by Alison Tyler
In the morning I experienced my first-ever hangover. For hours, I lay on the slim twin bed and stared at the ceiling, willing the rushing sound in my head to subside. When I eventually took a chance at walking upright, I realized that I’d missed the cafeteria’s sole Saturday daytime meal. If I wanted to eat I’d have to wait until six p.m., or fend for myself. Miserable, but yearning for sustenance, I took a taxi a mile off campus to the nearest grocery store. For a long time I wandered aimlessly up and down the aisles, filled with an overpowering craving for something, anything, but not knowing precisely what. After choosing two items with the care that some women use when buying expensive jewelry, I took my place in line at the checkout. My self-prescribed day-after cure was a bottle of tomato juice and a can of Pringles (the only things in the whole store that seemed even mildly appealing).
It was while I was standing there with my red plastic basket in hand that I started to become beautiful.
I didn’t know the transformation was happening right away. All I knew was that the handsome, dark-haired, forty-something man next to me in line was staring at me, his head angled so that he could look at me over his shades. I felt myself flush, pale skin turning scarlet, embarrassed because I had on the clothes I’d worn during the festivities the evening before, the clothes I’d ultimately slept all night in: faded blue jeans, a rah-rah-style University T-shirt in Bruin colors, and a thin navy blue hoodie. My turbulent raven curls had escaped from their standard ponytail style, falling well past my shoulders to reach the middle of my back. Purple smudges of fatigue made my brown eyes look even darker than usual. I hadn’t bothered with makeup of any kind.
Nervousness made me bite into my bottom lip. I felt over-exposed beneath the fluorescent lighting and underprepared for a confrontation with a stranger. I tried to look extremely interested in the multitude of processed foods filling the fat woman’s cart in front of me, but I felt the man staring relentlessly, and so I slowly turned to face him. As if encouraged by my action, he took a step closer to me and, in a low, soft voice, he whispered, “You have a look.”
The way he said the words gave me an unexpected wave of confidence. Or maybe it was the lack of sleep talking. I don’t know precisely why, but I met him head on and said, “The drunken, slept in my clothes, barely post-hangover look?”
He shook his head. “That’s not it. Something else. Something special.”
I bit my lip again, harder this time. Here was a true Hollywood-style line, but I was no Hollywood starlet. Flustered and confused, I looked down at my white Keds, looked out the window at the half-filled parking lot, looked up at the bars of ugly lighting. Suddenly it was my turn to pay for my groceries, and I fumbled in my pocket for my folded bills, then grabbed the change and my small paper bag of supplies and started to leave the store. The man abandoned his own few items on the gray conveyor belt and hurried after me.
“Where are you going?” he asked, his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t flinch away from him, but I pulled back, surprised by the power in his touch.
“Back to campus. I have a cab over there—” I gestured to the far corner of the parking lot. The blacktop glittered where shards of broken glass had melted into the oily asphalt.
“Tell him to go. I’ll take you.” He hesitated, as if he could sense the insecurity that had cloaked me for so many years, as if he could actually feel it. “Anywhere,” he promised, “I’ll take you. Wherever you need. Wherever you want to go.”
I looked at him carefully. Here was the exact situation my parents had spent my entire teenage life worrying about and doing their best to protect me from. I was going to take a ride with a man I didn’t know. And all their warding off of evil spirits did nothing to stop me. For some reason I obeyed his command, paying off the cab and following him to the expensive, shiny silver sports car parked nearby. The car gleamed like foil in the bright sunlight.
“You should never accept a ride with a stranger,” he told me severely as he opened the passenger door. “Especially a stranger in Los Angeles.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you choosing to ride with me?”
I smiled. I had been given the perfect answer. “You have a look,” I said, and he laughed as he got into the driver’s side and then slid an unmarked cassette into the tape deck. “I’m a music producer,” he told me. “I just heard this tape for the first time. The boy’s going to be huge.”
It was Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Introducing the Hardline According to . . .” and that music is embedded in my mind as a soundtrack to what happened next. The man drove me to his house high up in the Hollywood Hills where the movie stars live. He led me through the huge, well-decorated rooms, all the way to the mammoth patio in back. There, he gently took my clothes off my body and had me touch myself while he watched. And I was beautiful. For ten minutes in the eighties, I was so beautiful it was hard to handle.
I’d never done something like this before. Technically, I was a virgin. I’d had some kissing experience in high school, some backseat petting at a local drive-in theater, but shyness had kept me pure. Now, in the heat of the day, I touched myself while a stranger watched. I ran my hands over my body. I let my fingertips graze my nipples until they stood up hard and erect. I kept my eyes on the man as I let one hand wander lower, reaching to touch my pussy while he watched. The pool behind him was a true, aqua blue. The sky above matched that Technicolor brightness. Standing there on the tiled deck, looking out at his multi million dollar view, I put on a show with my nakedness and my roving touch.
“That’s right,” he said, nodding, his voice hoarse as if he were as surprised by my actions as I was. “Do that.”
