Sometimes sex is about comfort, about wanting to be close to another person. Sometimes it's about wanting to be accepted. Once in a while it's about love. More often than we'd like to think about, it's about darker motives -- power, greed, revenge. But sometimes it's just about "Whew, wild thing, you make my heart sing!" That was Linda.
Linda and I were a couple for about four months several years ago. If you read "Remembering Karen," you may remember Karen and I were also together for four months. The four months with Linda were different. Severely different.
It's not that Linda was a bad person -- although she kinda was -- it was more that she was ... I think the medical term is "totally whacked." When it came to reality, she'd driven through that neighborhood occasionally, but had never moved in. Not even for a short-term rental. But she had one saving grace: She was possibly the greatest fuck ever to have walked the earth.
I'm not particularly proud of myself for having stayed together that long with someone who was basically the "Rainman" of sex, but we all do stuff we're not proud of. Especially when we're 20. More especially when we're in a phase where the four basic food groups are coke, speed, tequila and ... well, OK, maybe there wasn't a fourth at the time. But y'know what? To hell with pride. It was worth it.
We met at a party at ... I dunno, somebody's house and I remember her not making much of an impression from a distance. Linda was attractive enough in a kind of Midwest white-bread way, but she had that sorta Sandra Bernhardt overbite thing that some people find really sexy but I don't. She also had that tiny bit of baby fat you'd normally associate with girls five or six years younger. And though I admitted to doing lots of things I wasn't proud of, associating with girls five or six years younger wasn't one of them.
But up close was different. Oh my, was it ever different. Personal space was not a concept Linda grasped. When she talked to you, she stood so close that her face filled your entire field of vision and her eyes would lock onto yours and draw you into a whole different world -- a world you knew you should probably run away from but couldn't. Two hours after those eyes locked onto mine we were in bed together.
Trying to describe Linda in a conventional way is useless. But y'know how we all have super-sensitive spots? Obvious ones like cunts and cocks and nipples, and not so obvious ones like ear lobes and backs of knees? Well, pick your top three, compress them down to one single molecule and then build a human being out of nothing but clones of that molecule. That was Linda. On an off day.
Since I was working nights then and Linda, at least theoretically, worked days we didn't have a whole lot of time together and tended to spend most of that together time in bed. Which is probably why I didn't realize just how reality-challenged she was and why I thought going off with her on vacation was a totally fine plan.
Although when she mentioned a cruise, that didn't exactly gas my jets. Cruises always struck me as kinda stuffy and formal and basically an old people's thing. Not the one she had in mind though. It was a run through the Caribbean on a converted fishing boat where you could live in a bathing suit. The one formal event was the "Captain's Dinner," at which they required you to wear a clean T-shirt or "at least turn a dirty one inside out." All right!
"And the best part is that it's free," Linda said. I'm more than a little thrifty by nature, so "free" was a pretty magical word. Yes, I know I should have asked why it was free, but with Linda I figured it was best to stick with the "Don't ask don't go to jail (hopefully)" policy. All I knew was that I would have to amuse myself at the airport in Miami for the better part of four hours while she did whatever had to be done to make the trip free. Didn't seem like a bad deal. So I did it.
When Linda finished her "work" part of the trip, we hopped on a plane and two short flights and a brief layover in Puerto Rico later we were in St. Kitt's and being shuttled to the ship. And it was fucking magnificent! Sunshine and blue skies and tradewinds and infectious reggae rhythms and something called rum swizzles that somehow managed to cool you off and heat you up at the same time.