Your bag is empty.
Foreplay starts hours before anyone is naked. Dinner. His knee against mine under the table for two seconds longer than an accident. Still, very few men understand this as actual foreplay, that desire is built, and that the best moments in bed are not choreography, they’re problem solving in real time.
Which brings me to the greatest single move a man has ever pulled off in my sexual life. It deserves a plaque.
Tuesday night. His couch, then his hallway, then his bedroom, moving the way you move when you can’t stop kissing long enough to look where you’re going. Furniture is a mere obstacle. Clothes come off somewhere between rooms.
Then the record scratch. I had my period. More to the point, I had forgotten I had a tampon in.
This is where it usually stalls. The bathroom intermission. “Give me one second,” which means the mood is now sitting alone in the bedroom checking its phone. Passion on hold while a woman deals with plumbing.
I was naked, wrapped around him, still kissing him, and I just said it into his mouth in a voice that was trying to be sultry and landed somewhere near apologetic. “I have to go to the bathroom, I have a tampon in.”
We kept kissing. He reached down, found the string, pulled it out, dropped it on the floor, and put me on the bed. Never stopped. Never looked.
That was it. Best move in the history of heterosexual relations.
No man before or after has handled that reality so cleanly. Not in 17 years of marriage. Not in the years since. One man, who understood that wanting me did not require an intermission because of a little blood.
Obviously his desire eclipsing my period was extremely sexy—not all men will go there. But it’s not just that he wanted me, it’s that he knew what to do. There is an intelligence that only shows up in instinct. Deal with what’s actually happening instead of flinching from it. That’s the whole difference between a man who has read about women and a man who has been with one.
I’m telling you this partly to be provocative. Mostly it’s a public service. It isn’t about tampons. It’s about seeing the thing between you and her, removing it, and not making a speech about it.
Everything about sex has gotten complicated. Competence is still the sexiest thing in the room. Solve the problem. Touch what other men are afraid to touch. Class dismissed.