The Last Time

The bar was just off the main drag of a Maine town too small to have its own zip code. My girlfriend and I smoked and drank. I got into a pool match that became a Jäger-shooting exhibition. We left at one, but instead of driving home she turned down a dirt road and parked.

We folded the backseat of her Blazer and stripped. We tried one position and then another, burning from the friction of the coarse carpet. I knocked my head trying to enter her from behind. I didn’t care. I was drunk, and I think I may have been happy too.

I hadn't come yet. "What do you want?" she asked. I said nothing, my mind crowded with perversions. I looked into her eyes: They were dark and bright at the same time, lit by a fugitive tenderness.

"Fuck my face," she said. So I did, in measured thrusts, braced against the roof, not yet getting off, reaching out for it.

Afterwards we put our clothes on, took photos. There’s one of her kissing my cheek as I fumble for a cigarette, my eyes three-quarters closed, looking the part of the drunk that I was. And I wonder how she loved me, and why.

That was my last time with her. The sex was great, but the physical memory of it is all but gone. Instead I see her look of desire mixed with abnegation, hear "Fuck my face": as crude and perfect a phrase as "I love you."