Little Glories

… or part two of Being Comfortable With Women.

Thalia, my lesbian roommate, knocked on my door late one night. It was nothing unusual. She seemed a little drunk. She had just come home from being out with friends, and she was wearing a smudge of dark lipstick and Cleopatra eyeliner. Her long, long hair was done up in a ponytail, and she was wearing a snug black, bare-shoulder top, and A-line skirt.

She plopped down on my bed and lit a cigarette and handed the pack over to me. I had my window open and fan on already. It was an early July New York night, already the worst swelter of summertime had set in, coating every person in that city with a fine layer of sweat and grime. — the ugly ones wear it like a grease stain; the beautiful people just seem to glow a little more. Thalia, one of the beautiful people, exhaled a long draft of smoke at the window and said at last, “Dude, I don’t want you to leave here!” She always called me dude.

I had already announced to the apartment that I would be moving into my own place at the end of the month. Living with three women was something I was comfortable with, as I have explained, but the very fact of having roommates at all was always a temporary fix in my mind. I belong alone, unless the person I am not-alone with has a special invitation.

Thalia sat nearer and nearer to me as we talked. She started with jokey comments about how I was abandoning her with “those two,” i.e. our other, lamer roommates. But then she tucked her chin under her knees, and started to talk about how she would miss our late night chats and smokes, how I had to promise to come see her at the bar she worked at.

She reached up in a moment of silence and slowly undid her hair, letting it fall across one shoulder. Her other shoulder glowed softly in the diffused orange light of the streetlights beyond the window. The fan hummed away with a throbbing insistence. I reached up and put my palm against the side of her head, feeling how soft her hair was, and slowly slid my hand all the way down the tress to her elbow, her locked elbow that propped up her whole body as she leant on her palm. It was like petting a horse. She blinked twice, very slowly, like in a dream, and fell forward at me, kissing me like a lover.

Thalia and I fucked on my bed that night, my crappy mattress-on-a-floor bed, with the ashtray pushed away, slid halfway across the room. With the fan droning it’s one note song. With the orange light streaking Thalia’s olive flesh, first her dull shine of sweat and then her running beads of sweat. With all those millions of people out there, all around us, all drenched in the same palpable summer night. I remember looking up at her and thinking she looked like a painting of Venus as she fucked me with her gyrating hips, my hands on her slick back and that long, impossible cascade of perfect hair draped over one shoulder once more, bouncing and sticking to the pouty swell of her lower abdomen.

Afterwards, she told me how long she had wanted that. I felt the same way, but I didn’t tell her that of course. She said she had lobbied the other two girls to let me move in because she thought I was cute, not because I had three sisters. We lay there for a while and I lazily drew patterns on her sweat-slick back with my finger, staring out the window. She didn’t need to be told to go back to her room, and after a sweet while, she got up. There was no sense in alarming the other girls at this point. Hopefully they didn’t hear us (for Thalia’s sake; she had to go on living there), but walking out of my room in the morning as they cooked eggs would be out of the question.

I probably don’t have to tell you the lessons here. I hope it’s obvious. Thalia lobbied to have me as a roommate because she was attracted to me, but she never would have done it if she didn’t also feel comfortable. Indeed comfort is just as important as attraction, which is Mystery Method 101. Neither would the roommates have allowed it if they didn’t also feel comfortable.

Also, Thalia had presumably heard me with other girls in there. She had certainly met a few. Never underestimate the massive power of preselection. And having her her a girl crying out in the grips of an orgasm is the equivalent of letting her see me at the bar with 20 different pretty girls on the arm.

With my moving-out impending, she realized she had nothing to lose. A few weeks of “awkwardness” (AKA sex) was worth the pay off in pleasure (AKA sex). Add together a long standing comfort, a feeling of shared secretness (our late night cigarettes), a mutual attraction, alcohol, and a lack of serious consequence and the results are practically inevitable.

I saw Thalia on a recent trip to New York. Her lesbian lover (not attractive.. seriously unattractive) and her now share the room I used to have, the room Thalia and I fucked in like sweaty animals. She’s put on a little weight, not a lot, but enough to break your heart just a little. It’s pretty obvious where she’s headed.

I do wonder though, on a hot summer night maybe, with the fan running, as she looks past her snoring girlfriend to the window, what she thinks about.