Page 65 of Use Me Up

And if we’re coming at this as equals, then it could be a real relationship. Maybe not a lasting one. Maybe not the relationship. But I just got done realizing that I have to fail at love in order to eventually have success, and maybe I can handle this.

He gives me a real, genuine smile.

I smile back, sort of shy, but I feel stripped open and bare now. I feel seen. I feel accepted. It’s good.

“I want to kiss you?” he says, and he sounds shy, too.

I close the distance between us, offering him my lips.

The kiss feels different, somehow, like it’s real and vulnerable in a way that things have never been with us. It wraps all around me, it penetrates any fortresses I’ve built inside me, it makes me feel warm and safe and good.

Ellis and I have sex but it’s different. It’s slower and we’re kissing and gasping against each other, and I feel connected to him. It’s like all the times before, I wasn’t really letting him in, but that I have this time, and there’s space for him here, and he fits here, and we’re tied to each other, almost fused or something. I don’t really have words for it, but it’s achingly sweet and intense.

But I don’t come.

He tries to finish me after, his fingers on the pulse of me, kissing my chin and my cheekbone and whispering in my ear, mostly just things like, “Yeah,” and “Good,” and… I don’t know, I just can’t.

Eventually, he makes me touch myself, and I come in two seconds.

I would puzzle over it more. It bugs me. I wonder if it’s something to do with what we talked about earlier, if I feel worthy of letting him make me come or something, if I think I don’t warrant it from him. But I’m sleepy, and I fall asleep before I can follow any of my wonderings to any real conclusion.

The next day, I’m supposed to work from home, and Ellis says I could do it at his place, but I don’t have my laptop here or anything, so I go back to my apartment. We make plans to see each other later, though, and when I go to his place, I bring everything with me.

Things fall into a rhythm. I’m almost always with him. I work from home for a few days, and then I go into the office on Friday. That’s typically how it works, Monday and Friday I go in, and the rest of the time, I work at home. As an unpaid intern, I don’t exactly have full-time hours’ worth of work, so there’s a lot of downtime.

This means that I observe Ellis’s workout routine, and he tells me all about lifting weights. Unlike cardio-type workouts, which I’ve always done in the past, weight-lifting apparently is only effective if you take days off. It’s two days on, one day off, or that’s how he does it, and he says you have to eat enough calories to be able to build muscle, and I have to say, a lot of this appeals to me more than running myself ragged.

So, I start doing some strength training along with him, and it just feels better than cardio ever did to me for some reason. Cardio always made me feel exhausted and miserable and sweaty. It’s not that I don’t sweat doing strength training, but it’s different. It’s about concentrated bursts of energy release instead of sustained pressure. Of course, Ellis says it’s a long game. You build muscle, but that doesn’t mean you lose fat, not like you would if you were in a calorie deficit or something. It’s more that the muscle burns more calories just by existing, so your body very slowly begins to change shape.

My body does not change shape at all.

But maybe I’ve been too hard on my body and the way it looks.

Maybe.

We have a lot of sex.

I still have trouble coming.

I try to explain it at one point. I’m really frustrated and lying next to him in bed and we’re both naked, and I say that I feel like I don’t know how to communicate with him how and where exactly to touch and what pressure to use and that it’s really easy to lose the thread of my orgasm, that I’ll be climbing for it and then something will go wrong, and that also now it’s become this thing, and every time I get close, I think, Ooh, it’s going to finally happen, he’s going to make me come, and then inevitably, I lose it.

He hovers over me, smiling down on me, and he says that usually he’s controlling his movement when he comes. “I’m inside you, but to get there, I have to move myself the way I like it.”

Oh. I realize that’s maybe true. The way that it works for men is sort of different. He has it easier than me, anyway, because sex is better designed to facilitate his orgasm. “But you can come if I’m using my mouth on you,” I say.

“It takes a while,” he says.

“Not as long as me!”

“I don’t see why it matters, really,” he says. “You know, the next time you go home, you should get your vibrator. We should use that.”

I search his expression. “This doesn’t bother you at all?”

He flops down next to me. “Maybe it should, but I’m a self-centered asshole, as we’ve already established.”

I shove him. “You really are.”

He tells me that it seems like it’s really common for women to be able to come only when they’re on top, and that’s probably because they’re controlling the movement.