Moonlight

There’s an affinity between women and the moon. Everyone knows that, but it’s most pronounced when it comes to her breasts. That’s something I wouldn’t learn for sure until years later, but there behind the stadium, it was something we both instinctively knew without even talking about it. We both looked at her tits in the moonlight, and we smiled like idiots because it was all so obvious. I bent my head and worshipped her breasts with my mouth, my tongue circling her nipples as Jessica stood and caressed my head, looking down at me, her blouse hanging loose around her arms. I still remember the little whimpering, gasping sounds she made, the way she hunched her shoulders and hissed with excitement when I touched her just so.

I might as well have been worshipping the moon, the way I worshipped her tits. I was still a poet then, and I’d been struggling to explain those vague longings I felt when looking at the moon, or at snow falling in a river, or the gathering clouds of a thunderstorm, or any of these other images that stuck in my mind and stirred something inside me. It’s taken me years to realize that those longings are the same ones I feel with a woman: a sexual ache that goes beyond the need to just get laid and get off. Beauty can be carnal as much as it can be abstract, and it was beauty I was responding to. Something inside me that was bigger than me; as big as the world, maybe bigger.

Jessica wasn’t a poet, thank God, and she finally lost patience with me and pulled me down onto the blanket. Those were different days, and girls were different than they are now. Those were still the days of what they called the sexual revolution, and sex was always possible, but it wasn’t inevitable. Girls especially were confused as to how they should behave and what they should expect, so of course men were confused too. So when Jessica reached for my cock—actually reached out and grabbed it through my pants—I forgot all about poetry….