He was seated on a deck chair, with his hands on his thighs, his sunglasses low down on his nose so he could look at me over the rim. I felt power in being naked. Felt a power in the way he drank in every touch of my fingertips on my stripped-bare skin. It was as if he were touching me as well. When my fingers found the wetness coating my lips, he sighed before I did. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back, arching my slim hips forward, running my hands over my hipbones. The tiles were hot under my bare feet. The air was still and clear. My hair tickled against my naked back. My eyelashes fluttered against my cheeks.
I knew that he wouldn’t touch me. Not unless I invited him to. Not unless I asked. But I didn’t. I didn’t need anything from him except his gaze. Because the way he stared at me – that’s what did it. That was the magic that made me beautiful. I used my fingers to spread my nether lips wide apart. I ran my thumbs up and down over the ridge of my clit, first my right thumb, then my left, then both together, vying for control, until I knew that I was seconds away from coming. I touched myself harder, my eyes closed tighter, my whole body flexed as I waited for the change to take me away.
My mind was filled to bursting with images. I saw myself relaxing with a beer the night before, letting my guard down for the first time ever. I saw myself the way this man must have seen me, unwound, let loose from the tight confines I’d kept myself in all my life. I saw myself opening up, from the split of my body, from the cages within. This picture of freedom brought me to the brink. For me, there was nothing more freeing than standing naked in front of a total stranger – a man whose name I didn’t even know – and letting him see everything.
He said, “Oh, God,” when I came. He said the words for me, so that I didn’t have to, and then, as if my pleasure had released him, he took off his sunglasses and came closer, on his knees on the patio, so very close to me, but he still didn’t touch me. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, as I brought my fingertips to my lips and slowly licked my own juices away.
“Don’t stop,” he said, and I knew from the sound of his voice that if I chose to, I could ask him for things. That he’d give me whatever I wanted. But all I wanted from him was his gaze. “Do it again,” he said, “please make yourself come again.”
With my fingers wet from my mouth, I parted my pussy lips for him, but this time, I slid two
fingers deep inside myself. He was close now, his breath on my skin, and I pushed forward with my hips again, feeling his hair softly tickling against my naked thighs. I let him watch me from inches away as I fucked myself. I let him see everything, the way my clit grew so engorged with the heat from within. The way I worked myself hard with my fingers, thrusting my wrist upward against my body, slamming my hand inside me when the need grew stronger and then stronger still. I used only my right hand this time, my thumb rubbing back and forth over my clit, and when I felt the climax building, I put my left hand on his head and twined my fingers through his thick, dark hair, grabbing onto him, anchoring him as I came a second time.
“So beautiful,” he said in that same low, steady voice. “You have this look, this god damn beautiful quality. I knew when I first saw you—”
I picked up my clothes from around me on the tiles and I dressed carefully, not hurrying. I felt as if I’d never hurry again, never be nervous again. When I was ready, he drove me back to my dorm, as he’d promised he would. Delivered me back in perfect condition, unmarred and unhurt, although I wasn’t the same person. Not at all. I’d transformed under his gaze. I’d changed.
I guess, sometimes that’s all it takes, one person’s gaze, one person’s opinion, to make all the difference. Like the way he’d said that D’Arby would be big – a single person’s opinion, summing up a powerful truth. It happens all the time in the media, the way it happened for me that time in L.A. In fact, just this weekend, I read a five-star review of Trent D’Arby’s latest CD, and the reviewer wrote: “For ten minutes in the eighties, D’Arby was on top of the world.”
And for almost those same exact ten minutes, I was beautiful. For the first time in my life, I was so fucking beautiful it was hard to handle. Yeah, I’ve been beautiful since. But never like that.
Never again.
Matthew, Mark, Luke & John
Alison Tyler
I didn’t mean to fuck all of them.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Guard the bed that I lie on,
I’m generally not that kind of a girl.
Four corners to my bed
Four angels round my head,
If anything, I’m fiercely monogamous . . . or always have been in the past.
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.
But I’d never tutored four guys before. Never found myself attracted to four different men at the same time. In my defense, it simply couldn’t be helped. They were each so unique, and so willing. And once I’d taken one into my bed, I found turning the next one down too difficult to fathom.
Of course, other people saw the whole situation in a different light:
“Why in the hell are you taking that class?” my mother had asked sternly, when I’d read off my schedule.
“French? I’ve always wanted to learn French.”
“Not French,” she huffed. “The other one.”
“Ancient Greek Art?” I tried next, grimacing at the audible sound of her anger steaming through the phone receiver. “You know I was hoping to go to Athens next summer . . .”
“The religious one,” she interrupted. “The Jesus one.”
I’d signed up for the 8 a.m. Christian Iconography class because it suited my schedule, not my spirituality. I was done by 9:30, able to make 10 a.m. French three days a week, and then finished until my late afternoon Art History lecture, which gave me time for my job at a weekly newspaper.
“It’s indecent,” my mother insisted. “A nice Jewish girl like you, taking a class like that . . .” FIX THIS . . . She wanted indecent? Indecent had nothing to do with the class, and everything to do with my fantasies.
