The Fun in Innocence is Losing It

It’s around 11:30pm and I’m lost in the back streets on Chinatown. It’s hot, I’m sweaty and my phone is about to go flat. I was having drinks with some friends when the text flirting had reached it’s limit and he had grown restless with our text talk. I can honestly say I didn’t comprehend that meeting up with a man a 11:30pm was a booty call. Maybe a kiss and possibly some heavy petting but that was the extent of it.

My phone rings and then turns off. I collapse onto the gutter feeling utterly ridiculous and a little desperate. I’m wearing a silk jumpsuit covered in sweat patches and my sandals have gum on the bottom. I invade and destroy my bag looking for a pen and when I’m finally victorious, my enthusiasm (which is just a little too intense) causes my intimate lady products (tampons and lip balm) to fly all over the ground. I feel like a pathetic slapstick interpretation of spontaneity. I had imagined my first time meeting someone off the net would be at least a little sexier than this. Even with a hint of noir. How misguided I was.

I get my phone to turn on and am greeted with this charming message-

‘been waiting outside now for ½ hr. where are you?!?! ‘

If I had any sense I would turn back now. But I’m young and naïve and willingly nonsensical. I scribble his address from a text on my palm and hail a cab, making one last attempt to meet my mystery internet man.

As my cab slowly makes it’s way to the corner of his street, my eyes are locked on the reflection of the lights on Sydney Harbour. So many things in life are exactly what they seem, reflections of lights and just reflections and other things draw you into a kind of infinite depth that you didn’t even know what there. Some people are assholes and will always be assholes, sometimes the biggest jerk is the hardest to let go. My mini-trance breaks away before I get to the corner of his street, and I tell the cab driver to let me out. I look around and am relieved to find myself uptown (meeting a guy who lives in Chinatown would just not do). I slowly walk to the corner, trying to apply my lip balm and look inconspicuously busy on my phone, and then suddenly we are face to face. I’m nervous and a little shocked. He just jumped from my pseudo reality into my actual reality in less than a second. And in that second something transpired between us, some kind of carnal telepathy, because in that second we both knew we would fuck.

He is this bronzed Adonis in thongs, tight mid thigh length denim shorts and a plaid shirt that is only buttoned up twice. I can see the path of hair on his stomach. I appreciate the sartorial irony. I see a sleeve emerge from a rolled up arm on the plain. He has dark eyes. He is fucking hot. I did not expect the first (or any) guy I meet on the internet to be so hot. He smiles with his lips closed and says in his American French tainted growl I will learn to love and hate, “You must be Pearl. I’m Jean”

I manage to reply with a pitiable hi. I seem to have acquired lip-biting twitch in the last few minutes and I cannot bear to make eye contact. My vision is focused past the blur that is his face on the lit up marble concierge desk behind the clear glass doors from where he has emerged. “We could go get a drink?” I don’t reply. “Or we could go to up to my place?” I work up the courage to make eye contact. He touches my hand. I bite my lip. The deal is sealed.

I know three things about him and I’m not completely sure they are true.

1) He is French and American (cue the jokes about arrogance and self-contempt)

2) He is 24…I think

3) He is some young hot shot trainer for some football team and the institute of sport.

I really don’t remember even talking. I’m sure we did. But my memory takes us from outside of his apartment and into his bed. The in-between is a blank spot. Like the first time you take a pill on new years eve and “wake up” making out in Mercedes with an heir you thought was gay (either way, I didn’t make a difference) or the first time you get drunk at a friend house (parent’s away, of course) after school and you wake up in her bed in your undies with her older sister bringing you iced water.

He touches my hand. I bite my lip. He is holding my hips a good 12 inches in the air and I’m getting fucked. I had never been “fucked” before in my life. Before Jean, I had only been with one guy before. Avi. My Jewish summer fling. And it was awkward, magical and completely primal. Whereas Jean seems to be a porn star, in the best of ways. He moves me around like a feather and his grip is tight and gentle. He is greedy with me and a little rough, but when his tongue runs down my thighs and onto me…I feel like I can’t breathe. His floor to ceiling windows let in the light from the sky-highs and the city and his body in that aged florescent light looks….perfect. He is tattoo’s creep onto his chest and he is smooth. It wasn’t until I started sleeping with Jean that I realised that I could also be perceived as that “quintessential” hot. That I ‘fucked’ men like Jean, and they fucked me. I wasn’t some awkward little girl anymore.

Jean and I saw each other on and off for nearly a year. We even tried dating. He was apt to calling me to come over with no underwear and heels. I would strut, a A quick, short stepped, stumbling strut, through the foyer and past the concierge. All eyes on me, all of nothing. I was sex doing a balancing act on heels. It was his sex, and it was I who was struggling to balance. I would stand outside of his door always waiting a minute or two. Just staring at that beige door. I would only have to know once before he opened it, and he would hold me tight at the back of my neck and kiss me hard. He would lift me up onto a mirrored stand, kneel between my legs and pull my skirt up. I would hold his head, pull his hair and push his face into me. It always started like this. I wonder who else has sat and had Jean eat them out on that mirrored stand? I wonder if he still has it?

I remember a Sunday afternoon during a weekend holed up in his apartment fucking. When we only left for brunch, Pellegrino and to pick up dinner. I remember sitting in the plaid he wore when we met and no underwear, on one his horrible and completely uncomfortable Patricia Urquiola chair and having my eyes accidentally fall on him. It was just that. It was as if he hadn’t been in the room the entire time and my vision just stumbled across him. He was sitting up with his hands behind his head and I saw the tattoo’s around his arms and chest. One was meant to represent his father who was, from memory, a) murdered b) a murderer or c) in Mexico. I didn’t pay much attention. He opened those dark eyes and they darted around the room and latched onto me. Just like a shark. I don’t think I had, and I still don’t, any idea who Jean was and I wonder where he is now more than I care to admit.