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My Bloody Valentine

03-oct-2002

In learning new dating skills, I’ve recently been dumbfounded to find out that if a guy asks me where I’m going next, most likely he wants to be invited along. Drag queens don’t make their mark being subtle. Usually, if I want to hang out with someone, I invite myself along. And if I want to fool around, I say something witty like, “Baby, all your bones are worth jumping, but I’m after one in particular.”

Now, in my struggle to snuggle, I’ve stopped being direct with hot men. Instead, I speak in code.

A month ago, P asked me what I was doing after the party we were at. I’m a fast learner. I said I wasn’t sure, but did he want to go to the Duff where my friends were headed? Later, at the Duff, I asked if he wanted to walk home with me.

When P and I left together, it made my skirt tremble. Sure, he has a weak chin and, though 27, he’s only been out for two years, but his tall slow smile is killer. He’s a lot of what I like best: artsy, smart, easy to entertain. We talked about my girly wardrobe and his 25 years in the closet.

Once at my place, I invited him up for a toke. We talked into the wee dark part of the night until finally I admitted I wanted to kiss him. When he took five minutes negotiating aloud whether that would be the right thing for the two of us, I should have been alerted to the subtext— he was tentative— but he ended with a ‘yes’, and that’s all I heard.

I’m not usually a biter, but he was so into my nibbling that I decided to go there. The more I chewed on him, the more he groaned in a good way and the more my molars hunkered down.

The next morning, I realized our mistake. He went to the washroom and didn’t return. I found him with his head in his hands, nauseous. He’d had a small bit of blood in his urine. There was no pain, he said, so I told him not to worry, he’d burst a blood vessel. I’d learned from the sex exploits of friends that it happens when you’re a little too rough. He came back to bed. I fantasized our wedding. Then I had to pee too. In the bathroom, I checked my face in the mirror and found large streaks of dried blood smeared across my cheeks. Ick.

I washed up, crawled back into bed, and gently told him what had happened. We did the HIV talk, etc etc, and, eventually, I curled into him, purring, “Don’t you worry, I promise that if we ever do that again, I won’t slap your bloody dick across my cheeks.”

I’m still waiting for his phone call. I realize now that had I read between the lines, I would have taken it easy on him. In our separate ways, we’d both bitten off more than we could chew.