“Oh, God!” I screamed to Neil, my boyfriend, beside me on the couch. “My toe!”
“That’s what you get for eating dandruff,” he responded.
“It wasn’t dandruff!” I shot back. “And technically I wasn’t eating—there wasn’t any swallowing involved.”
“What else is new?” he smirked, then upped the volume on The Bachelorette.
Neil and I had met six months earlier at a loft party. We’d both gotten headaches from the host’s excessive use of incense and so spent the majority of the evening alone on the fire escape discussing a shared, and vaguely sexual, fascination with Nanny’s legs from Muppet Babies. One month and eight dates later—after a night of mutual tilapia food poisoning—we lay sweating and facing each other on Neil’s plaid futon and decided it was time to be exclusive.
That night, he tapped me on the shoulder to inform me of his feelings.
“What do you want?” I moaned. I hadn’t meant to sound hostile, it’s just that it’s odd being tapped on the shoulder by someone who’s facing you.
“I want to be your boyfriend,” he explained.
I was flattered to be asked and impressed he’d do so in light of this sort of non-sexual physical intimacy.The downside, though, was that such behavior sets a dangerous precedent, and the next thing you know it’s five months later and you’re comfortable enough to chew your own detritus while he’s beside you on the couch. And he’s comfortable enough to let you know he likes The Bachelorette.
Action was required if we cared to change our dangerous pattern. I brainstormed the basic solutions of better underwear, more sex and cleaner genitals before Neil suggested something more dramatic. “My iBook has a camera,” he said. “We could video ourselves.”
I’d rather take a bullet to the crotch than watch myself have sex. I didn’t care to be a killjoy, though, and so I made my own suggestion of a role-play scenario wherein I’d be a mouthy lawyer and Neil, a judge who’d found me in contempt of court.
“Here,” I said, and threw him my terry-cloth robe. “This could be your costume!”
Neil refused it having spotted a non-descript stain on the sleeve, at which point it occurred to me I owned a pair of mauve handcuffs, a parting gift from my mom’s best friend at her third bachelorette party.
“What about these?” I suggested. “These plus the tie from the terry-cloth robe as a blindfold?”
Neil eyed the makeshift tools. “I’d be into that,” he said. “Although, could you do me so I don’t have to be distracted by the color of the handcuffs?”
I figured I ought to say yes, seeing as how I’m not usually tenacious where bedroom repartee is concerned, and after months with Neil, had gotten off my back exactly once on an occasion when he’d hurt his knee on an elliptical machine.
“OK,” I said. “No problem.”
He stripped immediately down to the green American Apparel briefs he wears to feel fetching. “Well, alright then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
I followed Neil the five feet from my living room to bed room, forced his wrists above his head and snapped on the handcuffs. They snagged on his arm hair.
“You’re a bad boy,” I said. “Your hairy wrists are very naughty.”
“I think, actually, that it’s best if you don’t talk,” said Neil. “I think it spoils the mood.”
The criticism hurt my feelings. I’m horribly defensive thanks to an adolescence spent overweight in myriad Gothic fashions, and so when constructively critical ruminations come my way as an adult, I can’t help but hurl insults.
“Well, so does your underwear,” is what I decided on for this occasion. “They make your crotch look like a Ken doll’s.”
Neil sighed and, I’m assuming, rolled his eyes, although I couldn’t be too sure seeing as how they’d been cloaked in a blindfold. “You don’t actually think that,” he said. “You’re just being defensive.”
“No, actually, I’m not,” I snapped back. “It flattens you out till you look like you’re tucking. How would you feel if I strolled through your apartment looking like I’d packed a baby’s leg against my pubic bone?”
“Honestly? I’d think it paired well with your beer gut and your pancake rack.”
Here, I felt the simultaneous urges to cry and say, “Touché.” An adept multi-tasker, I managed both at once.
“Oh, Jesus. I was kidding,” Neil said, inching toward me. “Come here. Let me hold you.” I threw myself against his chest. “Uncuff me first, though,” he went on.“It’s easier that way.”
I obliged the request, settled into his arms and reached for the terry-cloth tie to wipe my tears away.
“Leave them,” he said. “Don’t you know what they say about tears?”
“That they’re salty?” I asked.
“No,” he shook his head. “That they make the best lube.”
I’ve always been seduced by filthy jokes, a fact I write off as a sad attempt to seem edgy; a tick I’ve cultivated so as to convince men of my justbelow-the-surface wild streak. When Neil referenced tears as lube, I laughed and, touched as I was by his spot-on read of my problematic taste for misogynistic jokes— snuggled closer to him.
“Oh, you,” I cooed.
“Oh you,” he answered. I reached for the waistband of his briefs, he for the snap on my Hanes Her Way brassiere and, despite the rocky road that lead us there, we made the sex. And to Neil’s credit (or to mine?) we didn’t even need to use the tears.
Sara Barron is the author of People Are Unappealing: True Stories of Our Collective Capacity to Irritate and Annoy
