all you need is one

It is New Year’s Eve and unseasonably warm, and I am out to begin celebrating with some close friends. My girlfriends and I, we are all grad students and we are all in that special hell that’s populated exclusively with the smart, the miserable, and the not particularly self-aware.

We start off our evening with a heavyish meal, as our plans for later involve more whiskey than I like to remember. We are at a greasy sandwich shop, enjoying falafel and hummus wraps coupled with fries covered in jalapeños, with a side of champagne for my girlfriends and a diet coke with Jim Beam from my flask for me. We laugh, not realizing that this moment is one of those perfect times that I can look back at now and see how beautiful our friendships were in the midst of a sea of more professional bullshit than I had ever imagined. We toast all the horrible things that are finally ending with 2010: problems with our exes, problems with our families, problems with our schooling, problems with our credit card bills, and to the glimmer of hope that’s promised ever year on this day in the few hours before midnight. We inhale our meal and hail a cab to a party in the northern part of our fair city that we like to joke will be populated with about two hundred women, seven hundred gay men, and maybe 5 straight(ish) ones, and more sequins than you could find in the costumes for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. We are ultimately very correct in our assessment.

Over dinner, I have been telling Siobhán just how badly I want to fuck someone else to get the bitter taste of Adam out of my mouth. She teases me about the words I use, she teases me about my sex drive, she teases me about going to the gayest new year’s party in the city if what I really want is to fuck a man.  I take it in stride and return the jokes to her.

“All I need is one dude who’s willing to take my pants off,” I tell her, “and then it really doesn’t matter just how little the rest of them care about my junk.”

“Fair,” she says. “After all, if the incidence of something is 1 in 1,000 in the real world, but it happens to you, the incidence for you is 1 in 1.”

“Siobhán, that’s the nerdiest way I’ve ever heard a hookup described. Ever.”

“You’re welcome.”

We snag a cab and arrive just in time to beat a mass of fashionably late types to our new year’s event. We shed our coats. We get drinks. We strengthen them from my flask that’s tucked into the top of my boot.  We assess the crowd and find a blank spot for dancing.

My friends and I take sweaty, smiling pictures of each other all night. My outfit for the evening (black tanktop, black tights, black boots, black leather miniskirt, and a poorly-thought-out, visible through my shirt only in a camera flash, turquoise bra) is well documented next to my friends’ flashy party dresses and broad grins. There are photos of women embracing whose relationships—romantic or otherwise—have since dissolved, and photos of new friendships in their awkward beginnings before a deeper, more intimate connection is later forged.

I love these photos. I hate these photos.

After 45 minutes or so, I see a tall, boyish-faced man from the corner of my eye.

He looks at me, smiles, and looks away; he tells something to one of his friends.

I look at Siobhán: “All I need is one,” I remind her. She laughs and continues her dancing, which is a charming mix of voguing and gyrations over a beatific smile that never fails to attract a suitor.

I look up and see that stranger’s grin, this time with a wink. I look him in the face, raise an eyebrow in his direction, and keep up my dancing.

This tango goes on for longer than I anticipate.

I feel a tap on my shoulder.

I turn around to see someone other than who I expect, who happens to be standing about 3 feet away and talking to some other friend. The stranger I want to see is completely oblivious to this exchange.

This suitor is not a beautiful man, wearing not a beautiful hat, using not exactly eloquent words and covered in not particularly alluring sweat, and I think he might be hitting on me.

I may only need one to meet my goal for the evening, but just because an opportunity presents itself does not mean I am obligated to take it.

In equal parts desperation and irritation, I swing around to the tall, boyish man that I was hoping was seeking my attention. I tap his shoulder, square my shoulders and squeeze my breasts together with my upper arms, and when he turns to me I ask him, very bluntly:

“Would you like to dance with me?”

“Yes.”

The other suitor is completely crestfallen. I really don’t care.

His arm slides around my waist and I place my hands on his shoulders. We are far enough apart to be acceptable for a middle school party.

“What’s your name?”

“Margot. You?”

“I’m Louis.”

We dance for the next hour between now and midnight. He tells me what he does for a living. I tell him what I do. He tells me that he is from my fair city, I tell him that my hometown is several hundred miles away and I am surprised to discover that he used to work there. He is smart and charming and a little bit grabbier than I expect.

When midnight rolls around he pulls me in and kisses me with one hand exploring the texture of my woven tights under the short hemline of my leather miniskirt.

