The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Today on Nerve's TV blog: Dance, Hipster, Dance! Plus: our latest NewsCrush — and why one army brat is breaking up with Army Wives.
My girlfriend, Sienna, told me she was thinking about restoring her virginity. We'd just fucked, of course, unreasonably. Now we were in a glazed after-trance, laying in the half light and trying to figure where we were again, whose apartment and all.
"If we did decide to get serious," she said softly. "I'd want to restore my virginity."
"What?" I said. "What did you just say?"
Sienna went up on her elbow. One tit fell against the other and formed a channel where (it seemed reasonable to hope, given a half-hour) my cock might go.
"My virginity," she said. "My natural state of innocence."
"It's a little late for that," I said. "I mean, isn't the horse sort out
promotion
of the barn on that one?"
"It's something I'm thinking about," she said seriously.
"What are we taking about here, some kind of surgery?"
Sienna got up with a sweet little groan and staggered to the kitchen. Her ass was big and shapely. I could have lived between those cheeks, happily.
"I'm talking," she said, "about the purity given to me by God."
"Because I saw a show about that," I yelled. "It's fucking medieval. They sew these little gelcaps in there with fake blood — honey, are you listening?"
"No," Sienna yelled back.
"They stitch these gelcaps inside. All so these psychotic Arab grooms don't have to live with the horrible disgrace of marrying a woman with some actual joie de vulva."
Sienna appeared with a little plastic thingy full of chicken korma from Kash & Kurry. She sat on the edge of the bed, speared a chunk of chicken and popped it into her little red mouth.
"It's called hymenoplasty," I said. "A nosejob for your cooch."
"Don't use that word, you pig. I'm talking about the purity given to me by God."
"You don't believe in God," I said. "You told me you didn't believe in God."
Sienna handed me the korma and reached for her painted toes. It was one of these things she did now and then, to let me know who was in charge. "I don't believe in God as defined as some old man in the sky who tells people what to do or not do. That doesn't mean I don't believe in a larger guiding force."
"Who have you been talking to?" I said. "Having you been talking to Minky again?"
Minky was a friend of hers, one of these post Young Life morons who gets knocked up by the married youth minister and becomes a single mom and all of a sudden she's Jesus Christ's number one fag hag.
Sienna showed me with her fingers, a precise arpeggio across the intimates.
"This is something I'm deciding for me," Sienna said. "For us."
"Well, okay," I said. "If I can speak for the me part of us, I'd just like to point out that spiritual purity isn't about the body. It's about how you move through your life."
Sienna poked my thigh with her fork. "Listen to you," she said. "You're such a sad transparent little lech."
"What's transparent? That I desire you? That I find our sex life awesome? If I can be honest — " I said. And here, I have to admit making several mistakes, the first being using that phrase at all (which implies that everything else one says is dishonest), the second being the tone of my voice (which Sienna would characterize in subsequent discussions, not necessarily inaccurately, as smug), the third being my decision to reach for her ass, and the fourth being the actual statement that followed (which was offered under the misguided assumption that an earnest declaration would work better than some calculated lie or, for instance, keeping my big fat piehole shut). "We were just starting to cook, baby."
Sienna removed my hand from her ass. She had these hazel eyes that faded to yellow in the middle, and they went flat. "I just made up my mind," she said. "Thanks for the help."
But, see, we had just started to cook. We'd been together six months, seven if you count the month that Sienna had been "breaking things off" with Kyle, her super-needy Pilates trainer. We met at the office. She worked in the fifth-floor lab, pumping rats full of bad lipids. I was on the third floor, quietly torturing good old drosophila melanegaster. Your standard biotech coffee slaves.
Sienna was from Wyoming, a fact that made her seem exotic. I'd seen pictures of her at a junior rodeo, beaming with cowgirl know-how. She fancied herself the alpha slut of her high school. But she was still using material from back then, the smoldering glance, the bitten lower lip. The first time we did it, she threw her legs up in the air and grabbed her ankles, so as to reveal her downy loins. Her loins were downy. That was the problem. You want gushy in a loin, sopping, engorged. Even her whispers came straight out of the porn box.
As for me, I was my own museum of sexual horrors: slightly overweight, bumbling, prematurely ejaculatory, full of contempt for my own pleasure. I was stunned to have landed a dish like Sienna, slobbering, obsequious. Oh those first weeks of polite coitus! Mother, may I? It makes my dick noodly to think of it.
And then one night I was down south when Sienna let out a snort of impatience. I remembered thinking: So that's the end of that. Sienna yanked me up by the hair and showed me with her fingers, a precise arpeggio across the intimates. Then she slammed my head back down. "No. Not like a fucking butterfly. Like a human being. Right. Now open the hood. Both hands."
It wasn't her style, but she'd apparently grown tired of the endless varieties of male sexual ineptitude. And what risk did I pose? She was about to dump me. So I gave it my best, the slow swirl, the full labial frenchkiss, the coiling, split-slick fingerkick, which led (eventually) to the warm seep, the happy internal clench, and Sienna going all yuh-yuh-yuh while her palm ground into the back of my head.
This was the end of our dumb silence, the sandpapery blowjobs and sad, nudging insertions. No, it was a matter of confessing what we wanted, and how to get there. We gave ourselves over to a dazzling candor. This, with some slow coaxing, is how my eager thumb found its way inside her delicious ass. A month later, gently employing a device called The Back Door Elf, Sienna caressed some magical gland inside me. The ensuing ejaculation sent my eyeballs skittering from their sockets.
In July, I went away for a week and came back to find her shaved down and loopy. I pinned her knees back and marveled at the unshadowed beauty. I wanted everything all at once and took a long, slow run with my tongue. Up and back and back and up, over the soft pebbled flesh and the soaped-over dirty parts, which were not dirty at all, but sweetly bacterial.
