I slid my wet hand over his dick, down the shaft and over the knob of it, running the rubber across the crown in circles before going back down the underside of the shaft and then continuing, under his balls and back toward his hole. I did this a few more times, luxuriating in the way he shook and shuddered and yelped. I kept him close, my teeth on his underlip, his fast breath against my cheek, and when I had established the back-and-forth rhythm, as I went back under his balls one more time, this time I pushed in.

  “Aaa-aa-aah!” I let his lip go as his head flew back and I thrust inside him, his arms tight against the restraints. I slid out and felt him croon a little, disappointed. I made like I was headed back to his dick and instead returned inside him. He was slick and wet there, and it went in easily.

  He c
rooned again. It was like feeding him, sticking something in there.

  I got him on his back on the futon couch, his legs in the air, arms behind his back, and as I kissed him I worked his hole open with those two fingers, gently, feeling it push back against me like his mouth did as I kissed him and gently fucked his mouth with my tongue.

  His face was wet and his eyes drunk on plain lust. His face was flushed, I could tell, even in just the blue lights from the street, and his skin had the sheen of his exertions on it. He was the most beautiful thing I’d seen right then, arms relaxed behind his back, yet also out of control. I tapped the crown of his dick lightly and he winced, his pouty mouth closing slightly and then hanging open again, his lips the larger from the bruising kisses. We’d been at it now for a while.

  It would ruin it if he saw anything coming. I unzipped and his eyes focused. I drew out my dick.

  “I want to see it,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t get to.”

  I drew the condom on and lubed it and covered his eyes with my hands, tipping his head back and up as I pushed inside him. The warmth of him slid over my dick, and as I slid down into him I spat hard again into his open mouth as he gasped. He swallowed and made a kind of low hum as I slid in. I slapped his face with my other hand, his legs falling down around my thighs. “Unnh,” he said. “Hunnnh.” I slid my stubble down over his right nipple as I shoved even farther, rubbing against it, and his head slammed back and down. “Oh, fuck,” he said. I grabbed his dick, letting the crown circle freehand in my palm as I fucked him and ground on that nipple and he used his head to hold himself in place, pushing it into the couch. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. And then “Hrnnnh,” like he was in a hard cry, his arms thrashing underneath me, stuck under the weight of him and tied together by the stupid Velcro and nylon, somehow still holding. “Ah, fuck,” he said. “Ah.”