S L I C K is an erotica series for A+ members about titillation, torture, fucking and getting off.

I wake up on Day 15 in the usual way at first: a few naive seconds of general life appreciation followed by a scramble to recall an undoubtedly demented erotic dream about a celebrity or platonic friend I’d not previously considered sexually, which typically overlaps with remembering everything like a ceiling collapsing onto my soul.

But today, a triumphant finale: TODAY I WILL BE HUGGING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING.

On my nightstand next to my alarm clock, a circular cross-stitch reads “ANTICIPATION IS THE PUREST FORM OF PLEASURE,” positioned to replace the empty spot left by the framed photograph of me and my ex-wife Ali in Iceland pretending to be happy. It’s a Flaubert quote I honestly only know ’cause Joey Potter’s professor cited it late in Season Five of Dawson’s Creek, which I’ve recently finished rewatching in its entirety while learning to cross-stitch. Next to it, my phone in its charging dock is lit up with texts:

Chris: i haven’t been this excited about hugging somebody since I met my internet boyfriend at Kinkos in 9th grade
which was, honestly, a bust
for obvious reasons
also he got an immediate boner
but he helped me collate my zine
WHY AREN’T YOU AWAKE YET I’VE BEEN FROTHING AT THE MOUTH SINCE 5AM

Erica: I’M UP I’M UP I’M FROTHY
this is gonna be better than falafel day at camp ranana i can feel it

Chris: don’t talk about food i had a baked potato and a cilantro omelet for breakfast

I make my pour-over coffee and send her a pic of my last egg, frying in a thin sheen of oil, almost ready for its debut on a half-stale sourdough bread-end.

Chris: truly can’t wait to quarantine with a top chef!!!!

Erica: k bud i’m showering and then i’m powering
and by “powering” i mean coming over
which is a power move

Chris: i’ll be jogging in place

Erica: i’m not even gonna wash my hair, that’s how speedy this is gonna go down

I’d originally typed “i’m not even gonna masturbate,” but self-consciously deleted it, although it was true, even if what I said about my hair was not. We’ve been friends for nearly eight years and basically become best friends over the past six weeks as the only “single and living alone” members of our social group, but we’d actually had sex when we first met — back when having sex was still how I met people — but it had ended awkwardly and now we never talk about sex at all. Especially not now. I’m going into a platonic co-quarantine plan (created because we’re both depression-prone extroverts and I was crying a lot and I think she felt sorry for me) directly following the dregs of an eventually-sexless marriage and subsequent weeks of isolation, including this final two of Extreme Quarantine. My desire is reckless and entire. If it incidentally lands on Chris I’m confident she’ll rebuff me, out of disinterest or responsibility — both of us surely knowing that fucking could fuck the whole thing up.

Meanwhile, I’d been spending hours of lockdown in the bathtub with a waterproof vibe, fantasizing about being young and dumb and reckless again. Most of the sex I had in my early twenties I remember barely, if at all, but I always hang on to a few frames: In the private dining room of The Polo Lounge after hours where the sous-chef had told me to wait, the moment her dildo entered my throat and she said I’m gonna throat-fuck you and pulled my hair. The wide-eyed delight in the blue eyes of the scrawny blonde comic when she got her whole fist inside me. Looking in the mirror after getting fucked by a bad writer and realizing I had my period and there were bloody handprints all over my ass from where she’d slapped me.

Chris and I had fucked exactly once. I found her leaning against the kitchen counter at a mutual friend’s house party between me and the bottle of cheap wine I’d come in to fetch, wearing too many shirts and an absent smile — a shaggy burst of dark curly hair falling in her face, her forehead and neck just beginning to sweat, smoky eyes brooding, a vague aura of beer and uppers. But at least she stood up straight, which it seemed like nobody did anymore.

Chris’s frames, which I did not masturbate to: 1. Straddling her on her sofa in just a thong and her, fully dressed including even her shoes. 2. In her bedroom, she drunkenly instructed me to look away while she took off the two too-small sports bras she’d macgyvered into a layman’s binder on account of the process being “undignified,” and I’d rolled onto my bare stomach and, once she’d disrobed, she bent over to kiss my back and I could feel her nipples grazing my skin. 3. A part just afterwards in her kitchen, when she was microwaving pizza naked and I was leaning, staring at her, tasting a tinge of blood on my lip.

The next morning she’d made me pancakes in her underwear and an unbuttoned denim shirt and told me she wasn’t looking for a relationship right now. I’d rolled my eyes and immediately transitioned us into friends mode as some kind of protest against her presumption, refusing even a perfunctory goodbye kiss when I left shortly thereafter. Later that night at a loungey queer dance party I saw her again, as the vague ring of humans who’d eventually comprise my social circle had begun forming with both of us inside it.

I eagerly plop two suitcases — mostly sweatpants, face serums and quiet vibrators — into the trunk of my dented Prius, and drive right out of my head.

I’m anxious on the porch of her sky-blue Craftsman, and when she opens the door, I catch the smell of good weed and maybe cookies before barreling into her like a bull, wrapping my arms over her upper back while she takes my lower quadrant. My God. A body. A real live human body, the reliable slope of shoulder blades, the knots of her spine. Somebody else’s skin and shirt and a smell that isn’t my smell, her softness against my bones and edges. Her hair has grown out past her chin. I look like a lion, she’d said on FaceTime.

