Naked puffy vagina

My knees were up against my chest. He was on top of me, inside of me, lovely and full of course, but something else, something different, something… an extra frisson. It was Thursday morning. I’d shaved on Saturday — completely. He liked that. He liked the black stockings and the garter belt, too. I like that he likes them, love the little extra gasp that he made when I turned around after unzipping my skirt, letting it fall to the floor. Black lace, black garters, sheer black stockings. A cliche. But flattering. And the gasp. Worth the gasp. Female power.

Worth keeping my shoes on, even, for a few minutes. High heels are easy to hold onto, when you’re pulling your ankle over your head.

This morning, though, five days after the fact, five days after the smooth shave, was different. Shaving carries consequences. Consequences not as dramatic as unprotected sex, perhaps, but consequences nonetheless. Hair removal of all kinds, in fact, carries consequences. At the very least there’s stubble, razor burn. If you shave. If you wax — well, if I wax, I don’t know about those Glamazons on Sex & the City — but if I wax, I end up with a painful, unsightly collection of ingrown hairs. The pale, delicate white skin at the place where my thighs and my torso and my cunt all conjoin, becomes marred by red bumps. It’s not sexy. As my brother-in-law says to his daughter, “You can’t stop the beard.”

I definitely can’t stop the beard. I’m descended from hairy Vikings, hairy Mediterraneans, slightly-less-hairy Celts. I marvel at women who remove all their hair, all the time. Do their lady bits just grow desensitized over time? How is that a plus? And what about the drip factor?

Whenever I think about pubic hair removal, I think about one of the earlier pieces in The Vagina Monologues. It’s a bitter story, told by a woman whose husband was unfaithful, and insisted that she shave her cunt. She talks about her naked puffy vagina, how it made her feel little, like a little girl, to cut all the hair away.

I realized then that hair is there for a reason-it’s the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house. You have to love hair in order to love the vagina. You can’t pick the parts you want. And besides, my husband never stopped screwing around.

And there is a nakedness, a puffiness to a shaved cooch. It’s missing something. Missing a lawn. A lawn is a good metaphor. The vagina, you know, it excretes things. It has runoff. It’s also like that thing we named after it: a delta, always draining stuff. Fluid moves through it. Without hair, it’s extra tacky, extra sticky. You can’t sleep without your panties on, or the sheets get all funky.

But it’s also extra sensitive, like the back of my head feels when I get my hair clipped close. The lovely feel of a car’s headrest against my smooth, close-clipped scalp. The lovely feel of the water beading at the cleft of my labia majora in the shower, dropping right to the spot where my clit nestles beneath my naked lips.

Naked in the mirror, without hair, utterly open, exposed. Excellent on camera, the curly joining of the lips around a ridiculously large porn-star cock as a woman rides reverse cowgirl, her hipbones like blades, the tendons running from her cunt to her thighs, all hard and plastic and yet still engaging, enthralling. Still the sacred work of sexuality.

And this morning, with a five-day stubble on my lips, the feel of Bran’s cock inside me, and the area around his cock — what do you call that on a man? — the base of his cock, the foothills of his cock, hairy and beautiful and against my skin, I could feel him, feel his skin against mine, extra sensitized and naked and exposed.

“It feels so good,” I gasped.

“Maybe you should do it more often,” he said — meaning shaving.

How easy it is for a woman to give away her power.

The good, the hot, and the mushy

The good
Back when I was a wee recent college graduate (sans health insurance), I discovered one of the unsung consequences of sex with men: Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs). The standard medical treatment for a UTI is a short course of antibiotics. Which gets rid of the infection, but in the process also kills off all the helpful bacteria in your system which keep the yeasty beasties in check. Which means that the yeast colonies that live in, among other places, the hoo hoo, will run amuck. It can become an ugly, ugly cycle: UTI, yeast infection, UTI, yeast infection. Neither of which are good for the ol’ sex-with-men life.

