My next intended one-night stand, in some ways, ended up a failure. He returned again and again.
Ben, a stuntman from Iowa, was a new guy from work. We flirted like high schoolers. One night I noticed he had a milk stain on his apron from frothing a cappuccino. “Did you get excited?” I asked, lowering my eyes to the splat near his crotch.
“Only for you,” he said, smiling.
At the Christmas party, I decided I was going to have Ben. I sat down across from him at one of the tables and pointed to a roll of candy, a gag gift he’d opened from his Secret Santa. “I want one,” I told him.
He flipped an orange candy into his mouth. “Come and get it.” I leaned across the table, cluttered with empty martini glasses. I put my lips to his and stole the candy in one lickety-swoop.
His eyes widened. “Here,” he said, popping a second candy into his
mouth, “have another one.”
Ben came back to my apartment that night. We were in the living room for five minutes before I led him to my bedroom. He stopped in the doorway. I kept walking toward the bed. I stripped down to my underwear and crawled underneath the sheets, my cinematic way of lletting him know he could have me. He didn’t budge. He raked his fingers through his blond hair, unsure if a girl who had just consumed seven fruity martinis and stumbled up the stairs was what he wanted at that moment. He got into bed, and we fooled around until I fell asleep. We started to grab drinks after work, and a few nights a week, he’d
come home with me. We made out, groped, cuddled some, but I didn’t understand why he hesitated to have penetrative sex. If sex wasn’t the thing that kept him coming back, then maybe it was the tease of it, I assumed.
The nights Ben and I didn’t work together, neither of us called the other. He was a bit immature (he called vaginas “kootzers”) and liked to keep conversations breezy (it was unclear if he felt deeply about anything other than Iowa and football). I didn’t know if he was dating anyone else, but the way he didn’t rush out of bed in the morning, lingering to joke around, putting all his weight on me in a move he called “the crusher,” how some days we even got dressed and grabbed huevos rancheros, was enough for me. Clarity on our status would have opened me up to rejection. That he kept showing up, that he made me smile and asked little of me in return, was the best I couldn’t ask for.
Reprinted with permission from Local: A Memoir by Jessica Machado (Little A). Local is available from Amazon.