Wasted / 225
It was 1 A.M. when he swung around a post, long hair hanging down onto my table, dangling dangerously close to my coffee. I moved my cup. The noise was deafening. It was always packed in there on weekends. Minneapolis being the land often thousand treatment centers, the coffee shops and cafés are often jammed like San Francisco bars, standing room only after 10 P.M., bass pumping through the floor so hard your table throbbed and your books shivered. I was reading Bertrand Russell's Unpopular Essays. His hair was blond and I heard him holler over the din, “HI!” I glanced up and said HI. He asked: CAN I SIT? I answered: NO. He said: MY NAME IS DAVE. I said: GOOD. He sat. He leaned close to me across the small table, stuck out his hand, and said, What's your name? For the next few hours he talked. And talked and talked. I decided that I would sleep with him. I did this, went about mentally seducing men just for kicks. The point was never the sex. I hadn't ever enjoyed sex much, and wouldn't for several years. The point was the game, and the game was not simply to get someone into bed. Men are embarrassingly easy to seduce. The game was to get them to fall in love with you first, or get them to think they were in love with you, think you were the most astonishing woman they'd ever met in their entire lives, and if things went according to plan, fuck them up forever. By about 4 A.M. he had decided he was in love with me. Which, though a little strange, since I'd barely spoken, was fine with me. It's always nice when someone's in love with you. Gives you leverage. I took him home. We made a fire, lay on the floor making abstract plans, lying to each other because we could. We went to bed and stayed there for the weekend. I don't know what happened, precisely, but something did, and I found myself rolling around in the sheets with a man I knew only as Dave and having, arguably, the best sex of my life. Certainly the most startling sex. The most raucous, noisy sex, shocking me in the moments when I would see myself from the outside, unrecognizable, bare and