thirty minutes

by Sophie

It’s 9:43 a.m. Jamie awoke on the wrong side of the bed, but I didn’t. I awoke full of ideas and thoughts about last night — a date night for Jamie and myself — and was trying to harness the energy to actually produce words. Jamie must have been reading my mind.

“I’m turning into a hardass editor. You are going to post today. Five hundred words, see how long it takes you to do it. Wanna set a timer, or should we do it by word count?”

I scrunch my nose. “I think I wanna do word count.”

“Well, I’m ready to fuck.”

“Give me thirty minutes.”

Since my morning sex is dependent upon the completion of this task, I now sit dutifully in front of my computer and find myself thinking about date night. Jamie and I attended another Bedpost Confessions show and it was yet again a thought-provoking event, but for some reason last night I paid more attention to the attendees than the performers. The whole thing is held in a small independent venue; on all three occasions we have attended, the audience was as large as the building can hold. For people watchers, it’s an extraordinary crowd, even more diverse and fascinating than you could imagine for a group of people who want to watch stories about sex. Last night, watching them mingle and greet friends, I started thinking about what is actually sexy.

Obviously, we all have our predilections and (wet) dreams to which we return whenever we need a guaranteed release. Those things are the nuclear weapons in our erotically fantastic arsenal. Last night reminded me that there are so many other, much subtler but equally as intoxicating turn-ons in the world. The energy and vibe at Bedpost Confessions was a swirl of these things.

Like the couple sitting in front of me. On more than one occasion they would turn to one another and the guy would whisper in his girlfriend’s ear and then they’d share a soft kiss, but not too soft. Or the dance of the ASL interpreters’ hands, graceful in the air, the flesh of their arms almost ghost-like under stage lights. The feel of someone else brushing — completely platonically — against you as they move through the crowd, which would normally be totally innocuous, but since you’re both in this particular audience it’s just a little more thrilling.

The speakers were also captivating, but sometimes the descriptions and flow of their words were even more interesting than the actual story. The first speaker last night spoke about a subject that, as Jamie pointed out this morning, I will never have direct experience with, but her unflinching verbal depiction of her postpartum body and the sex acts she performs with her husband was undeniably sexy in its candor. Many times the audience was reminded in colorful language of the wetness of sex, the softness of flesh, and that in itself was arousing.

The couple next to me would occasionally discuss some of the content. Their running commentary made me think that they live a fairly vanilla life. At one point, after seeing an audience member’s anonymous confession in the slide show between acts, the woman said, “Blow jobs being someone’s favorite? I don’t think so,” right after Jamie asked me if I had written it. (That made me laugh.) But the mere fact that they were at this show, expanding their horizons, withholding the majority of their judgement, was intrinsically sexy to me. I imagined that they would go home that evening and try something different in bed, and I liked that. Immensely.

Finally, being there with Jamie as he reached over and touched the back of my neck, hearing him say sweet things softly as to not disturb the audience, asking me playfully if we could leave before the final presenter, was at the core of my arousal last night, and when we returned home he made good on some promises he had made earlier in the evening in stunning form. However, he owes me on a couple of others, and so I’m going to stop here in order to make him pay up.