Hey buddy, she says to the door I just closed.

Hi, I say to her foyer, squeezing. A body!

I love bodies, Chris says.

Same, I say, and Chris squeezes mine.

It’s time for us to let go.

But I can’t.

If I’m not moving away from the hug I should, at least, change it, let it evolve, justify its ongoing performance and to that end I hold tighter, clasping my forearms with opposite hands while subtly shifting my whole body flush against hers.

The thing about bodies is that they line right up. There are variations based on weight, frame, height, sure. Chris has got maybe two inches on me, for example — a minimal variation. Ali and I were exactly the same height, same shoe size, everything. She was the last person to hug me before now, I realize, the impersonality of it crushing me more than her actually leaving.

What I’m telling you is that it’s hard not to line up — foot to foot, thigh to thigh, chest to chest (breast to breast), mouth to mouth. We are pressing so hard into each other, fusing bits, like the part of that meditation app I barely used, where you think about your toes and then your calves, your thighs, like my entire body is leaving itself and then flooding back in, over and over, like I’m getting a body for a first time, sliding into it (or her) like a sleeve. I want to lick her shins.

Fuck, our indefinite platonic co-quarantine is 45 seconds in and my acute thirst is already fogging the air, wet between my legs where our cunts are so proximate and maybe something’s sparking there

Fuck, our indefinite platonic co-quarantine is 45 seconds in and my acute thirst is already fogging the air, wet between my legs where our cunts are so proximate and maybe something’s sparking there. Should I excuse myself, go hump the Lemon Lime tree in her backyard, a mouthful of sour pulp —

And then.

Her nails, suddenly, digging in — I nearly scream, I nearly come, these erotic sharp digs — she’s grabbing me, she’s grabbing me? I counter, I grab like an animal, trying to scratch her off and crawl inside.

This already feels foolish, incidental, desperate even, but if she’s not gonna stop me then I can’t stop myself. My new body, the one that flooded back in? It’s not like the old one, untouched and contained for so long; first because Ali didn’t want it and then for its asymptomatic potential.

This new body is slick, starved, wanting. I should’ve masturbated in the shower. I need to be pushed against a wall. She smells like the ocean.

You smell like the ocean.

What’s the ocean?

I move my hand from her back to her bicep, guiding her arm off my back, her hand towards my waist and stepping back ever-so-slightly so there’s room for her to slide through but not enough for eye contact. She calls my bluff, tips my chin back to get my eyes right at hers, confirming that I am consenting, willing, open—

That’s — her finger at the base of my stomach, I gasp, she goes further.

I go on: the ocean?

Bless her heart she forgives the metaphor and dives right in, my cunt opening with my legs, and I jerk my head back like being snatched out of the pack by a claw, the thought of what might happen next as thrilling as when it does. I reel forward and look her in the eyes as her fingers glide from teasing my clit into more, my mouth slack and open.

That look on a self-satisfied top’s face when they’ve gotten in there good, when everything’s wet around their fingers (it feels like two) — eyes squinting, closing for one second right when they’re in as far as it can go, like they’ve never felt something better grazing their knuckles than your cunt. The lower lip bite, the deep breath in, the exhale. I almost scream no when she pulls her hand out, but before I can she shoves me against the opposite wall and kisses me like a tiger attack, marking my neck for nobody to see while thrusting back in.

Her fingers rocking inside me, maybe I’m eight years ago, fresh-faced and unhurt, when things felt easy and Ali finger-fucked me in the back row of the movie theater midway through Les Miserables while Chris’s then-girlfriend fell asleep on her shoulder in the row ahead of us.

She slides off her sweatpants before sitting on her expensive couch — get up here — and I undo my drawstring (a frame: drunk, my high school boyfriend put his hand on my thigh and said my pajama pants were his favorite, and Astrid sitting next to me whispered easy access into my hair and kissed my ear where he couldn’t see) and I straddle her. She pushes the crotch of my underwear to the side and I ride three fingers, wanting more already, so much space left to fill.

She is as ample as I am light, a lushness I can sink into that can maybe hold or massacre me or both. Reflexively, losing myself: This was not the plan

Chris laughs and I want to lick her teeth right off. I’m sorry.

No you’re not.

In her bedroom she takes her shirt off but this time, I can watch. Gone are the dark grooves, like tire tracks on her shoulders and around her ribs, where the bras dug in. Everything’s smooth and level, the strain replaced by two scars slightly darker and redder than the brown skin of her chest, almost meeting, still slightly raised, like inverted parentheses beneath an empty clause. I remember the fresh scars from just after; Chris, high on Vicodin while Ali made her dinner and I drank an entire bottle of wine.

Beneath her collarbone, tickling the top of her now-muscled chest, a Gloria Anzaldúa quote in block letters: I Change Myself, I Change the World. She descends, the soft electricity of her fingertips teasing my nipples, circling like a stakeout, and I’m breathless with how much better this moment is than any recent memory.

