Don Lee - The Collective

Mainly I stayed in bed — with Didi. She had a roommate and I didn’t, so we spent most of the time in my room in Dupre. To reduce the number of trips back and forth, Didi brought over some of her clothes and toiletries, then her books, boom box, and CDs, and in short order my closet and bureau were subsumed by her things. She essentially moved in with me. The RA’s attitude toward this was surprisingly lax. Students were written up for lighting candles or incense, and if you were caught with alcohol you had to pour it out, but no one seemed to care about new arrangements of cohabitation. You could sleep with anyone you wanted, it seemed, as long as you didn’t burn the place down.

Didi and I were constrained only by my tiny bed. I began to suspect that, for the original designers, putting the twin mattresses on stilts had not been so much a space-saving measure as an underhanded way of discouraging conjugal overnights. It was a wonder neither one of us ever rolled over and plummeted to the floor as we slept. Not that we slept that much, although Didi did everything possible to make the bunk bed comfortable. She replaced my bedding with hers — four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, feather-down pillows and a mattress pad, a comforter and a duvet. It was the softest, plushiest material I had ever lain on. I had never thought about thread counts before; it was possible I had never heard of the term. My mother had always bought generic sheets on sale for us at Sears.

Nonetheless, Didi and I did not take advantage of the luxurious linen, at least for slumber. We were constantly mucking it up, fucking. If we weren’t in the midst of carnality, we were in the faux-tristesse of post-carnality, moonily staring at each other, limbs and fingers entwined. Occasionally we’d catnap, then one would rouse the other and we’d begin anew. We spent more hours naked than clothed. When we were forced to get out of bed and stand, we’d nearly keel, verticality having become so unfamiliar to us. We lost weight, unable to make it to the dining hall for meals, and we were forever woozy from hunger and dehydration. We clung to each other as if our lives depended on it.

What dawned on me was that no one had ever described sex properly in literature, the sheer sloppiness of it, the excretions and stickiness and sweat, the pungent smells and tastes, the slurps and smacks and pickled inelegance of daily congress. We soon used up my stockpile of condoms, and decided to go without. We wanted to feel each other, and there was something much more arousing about the perils of relying on me to pull out in time. Didi sometimes would not let me withdraw when I felt I would rupture. “Not yet, not yet,” she’d whisper.

Her poor lovely sheets. We ruined them. We slept on the wet spots, because the bed was too small not to. We couldn’t wash the sheets and duvet often enough, and they were indelibly stained with crusty yellow patches. I would use a towel to wipe the semen off myself, off Didi’s stomach and breasts and back and face, and each day the towels would become stiffer — scruffed and mangy. After a while, I didn’t bother trying to wash them anymore. I threw them away and asked my mother to mail me another set. “Why do you need so many towels?” she asked on the phone. “Is someone stealing them from the bathroom? You need to mark your name on them.”

We tried different positions, making things up as we went along. We became expert at fellatio and cunnilingus (the intricacies of which had previously been an utter mystery to me), gymnastically hanging halfway off the lofted bed.

“Your skin is so smooth,” Didi told me. “You’re practically hairless.” She plucked at my arm with her fingers, unable to gain purchase on a single strand. “I love your body.”

Both of us, quite unintentionally, through our starvation and acrobatics, had acquired washboard abs. I hadn’t appreciated how much of a workout sex could be.

“You don’t realize how beautiful you are yet, do you?” she said.

This was true. No one had ever described me as beautiful, or even good-looking, and I knew that objectively I had not changed in the course of a few months, metamorphosing from middling to handsome. But something in me had changed. I carried myself differently now. I had crossed a line of maturation, stepping from callow to experienced.

Once, as I was entering her from behind, I touched upon the wrong opening. I started to retreat, but Didi said, “Wait. Stay there.”

“Really?” I asked.

She lowered her ass and pressed back into me.

When we were done, I went to the bathroom and washed myself off in the shower. “Was it disgusting?” she asked.

“No.” I didn’t know what I had imagined. Probably the same thing Didi had: my penis excrementally and perhaps permanently browned, flecked with bits of feces. Yet, as much as I’d looked, I hadn’t noticed anything really unusual.

Didi scooted against the wall and lifted the covers as I climbed back into bed. “How did it feel? When you were inside.”

“It was… weird.”

“Didn’t it feel good?”

“It was okay, I guess.” I had been too self-conscious amid the act to derive any enjoyment from it. I had kept thinking to myself, with wonder, We — are — having — anal — sex. “How’d it feel to you?” I asked Didi.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m glad we did it.”

A taboo had been broken, and we were a little awed with ourselves, though we never tried it again. From then on, we stopped at nothing, even making love when she had her period, adding blood to the blotter of her sheets. Our intimacy was freeing and intoxicating. I had never been physically and emotionally so close to anyone. We were at ease, unabashed. We could do or say anything without fear of ridicule or retribution. It didn’t matter what we looked like, if our breath smelled or we farted or had a zit. This was acceptance, I thought. This was love.

We kept going, experimenting, exploring every inch of each other’s body, learning each other’s likes and dislikes. (She liked when I raised her knees to her chest, feeling me deepest that way; I liked when she straddled me and rubbed the folds of her vulva along the underside of my erection before reaching down and sinking onto me; she liked when, as I tongued her clitoris, I inserted a finger and hooked the tip and pressed against the roof of her vaginal canal; she disliked, though, her earlobes being sucked, and I didn’t much care for the insertion of her pinkie into my anus one time.)

Nothing had prepared me for this education — not any of my sister’s women’s magazines that I used to sneak away to read, not the two copies of Playboy and one issue of Penthouse that I had found in my father’s closet. I realized that, before Didi, I had been a complete neophyte. I had known as much about sex, real sex, as I had about thread counts. And yet I wanted to know more. I could not get enough. I wanted to become a great lover.

I didn’t see much of Joshua and Jessica during this period. I let my studies go. I didn’t attend meetings for the school literary magazine or for Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity. Reluctantly I went to my classes — sleepy, unshowered, bowlegged — but all I could think about was getting back into bed, naked again, with Didi.

The four days we spent apart for Thanksgiving, flying to opposite coasts to our respective homes, were interminable. I met her at the airport with flowers, took her back to Dupre, and stripped her down as soon as the door was shut.

“I love you,” I said.

She laughed as I backed her into the room toward a clear space on the floor, waddling with my jeans around my ankles, cock standing acutely upright.