Your bag is empty.
My friend Lex calls from Rome asking if she should fuck her fling’s friend, and I stop her at the second part. The chef is not a fling. A fling doesn’t leave bite bruises up the inside of both thighs so consistently that a woman spends a calendar year in pants and maxi skirts. Lex owns mini-dresses, but Rome never saw them. The not-exclusive part is real. Lex has other lovers, all year. But the chef is the constant.What they are is in love and not exclusive, which people hear as casual and it’s the opposite. He cooked for her at two in the morning and ate her at three. Fling is what she calls him so the question sounds manageable.
When his restaurant opened, the chef first only invited one person to the dinner. Her. A table for 40, one name on the list. She told him an opening needs witnesses, so he filled the table with his people and pointed across the bread at an architect and said, “you two will get along.” A while later, the chef went quiet the way chefs do. Good knife roll, gone. The bruises healed. She reports this like a woman describing a drought.
During this drought, the architect texts.
The architect is tall. Lex mentioned it four times, and Lex measures men in usable surface. Tall, Australian, built like the Commonwealth made him on purpose. A Canadian and an Australian in a room: two hospitable alcoholic peoples recognizing each other across the world’s politest border. Same queen on the money, same instinct to apologize while pouring you another. Genetically incapable of letting a glass sit empty or a tension sit unnamed.
Drinks, a pool table, him bending over shots he didn’t need to bend for, her watching him line it up and thinking things you don’t say in a Catholic country. At the end of the night she tells him the true thing: “there’s a spark between us.” Then, the less true thing: “we’re never acting on it. We’re both extremely important to this man, he needs to walk into a room he can trust.” Those are the terms of their treaty. None of her other lovers needed a treaty
Last week she’s home drunk, because she’s Italian now and wine is water because Jesus. Architect tells her that he’s coming over, then he arrives hard at the door. Wants everything. She says no. He says he won’t tell. “I won’t tell” is the oldest key in the world, half the people you know exist because of I won’t tell. It didn’t turn.
What she said was, “I’ll kiss you and then you’ll go. Because I like you and I want to kiss you.”
The makeout was incredible. Their tongues were immediately a synchronized swim team of two. She didn’t kiss the chef like this. Her back found the wall, his thigh found the space between hers, and for the first time in a year there was nothing under her skirt to hide. She missed the hiding. He surfaced once, wrecked, hard against her hip, to ask, “can I touch your pussy?” “Absolutely not, sir,” she said. Touch my tiddies. He did, both hands, a man finally allowed at the buffet after watching through glass. Twenty minutes, terms fully honored, everything happening exactly at the border because that’s where she put it. Then she told him to go, wet, sovereign, and certain. At the door he said it again, I won’t tell him, and she said the thing the whole night had been loading:
Have you thought about how important I am to him? Once? As his friend, did you never wonder why I was the only person with him at the opening?
He had not.
She calls me in the morning and asks it again: should I fuck my fling’s friend? Then the confusing part. She feels nothing for the architect. Shouldn’t that make it easier? Isn’t no feelings the exact condition for sex as pure sport? She’s had a year of lovers on those grounds without convening a single summit.
No, Lex. Backwards. The other lovers never got a treaty because they didn’t matter. Nothing they touched also touched the chef. The architect comes pre-installed in the chef’s actual life, and her body knows it. That’s why the kiss swam like that. It wasn’t chemistry, it was proximity to the thing she actually wants, arriving through the nearest available tall man. He tasted like the chef’s world. She wasn’t kissing him, she was still kissing the chef.
The man had been gone a month. By not sleeping with the architect, Lex didn’t pass a test that night, she renegotiated her treaty. The deal was, “we don’t fuck,” but by midnight it was “we don’t fuck below the waist,” and that’s moving the line while the anthem plays. A year of wearing his teeth under long skirts, one month of blank thighs, and the first man from inside his world got her against a wall.