For the next 45 minutes we continue this dance. He kisses me and gropes me, he tells me that he expects me to slap him at any minute and is surprised when I don’t. I see my friends over his shoulder and they are keeping a watchful, yet encouraging, eye on my activities. Siobhán has wandered off somewhere with one of Louis’s group and I don’t hear from her until the next day.

When he tries to cup my pussy under my skirt on the dance floor, I draw a line.

“For that,” I inform him, “you better just take me home.”

“Ok.”

We leave. We scamper out of the club like we’re getting away with something. We get a cab driven by a dry old man who could not care less about our excitement as long as we don’t destroy his backseat.

“Unicorn Lane and la Ravaudeuse Road,” I yelp, crashing into the cab and on top of my newfound paramour.

“Ok.” The cab driver has clearly been a witness to this scene several times over in just this one evening.

In the relative privacy of the backseat, Louis bites my earlobes and my neck, he pulls down the tops of my tights and his aggressive hand is immediately exploring my anatomy.

“Margot, when we get to your house I am going to eat your pussy for at least an hour.”

I spread my thighs and stifle a moan, I tell him not to make me come in the cab because the driver would probably hate it. He laughs. I unzip his pants and wrap my free hand around the base of his cock.

Many months later, Louis tells me that the comment that I make, that he is thicker than I anticipate, was so unexpected to him that he struggled not to come into my palm at that moment.

We put ourselves together when the cab careens to a halt at the designated corner. Louis flings some money at the driver as we tumble out. I lead him halfway down the block to the front door of my building. His hands are up my skirt as he follows me up the stairs to my apartment’s front door. I let us in and shed all my clothes on the walk back to my room. I hear astonished comments from behind me.

We arrive at the back of the apartment. Louis is naked too, he presses against me in a heated, urgent kiss. I drop to my knees and take his cock into my mouth as he grabs my hair, in part to steady his bulk and in part from the thrill of dominating a relatively unknown woman. This only last a minute before he pulls me up by the underarms and presses me towards the bed. I land on my back.

It is his turn to drop to his knees. He makes good on the promise he made me in the cab: while it isn’t anywhere approaching an hour, it is plenty of time for me to come with my pussy squeezing the three fingers he has shoved inside me while I arch my back and pant.

I breathlessly tell him that the condoms are, of course, in the bedside drawer. He grabs one and rolls it on. As soon as he is done, I am on top of him and riding him while he squeezes my ass. He pulls me forward by the waist and lands his face between my breasts. He pinches and bites my nipples when I ask him to. I pull his hair when he asks me to. I come in a flood across his pelvis.

He rolls me over on my back without missing a beat and bends me in half to put my legs over his shoulders. He bites me and sucks my earlobes, his nails scratch into my waist and hips as deeply as mine do into his back. When he comes he lets out a guttural sound that shakes my diaphragm.

We are silent except for our heavy breath.

After, we talk. I discover that Louis is a good person, or at least he passes for one on what I expect is a one-night stand. He tells me more intimate details about his life that night than he will ever be comfortable telling me later, because I am a perfect stranger to him. I tell him fewer of my own and am generally cooler than I ever could normally be, because he is a perfect stranger to me. He is older than he looks, and more complex than he likes to be.

“Happy new year,” he mutters to me before we fall asleep. It is 4am.

The next morning, a thick hand parting my labia and exploring my clit coupled with a hard dick pressing into my back awakens me, and I am exactly on the edge of orgasm. When another hand finds my now-sore breast and stimulates an aching nipple, I moan and shudder into consciousness.

When I am a thinking person again, I roll over onto my belly and place myself between this stranger’s thighs. He is hard again. I take him into my mouth, with one hand gripping the base of his cock and the other fondling his balls. Louis is not yet friendly enough to call me names, so instead he grabs my hair and complements my skills before he orgasms down my throat.

After a few minutes we are both calm. We are both finding out more about each other, these two relative unknowns who will, we find out later, be perfectly unmatched.

I offer him a shower, and ask if he wants to get brunch. He politely declines, saying that he has to meet his friends from last night. I check my phone to find about ten texts from last night, ranging from friends reminding me to be safe and careful to complimenting me, to Siobhán asking if I want to get our customary New Year’s meal of lo mein, which is an invitation that I accept.

Louis reassembles himself in his sweaty clothes. I put on some pajamas and make coffee. He kisses me on the cheek in the kitchen before we trade phone numbers. As I see him out the door, my roommate wanders out of her room and looks at Louis, then back at me, and then promptly goes back to bed.

I wrongly expect to never see him again.