One Time I Was Celibate For Eight Years and It Bummed Me Out

Hezekiah makes for a good story. Have you heard the one where I went on a three-hour date with a time-traveling preacher from the Old West? He arrived twenty minutes late in a bolo tie and pressed white shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple. He told me three times that he’d never seen anyone so beautiful. He had been an evangelical pastor; now he was a militant atheist. Wide-eyed and unblinking in the face of my shocking beauty, he planned out our future together and said, where do you see us in ten years? In these plans, I, the most beautiful woman in the world, was to stay in Indiana waiting for him to complete his PhD in physics and never uttering the word God. My God. I can’t even promise I’ll be here next year, I said.

Chuck met me at a coffee shop and ate a sandwich in front of me, crumbs spraying in my direction like anthrax. Oh yeah you can’t eat gluten. What’s that like? He told me fiction was pointless. He read only political biographies. He insisted racism didn’t exist anymore even as he detailed what he had been taught to do to stay alive should a police officer ever pull him over for driving while Black. He studied law. He knew his rights. He had, on more than one occasion, been dumped for being boring.

Do you think I’m boring?

Oh, no, never.

TJ is the story I don’t tell. It is here I confess the shameful truth: I am not the most beautiful woman in the world. Plump, plain, brown bags like me should be grateful for any attention we get. TJ reminded me of my place.

Lexi had never learned how a woman holds herself. Neither had I. We should have sat up straight, we should have tipped our chins upward like sunflowers to face the sky without fear, we should have behaved as though we deserved to be seen, to be touched, to be loved. We should have faked the knowing.

I could make it so good for you, she said from within the shell of her hunched back, her rolled shoulders.

Yes, yes, I couldn’t say from within mine.

Thomas and I went on a date because I’m half Thai and he’s a quarter. We searched for ourselves in each other’s faces and came up cold. He said he knew a few words in Thai and demonstrated. He did not know a few words in Thai.

Emmett was sickly and could eat even fewer things than I. He had five cats and constant panic attacks. I thought I might like him someday. I never made a move because I was too 

•    Fat

•    Brown                                

•    Scared

•    Damaged

•    Unsure                          

•    Used to guarding against rejection                 

•    Allergic to cats

•    Angry                                                                     

•    Weird

•    Flawed                                 

•    Pathetic

•    Me

He never made a move because I don’t know.

 After months of clicking through underwhelming profiles, I found Paul. He was gorgeous in a Mos Def meets Malcolm X way; too handsome for the likes of me. My ability to message someone on these sites ranged from “no big deal” to “cripplingly impossible” depending on how flayed my skin was on any given day. But there in the sidebar of Paul’s profile was my chance: this lovely man with the curly smile preferred a thicker body.

We started our fourth date at opposite ends of the couch. I’d been looking forward to an exciting night of sci-fi and cuddling for two days. I’d tucked a couple of optimistic condoms into my wallet and shaved my legs. It took us two episodes of Battlestar Galactica to inch close enough for our arms to graze one another, each point of contact an electric warmth that sent my blood thundering.

We watched Starbuck and Apollo frak their way through the apocalypse as the couch and all my years of touchlessness yawned between us. I slowly sagged into Paul’s body and he tucked me in against him. Sometimes he would get up the nerve to stroke my arm. Eventually, my hand landed on his bare knee and my head on his chest, his heartbeat keeping time against my ear. When I trailed my fingertips over the soft skin behind Paul’s knee, I could feel his pulse quicken against me. By the end of three episodes, his erection twitched at my elbow as all my skin buzzed with awareness. Lust was heavy and molten in the bowl of my belly, my nipples tight against the fabric of my bra—God, I wanted him. I wanted his mouth on my tits and his fingers pushing into the flood coursing through my body. I wanted to see if his cock fit just so against the roof of my mouth. I wanted to feel it again, the moment I’d once loved most about sex—that first thrust inside. I wanted to be less alone in this tumbleweed body.

I went home in the middle of the night feeling very much like I had the day I had sex for the first time at seventeen: sore and vaguely disappointed. As if my life should have entered a new chapter, but the pages were stuck together. I spent the drive home imagining the hot brush of his dick on my arm, the force of his desire straining against his boxers. If only I could live on the precipice of that moment, ready to soar. If only I had made it last longer.

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow whose work appears in such journals as Ploughshares, AAWW's The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a collection through Rose Metal Press in 2023. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis.