“Intimate Traps” - Excerpt

1.

A clit or a cock is a fruit that plumps, engorging with its fill of blood. Nipples grow firm and lips get wet, yet despite these tantalizing effects of arousal we insist on maintaining decency—the gall!—ingesting each other only by degrees, possessing a drop, a mouthful, a swallow; never enough to satiate fully, we sip and suck and lust and long. Why not gobble each other up, rather than staring at each other across the table; glancing at the skin revealed at the neck of a shirt, or the back of a hand, or taking in with our peripheral vision a promiscuous curl dangling over one eye? That’s all? (Jesus, fuck!) And yet the delightful trick of desire is that if we are going to ride it to maximal satisfaction, we must continually defy its command to consume. For, once we’ve had our fill of all there is to be had of our darling other—that’s it; we must move on. So long! And so, in life, and also in sex, we must pace ourselves to go slow: making the act of fucking last as long as we can; to extend and stretch.

Sky was enamored with these erotic ideals, which they knew from their undergraduate religion classes to be a form of tantric practice, and which they sought with unseeking submission; in other words, they were fundamentally open to the vast and incomprehensible mysteries of the universe and out of an idolizing reverence they never asked of it any specifics, maintaining that maximal psychic strength was only supportable on a base of infinite flexibility. (Ask and ye shall receive, but chooseth ye not the form.) And with this practice, Sky had met Araceli in the checkout line at the co-op where Sky had been a cashier the previous year, and when Araceli had invited Sky to move into her apartment in downtown Bardo, Mass, Sky had acquiesced, and now Sky was completing the final year of their MFA in Sculpture at BCLA (Bardo College of Liberal Arts), and now forces and patterns had assembled in such a way that Sky had had a dream the previous night—and the dream had been of polyamory, and the dream had been—

Well, the dream had been good, and so, transitioning from dream-state to waking, Sky was making a move.

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