Then she sucks on one nipple, the other, they harden and I think i have been inside for so long and I say I need you inside me. I have been entirely contained I have been safe I haven’t let anybody in now I need her whole hand.

I want her to break me open so I can go from feeling nothing to feeling everything at once, every light on the Operation board buzzing, every body part and every minute up for grabs. She yanks at my hair with hunger like a thing she might eat so I can’t move, her mouth hot on my mouth, her leg shoved between mine, rubbing me, we’re drenched in sweat and come, which is fine, this already feels like swimming and also trying to swallow an entire swimming pool, but in a good way, and everybody’s hair in the sun afterwards will be perfect

I want her to break me open so I can go from feeling nothing to feeling everything at once, every light on the Operation board buzzing, every body part and every minute up for grabs.

Between my thighs she bites me, soft at first and then firmer, getting closer.

I haven’t um, in a while I say when she reaches to slide my boyshorts off. Surely she knows what I mean.

She laughs, I could not care less.

Illustration by Raisa Yavneh

Pretend to be into it, I request, say you have an enchanted forest fetish

I don’t have to pretend, are her words before the tip of her tongue is at the tip of my clit and it is as cool and precise as my cunt is sweltering and everywhere as she takes me into her fully, palms seizing my ass like lifting a bowl to drink from,

I want all of you inside me.

Her whole body seizes in delight, like I’ve handed her an unexpected gift, twitching and aching to unwrap —

Are you sure?

I can take it.

Slowly, of course, at first. One, two, three, four, yes, opening to fill up and she moans fuck you feel so good, and I am agape, surrendered. That’s how I come, eventually: her whole fist inside me, her slack-jawed slippery face enraptured, safe, contained, entire, inside.

“So uh,” I wince, “Should we go to Ralph’s now or…?”

“You know what’s kinda funny but also super embarrassing?” Chris ignores my question to ask. Her fingers are tight around the pillow she’s got one cheek on, looking straight at me, like we’re two girls sharing secrets at a sleepover.

“Uh, my divorce?”

“C’mon,” she smiles. “So like, remember when we had sex a million years ago?”

“Honestly, barely, but yes, of course.”

“I thought you… thought I was bad.”

“In… bed?”

“Yeah.”

“First of all, I mean, was it bad?”

“You were there —“

“I mean, I was drunk and it was ages ago! But I remember feeling good about it, like it was fun.”

“You didn’t come.”

I groan. “Oh my GOD.”

“What??”

“That’s not the fucking barometer of good sex you idiot,” I grab an extraneous pillow and whack her with it, her attempt to block me immediately thwarted. “Anyhow, we had fun! We did what I wanted to do.”

“But then we never did it again!”

“Did you want to?” I squint. “I would’ve! But it didn’t seem like you did.”

“Honestly, back then….” she runs her fingers through her hair. “I probably just wanted you to want to do it again. Like for my fragile butch ego.”

“You do remember that the very first thing you told me afterwards was that you were not looking for a relationship right now.”

She cringes. “Yeah, that sounds like me.”

“It was just so presumptuous! We hadn’t even been on a proper date, we’d just made out in a hallway and fucked on your giant bed—“

“A king for a king, I always say.” A beat. “What do we do now?”

“Grocery store?” I’m starving.

“No I mean, this—“

“Well for starters,” I roll over and start rooting around for my shirt on the floor. She gives my bare ass a whack. I flip back. “I’m not really looking for a relationship right now —“

“I hate you.”

She’s still topless, her skin perfect against royal blue bedsheets. “You know,” I reveal, “this is the first time I’ve had sex in like, a year?”

“But y’all just broke up like two months ago.”

“Mhm, yup.”

Her eyes widen like little plates. “Oh. WOW.”

I grimace.

“C’mere,” she paws at me, and I slide closer to her, facing her now as her fingers tiptoe back to my cunt, still damp and swollen. I breathe in and she breathes out as she slides one finger back in to where she’s recently slaughtered me, her eyes like a dare, and it’s only fair that I reach under the covers and slip into her, like a battle of the bands, rocking fervently, kissing, digging, scratching.

She comes after flipping me over and fucking me while her clit rides the ridge between her knuckles and she lets her full weight over me afterwards, it’s better than the weighted blanket but also more complicated.

“We’ve gotta stop fucking long enough to buy some fucking food.” I hope she doesn’t cut her own hair, I like grabbing it.

“Okay okay,” she rolls off me and nods. “But can I fuck you again later?”

I nod silently.

“Are you nervous?”

I nod again. I don’t know what happens next. About this. About anything. It felt good to not fear the possibility of my body for a minute, to not fear harming somebody else’s with my own, to feel the exact opposite of that. To feel something starting instead of everything ending, or pausing.

I roll over and scamper up to the window, drawing back a curtain. The street below is empty. Across the street, a small woman in a mask is walking a large dog. Not a single car drives by, but an alarm blares softly in the distance, coming closer.

“We’re gonna do the lasagna tonight, right?” Chris is futzing with her hair in the mirror.

“Yeah,” I say, as the woman with the dog exits my purview and everything below me is empty and strange, like in a movie. “That’s the plan.”

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