Rules for talking about sex

I will be talking about sex. There will be an audience. What is said in the privacy of my own Moleskine notebook will become something that is said and cannot be retracted. My mouth has a habit of opening and remaining so, an open flu and all the creaking and echoes of my life all there to hear if you listen closely. So there must be rules.

Do not talk about the husband. This is the first rule, although this is a rule that I will have trouble keeping. Statuesque, becoming more rich and gorgeous with every passing day. I sometimes drag myself out of bed so that I can be there to watch him step into the shower. Unclothed, he is something to be savoured. Still, the sex is a no go zone and he is off limits to me.

My crushes. I can speak of my crushes but in the scheme of things they will swell to disproportionate sizes without the boundaries of my husband to contain them. I could speak of fantasy, unnamed bodies that I rub myself against to gain the greatest pleasure. But these are real people. People can be bruised. I must not be rough with real people. Perhaps I should not speak about my crushes.

Pornography? Certainly I can speak about pornography, but what was once rich and bloodfilled has no shrunk down to nothing but dust. I pick at the crumbs of pornography these days, but the orgasms that accompany them are dry and blow away at the slightest disturbance of the air.

Still I will need to talk about sex. I pencil the dates into my diary and it is a conundrum. What to say? What to say?

Rules of writing sex

Back to the grindstone. I have been wallowing in the play of truth telling. Just a game, truth or dare. I have been picking the easiest path towards truth. Now is the time to hunker down and dare myself to think about the craft of it. My craft. My only superpower which is sex.

Leaving space. I think this might be the first rule. Space for the reader to sink into. Space for you to slip into my skin. You want to touch what I touch, bite down into flesh or slip your fingers into one place or another. You want me to lead you to the adventure and to stay with you, see you through it all. If I were to leave before the deal is sealed you will be left with this lover that you do not know and perhaps nothing would come of it. Like that time I set it up for you and it untangled one drunken thread at a time when I left the building.

But I must hold back in the actual act. I must slip in one finger and allow you space for two of your own. I must kiss one breast and leave the other free for your mouth. Sometimes our lips must touch over a single nipple. Writing like doing. Leaving space for the other. Raymond Carver does it. James Salter does it. We will do it together, you and I in the same heady tussle. You and I make love to them.

good and bad orgasms

I had an orgasm that was a disappointment. I came fresh from a shower and, despite the lessons learned I opened my laptop and trawled for porn. Nothing. A blip. The blood rising to the surface and retreating again. The lips of my vagina barely thickening. No moisture. No joy. Is that all? And the two men still going through the motions, and the girl still lying there looking half glad, half scared.

So dressed then and wishing it had gone some other way. How can I let it end like that? The bus waits. I know. I think about the time it wil take to get to the day job. Bookshop awaits but there is more. Surely there is more. Real world. Nothing pornographic. Sweet moments. A little love. People conversing with just an edge of flitation. Clothed hugs. Clothed kissing. Old old old, I am getting old when people brushing past each other on the street eclipses double entry and a cum shot.

Story by Kathryn Santic

Kathryn Santic is a young writer from Griffith University.

alive

That feeling that you are in your skin. It is hormonally driven probably. A hunger that is almost vampyric in its intensity. The idea that some one other has blood and bodily fluids that you might roll on the tongue. The idea of filling your mouth with it. When this feeling comes on you know you are amongst the living.

Months of hiding inside the thick dullness of your skin have not prepared you for the sudden rush of lust. The day to day can overtake you. A trudge toward nothing. Smile. Laugh. Chat. But when there is no one there you know that you are emptied out. There is no smile to be had without performative imperative. There is no opening out to the elements without the scent of sex.

This, then, is the dilemma. Thin skin singing you are open to the pain that comes with being alive. But even with the pain it seems better than the dull thud, a migrainous gray. The safe and empty world without the sex.

So give me the sex. Let me teeter on the edge of it. Let me inhale it torturously through open pores. I chose this. I accept this. I live with this.

unresolved sexual tension

You can see it between them. It is in the way they fight like kids in a playground, throwing stones. He says he does not like her but if you step back far enough that seems unlikely. He is not nasty like this with anyone else. She is not mean. It is against their fundamental natures. They tussle. I watch them. She admits that is what is moving her. He says he is unmoved. Sometimes I believe him. She is not his type. He likes a prettier, quieter, non-threatening kind of little girl. Yet they argy-bargy till I begin to wonder. I can see the wrestling in the bedroom. Inelegant. Half play, half honest agitation.

Come on - I tell him - surely there is some small flame where smoke is billowing.

I am not attracted to her - he tells me. I am curious, but not interested. And suddenly I could slap him. Unresolved sexual tension? or just empathy and a sudden indefensible need to defend her from the hurt that she will surely feel.

wet

surprised because this does not happen. This is not how I am made. I am not the slippery sliding type and yet there is this sudden uncontrollable physical reaction. So rare. So rare to make it an almost unique experience and now my attention is hijacked. I can think of nothing else. Just the way it changes the way I walk. The chafe of my lips against each other, the idea that, although not alone, I might slip my hand in and check the feel of it. I am missing an experience that happens so little that it is almost never. Lake Eyre filling up with water, and me, half a continent away unable to dip my fingers into the clear shallow pool.