The iconography class was my last choice, but the only one still open by the time my lottery number for class sign-ups was called. I kept reminding myself that it was important to take the appropriate amount of credits each semester. I even pretended that Christian Iconography was bound to be useful in my future life. Although how useful in my future love life, I couldn’t really appreciate.
Three days a week, I found myself walking down the steep hill from dorm to quad, trying desperately to memorize the various icons we’d been discussing. For a non-practicing Jewish girl, the subject might as well have been in Greek. (Except I was doing fine in Ancient Greek Artifacts.)
“Do you like it?” my mom asked after the first week.
“Sure,” I told her. “What’s not to like?”
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Guard the bed that I lie on.
I sing-songed the nursery rhyme as I headed into class.
Four corners to my bed
Four angels round my head,
And I took my standard spot at the back of the lecture hall, to-go coffee cup in hand, ready to learn more about art with a Christian perspective.
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.
The truth was, I couldn’t focus fully on the slides, or the droning words of the professor. Couldn’t focus properly because of my fellow classmates. Well, four to be precise. The handsome jocks in the row in front of me, who always showed up late, and who seemed to have found themselves in this lecture for the same reasons I did – nothing else was available.
I listened to them joking with each other, never saw them open a notebook, never even saw them glance up at the slide-show. And I nicknamed them: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The dark-haired “Matthew” was the man. Redheaded “Mark” was the lion. “Luke” had shaved his head, punk-rock style, and sported more than his fair share of tattoos. He was definitely the ox. And “John,” the quietest, most delicately drawn, the eagle.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Guard the bed that I lie on.
In spite of their intrusion into my fantasies, I tried my best. I took copious notes. Created flashcards. Posted assorted images on my bulletin board and over my bed. I was determined to show my disbelieving family that I could ace a class I had no interest in. Although my interest grew the week before midterms, when the foursome sent over “John” to ask me a question.
“Study with us?”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re rancid at this. Seriously. We lost a bet and had to take the class. I have no desire to take it over again, and even less of a desire to fail without trying. You look like you know what you’re doing. Will you study with us tomorrow night? Cram with us. Help us out.”
“Group studying has never worked for me,” I told him honestly.
“You’d rather do us one on one?”
The way he asked the question made me wonder if he might actually be suggesting something else entirely. But I pretended not to hear the innuendo, and I nodded. “Sure, that would be better.” And I watched as he made out a little study schedule for the week we had left. Matthew on Monday and Thursday. Mark on Tuesday and Friday. Luke on Wednesday and Saturday.
“That only leaves Sunday for you,” I said.
“I’m the smartest of the four of us,” he grinned.
When the first one showed up – twenty minutes late, with a brown paper bag in hand and no backpack in sight – I started to get the feeling that maybe betting on classes wasn’t the only gamble this little group took.
“I’ve got flashcards,” I told him, ushering him into my dorm room.
“I’ve got vodka.”
“I don’t think that’s going to help you pass,” I smiled, trying not to sound too condescending.
“But it might help me get there – ” he nodded toward my bed.
“I heard you lost a bet. That’s why you’re taking the class.”
He nodded. He didn’t look the least bit sheepish about this information.
“So you’re a gambler?”
Another nod as he opened the vodka.
“Then let’s place a bet of our own. You name the items on the flashcards – get at least ten correct – and I’ll have a glass of that.”
&
nbsp; “I didn’t bring glasses.”
“A swig then,” I said brightly. But “Matthew” had other plans. “Let’s try this,” he countered. “You take off your clothes and lie down on the bed. I’ll cover you all over with the flashcards. If I get one correct, I’ll take the card away. Until you’re totally naked.”
“How’s that going to help you ace the exam?”
“I’m doomed,” he said. “I just want to have a little fun.”
Against my better judgment, I stripped down and placed the cards strategically over my body. Matthew turned away, gentlemanly, while I got comfortable. When I was ready, he came up on the bed at my side, gazing at the images on the cards, doing his best to try to remember what each icon represented. He failed miserably, but was such a good sport, that I wound up laughing, giggling, as the cards fell away, and then stopping when I saw him staring at my naked body.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Guard the bed that I lie on.
The words spiraled in my head as he slid off his own clothes and met me on the mattress.
“Who would have thought Christian Iconography would be such a fucking turn-on?” he growled right before he came.
On Tuesday, I vowed to be better prepared. I had books spread out on the bed, so that there was no chance for foul play, or foreplay. And I dressed myself in a type of no-nonsense costume – clad in my oldest gray sweats, my dark hair scraped back in a pony tail, my glasses in place. “Mark” didn’t seem to notice. He showed up with his backpack, unlike Matthew. But it didn’t hold books, a binder, notebook, or even a pencil. Instead, as I watched, in awe, he drew out the sexiest little lingerie set, tags showing that he’d correctly guessed my size.
“I’ve got this thing for brunettes in black,” he said, handing over the lacy outfit. “Especially ones who wear those cute little intellectual glasses like yours.”