Four Dollar Wine Critic: Drunkentines / Sex Noises

I want to be known, and loved, and intellectually and sexually adored constantly by everybody. I want each party to be a glimmering climax where I utterly belong.

Enter Valentine’s Day weekend: a playground of hungry hearts and lonely bodies.

Weather: drunk.

Ethos: thirsty.

Drake summarizes the prevailing feeling: “I need a girl who gon’ love me/I need a girl who gon’ trust me/Someone to fuck me/Someone to make me feel lucky/Someone that’s so proud to be with me.”

Moscato

(Party; in exchange for my sparkling presence)

I’ve been stomping the slushy streets of Cambridge the past couple evenings, scenic in my loneliness, wallet fat from babysitting. I’m stalking down a slutty senior spring dress. What I find is a slutty senior spring romper: black lace, air-delicate, and more ass cheek than Harvard Square ever knew it wanted. As Kim Addonizio might have written had she been more fashion forward:

I want a black romper

I want it flimsy and cheap

I want it too tight. I want to wear it

Until someone tears it off me.

And then someone does. “You have a perfect body,” the rando is saying. It’s Friday night, shit’s gotten tipsy yet still affirmatively consensual, and we’ve ditched the party to make sweet love on my bed in the common room. “I always like a white woman with a great ass.”

Sexual experiences teach me new things. For example, Rando’s name. For another example, I never realized I was a great ass person. I always thought I was a mediocre ass person, and a great tits person. Women can have it all!

At this point, my roommate stumbles in. It’s 3 a.m.: From the door, to the bathroom, right past where Rando and I, in states of compromising undress, are rompering.

Cue the retching.

I jump out of bed naked and knock at the bathroom door. “Hey, baby, how are you doing? Do you want anything? Water? Me to hold your hair back?”

“No,” he slurs between vomit sounds.“No,no. It’s okay. It’s cleansing!”

I hover nervously for a second and then return to aforementioned sweet lovemaking to the barf soundtrack.

“Hey dude!” says Rando to Roommate when the latter emerges cleansed and in his boxer shorts, because it’s not at all gay to chat with another dude naked while you’re engaging in intercourse with his friend. “How’s it going, bro? Good night?”

“Great night,” says Roommate, pleasantly.

Cheap White Wine

(Hanging out in room; bonding)

The boy stays the night, pretty against my pillow in the clear-lit morning, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is later Saturday, my head on Roommate’s lap as we lay on the couch talking.

“We have to chat about last night,” Roommate says.

Oh God, oh shit, I think, he felt icky. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “Did I make you uncomfortable? Do you want me to put up a curtain? I really don’t get laid usually. It was totally out of the ordinary.”

“No, no, you’re fine,” he says. “I just wanted to say it sounded like you were having a great time last night, and I’m really happy for you.”

His hands are in my hair. One time a few years ago, when I thought I was maybe sexily crush- ing on him, I asked Roommate at a party if he thought he’d ever want to sleep with me.

“I think you’re beautiful,” he said. “But I don’t want to have sex with you.”

The wine is sweet on the couch mid-after- noon, his hands are cool, and I’m sleepy. My brain turns over, like smooth stones, a couple HD lines:

So, when you had risen

from all the lethargy of love and its heat, you would have summoned me,

me alone,

and found my hands,

beyond all the hands in the world,

cold, cold, cold,

intolerably cold and sweet.

My Friend’s Margarita

($12; Border Café)

You know what else is intolerably cold and sweet, and also alcoholic? A margarita. Three of us are at a table at Border, me and The Queers, friends I’ve known, loved, and been flamboy- antly gay with since freshman year. She has a margarita; he’s digging into the fried shrimp; I have singlehandedly finished off our second chip basket. Like the gayest-ass version of Sex and the City, we are catching up on the music of the pre- vious evening.

“No, no,” he’s saying, “it’s a little bit more of a groan–you know, like a low groaning.”

“Like a moan or a groan?” I ask. “I’m a moaner. Not a groaner.”

“You know, like a low-pitched–ughhhhhh,” he says.

“Not like a breath? Not like a–uha-uha-uha- uha.”

“Or what about a, you know, a–mmmph. Mmmmmmph.”

We pay the bill and bundle up. She’s in love, he’s high, I’m a little bit of both. We link arms. We are everything. We huddle into the slushy night.