Luckily for me, my post-college boyfriend was a total SNAG (Sensitive New-Age Guy), and he asked one of his exes, who worked as a midwife, if she knew of any herbal remedies that help with UTIs. Sure enough, she did. So the next time I got one, I took this little herb called Uva Ursi, and then I drank nettle tea for about a month. Eventually my body got back into whack.

SNAG-boyfriend and I also took the advice of the expensively-out-of-pocketedly-paid-for nurse practitioner I saw, and started making sure that (a) he was keeping this bits clean and (b) I was peeing right after penetrative sex. In fact, peeing after genital contact in genital general is a good idea. While stinky, urine is also antiseptic, and flushing the pipes right after messing around with the plumbing can get rid of any newly introduced bacteria and whatnot.

The hot
Bran laughed at me on Wednesday night. “You’re so predictable,” he said. But apparently he was better at predicting my behavior than I was. After dinner, we came back to his pad to find his living room full of dykes from Wellesley — lovely friends of his lovely roommate. Neither of us was in the mood to socialize though, so I found myself in the interesting position of nodding hello to my fellow Seven Sisters… Sisters and then following the straight white man into his room. I love my straight white man. Part of the reason I love him is because he’s friends with more dykes than I am. I’d like to think that I’ve come to terms with the whole identity-politics-angst bullshit that haunted me for most of my 20s. And I know I had a better time after I followed him into his bedroom than if I’d stayed out there to talk to a bunch of strangers.

This is not why he called me predictable, though. It was because, as we lay there very carefully not making any heavy-breathing-bouncy-bouncy-type noises in his bed (the only thing that separates Bran’s bedroom from the living room is a curtain and a pair of French doors), and as he turned off the light, and we both rolled over in unison and began to spoon, it occurred to me that the probability of my actually getting out of the bed had suddenly dropped to .00001. I’d had every intention of shrugging on my jacket, hoisting my bag, and heading out to my car for the long ride across town to the silence of my lonely room my own bed and my snuggly kitty cat. But then he turned off the light. And suddenly all my body wanted to do was sleep.

I did sleep over. I even used his toothbrush. And in the morning, I slipped out of bed around 5:00 am, just as the very first hint of light blue was beginning to rise through the night-blue sky. In the half-light and the silence, I slipped on my skirt, and my blouse, and was fumbling around for my socks. And then he reached over out of his dreams and pulled me back into the bed. I went willingly, kissed his scratchy face, his soft eyelids, rubbed my cheek against the smooth fur of his hair. Then I rose up on my knees, above him.

I began to stroke him, first his strong arms and shoulders — arms that reached up to me and touched me about the waist. He had a t-shirt on, but no boxers. I slipped my hand down past the hem of his T-shirt, to the soft spot where his belly joins his hips, and then traced the curve of his little boy-ass, down the backs of his thighs and his knees. His legs opened under my touch, his eyes closed. I held him in the palm of my hand. A precious bird, a rare mushroom, an egg.

He bloomed under my touch, moving gently from side to side, his cock swelling, his thighs luminous in the early dawn light, his face open and innocent and utterly mine in his sleep.

I slipped a hand up under his shirt to pinch one nipple, gently, gently–rrr. Difficult to do it gently.

And slipped off my blouse and straddled him, cupping his face (eyes still closed) between my breasts. Face to heart.

And stepped back, undid the zipper of my skirt, let it fall from my waist, and carefully placed it and my blouse atop my bag on the other side of the room, where they wouldn’t get wrinkled.

“What are you doing?” he said.

I didn’t answer. I straddled him, slid his hard cock into the slick fault line of my labia, enjoying the wet/hard/push/pull.

“Can you feel how wet I am?” I asked, knowing how he’d answer.

His cock, skin to skin with my cunt, slick and inviting. Leaning over him, I bumped my hips up and then back, and he was sliding into me.

“No,” he gasped, suddenly awake.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No,” and now his eyes were opening, worried.

“We’ve both been tested,” I said. “And I’m still bleeding. It’s all right. There are no eggs left. We won’t make a baby. It’s just… sport fucking.”

And I began to move, up and down against him.

