“There’s more to relationships than acquisition.” Scott was trying to talk me out of something. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about the different ways a relationship can turn out. A lover can be a best friend, a piece of furniture, or an eternity. My Chris treated people like furniture—jumping from one to the next, rearranging the pieces, tossing out, and retrieving. Chris says that he’s “a very visual person.” That means he doesn’t like the way a lot of people look right off the bat and quickly tires of the looks of those he does like. Visual fickleness. He moves from face to face, body to body, from inside of one asshole to inside of another. The whole process takes as little of getting to know someone as it sounds.

Chris is beautiful, handsome, sexy. That means person after person is willing to let him put his cock inside of them, or lick the sweat from his belly, or do whatever Chris decides he wants. He knows just how to do everything so that you’re always ready for more. His eyes are brown and steady. Unavoidable. In a bar they look straight into yours from across the room—he’s interested in getting your interest going, no matter what he plans or doesn’t plan to do about it. But it’s the hands you should be watching. He might slip one of them down your pants and tease your asshole while giving you a kiss. Then when your resistance is zero he might give you a nice pat and be on his way. He might. He might do anything. With Chris even a pat and a quick kiss are worth something. That’s the way it is with him. And the way he does whatever he’s decided to do will always seem okay. Almost respectable. He’s never rude. His tone is always friendly. There’s nothing you could pin down as deceptive, yet the effect is the same: left alone with your buns in the oven, or your iron in the fire, or your head up your ass. That’s how I used to think of Chris. I hated him, and I would stay with him whenever he’d have me.

I’ve known Chris for four years now. I’m the only one that he has continued to see and that has continued to see him for that length of time. We have sex about twenty times a year. Sometimes we do it four times in a month and then don’t see each other for four months. And we live in the same city. It’s not so big. Usually a chance meeting gets us started. It’s always up to him, he knows I’m ready. He knows I’m hooked on him. I know that if we’re at the same party we’ll end up together. We both know that I’m different than most of the guys he sees. We’re on to each other. He wants me in a different way, but almost as much as I want him. We are drawn to each other. We are each the free electron the other’s unbalanced nucleus needs. It’s an electrical type of thing. A charge.

Once when I was on the other side of the country and thought we’d never be in the same city again, I sent him a card telling him he was an asshole and that I loved him. When I came back he told me he loved me too. If that were true, I wondered, then why did I get to see him so seldom? He said that I was the one who never called—then I couldn’t get hold of him for a month. Still, he does want me. Just not all the time. He does want me but that doesn’t mean he can be around me too much. He’s just the kind of guy he is. And I’m the kind I am. Everyone that can’t have him wants him. I want everyone I can’t have.

Over coffee I told Scott and Jeff about the way Chris and I are together. I wanted to hear someone else accept the relationship just as it is, the way I have. Instead they gently tried to tell me about the way loving relationships are supposed to be, always sharing and sensitive, etc. Chris and I are sensitive, only in a different way. Chris and I share some needs and the means to satisfy them. Together we’re basically self-contained. Scott and Jeff tell me that there are other needs to consider, that a relationship can’t be based on sexual intensity alone. I say if sexual intensity’s there the relationship has already been based.

I don’t think we can always be sure what it is we need; that seems to be different for me than it is for Scott and Jeff. Or is it? Maybe Scott and Jeff have forgotten how good pure intensity can feel. Maybe they’ve never experienced the vulnerability of being spanked during sex by someone they really want. Or known the relief you can feel when someone gets you to forget yourself totally. Someone who helps you to find a subhuman state—no language, no questions, no problems—just a pulsing, quivering slab of sensation. People would pay a guru or a Rolfer to do that. Or Werner Erhard. It’s not an unusual desire. It’s not an unusual need, letting someone else take the reins once in a while. I’d rather be physically fucked by Chris than verbally fucked by Werner Erhard. I never wanted my parents to spank me, but when I can pick who’s doing it I can enjoy a good spanking. Skin craves sensation. It’s those nerve endings. It’s the way we’re made.

I wonder if protozoa ever get into a little S/M. They seem to think about sex less and do it more. They do it all the time. One-celled nymphomaniacs constantly going at it in a big way, without the aid of cockrings, lubricants, vibrators, or pornography. That can’t be totally unfamiliar to us. It’s basic, after all.

I don’t think Scott and Jeff quite understood. I needed more of something. Self-awareness alone had become pretty vapid. Everything seemed too neat. I didn’t want to be dirty exactly, but I didn’t want to shave every day either. I didn’t want to get hurt exactly, but I liked sex rough. I needed someone who could satisfy urges I couldn’t even name. Someone complicated enough to be exciting, primal enough to be effective. For me that was Chris. He hadn’t chosen his shape and I hadn’t chosen mine, yet all the right barriers were there to create the charge.