What I hadn’t said was that I also had a sea sponge tampon inside me, which decreased the chances of any sperm actually sticking around, even on the off-chance that Ovum hadn’t yet left the building. And that woo-woo intuition part of me said that it had.

He relaxed into it, and then more than relaxed.

“I love… I love fucking you,” he said, in rhythm to our movements.

“Oh yeah? Why do you love fucking me?” I asked.

“Because I love you.”

It wasn’t what I’d expected to hear. It made me want to fuck him harder.

Which I did, and we made all the noises we’d been careful not to make the night before. Unashamed, I pulled my lips wide and worked my clit — hard — as he fucked me, as I fucked him. I came, or something approximately like coming anyway.

“Stand up and bend over the bed,” he said — suddenly, in my mind.

“No,” I said.

“Do it,” he said.

“Make me.”

He grabbed my wrist in a half-hearted attempt to wrestle, but then he used another, stronger lever.

“Do you want more cock?”

“Yes.” I was surprised to hear myself say it. But yes, yes I did.

“Then do it.”

I did. I stood up and placed my hands on the edge of the bed, bent over just as he ordered me to. He slid his cock, still hard, between my legs, then reached over and held a towel under my nose.

“What does it smell like?” he asked. It was damp.

“You,” I responded.

He dropped it to the floor, between my legs, and before I knew it — I didn’t think it would happen at all that morning, and certainly not so soon, I was coming, with his cock inside me and my finger on my clit, coming all down my legs and onto the towel. A pavlovian response.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes.”

“Did I tell you you could come?”

“No… I couldn’t help it.”

He continued to fuck me, told me to get my ass lower, he didn’t care how I did it, and I did, obeying him and loving every minute of it.

“Are you going to punish me for coming without permission?” I asked, working my pussy against his cock.

“You sound awfully confident for someone who’s getting fucked,” he replied.

And I thought of Bitchy Jones taking Jack’s voice and to my horror delight horror I found that I wanted Bran to take mine. I wanted to be… not the professional, competent, self-possessed, well-educated, eloquent, cerebral woman I am most of the time, but something else. Not self-possessed but possessed by another. Voiceless. To speak without voice. To not speak, to speak with the body. And I was silent. I bit the side of the mattress, I found myself growling.

He pulled out, sat on the side of the bed, leaned back. Winded, maybe — not physically, but winded.

I kneeled on the floor in front of him. I reached for his cock, still hard, with my lips. He pulled it out of reach.

“Not unless you want to,” he said.

I didn’t want to use my words. I wanted to show him. I whimpered.

Once again he prevented me from wrapping my lips around his cock.

“Not unless you want to,” he repeated.

And I knew then that I really wanted to. It wasn’t about him, his pleasure, it was about mine. Oh shame, shame! What will the Seven Sisters grads say! But it’s true, I loved to take him between my lips, and to taste myself on him, and to take him all the way down to the back of my throat. To have him fill that most hungry and forceful and overused of orifices.

“Watch what you do,” he said. And I knew he was close to coming. And I pulled up next to him on the bed, and pulled his hand to his cock, and stroked it along with him, our hands together, our bodies together.

“Please come,” I pleaded. “You’re so beautiful when you come.” And he did. And he was.

The mushy
So I came down with a UTI a couple days later. The fact that I was in a hurry and didn’t pee after sex probably had something to do with it. But I knew what to do, even though it hurt like the dickens, and now I’ve got enough uva ursi and nettle tea, plus a few other kinds of herbs (because you really can’t visit the bulk herb section of your favorite natural foods store and buy just one) and will probably float away any day now.

On Saturday we went for a long hike in the woods, which are still yellow but not yet orange-red, and had dinner at the Whole Foods hot- and cold-bar (it makes me homesick for New York). And watched a romantic comedy which I found annoyingly formulaic, although he pointed out the idiosyncracies of some of the characters.

“Given the fact that my parents will probably be divorcing in the next year, romantic comedies give me a hope for my own future,” he said as I pulled out of the parking lot of the theater.

“I’d say your future is looking pretty good,” I said. The fact that Bran’s parents are still together after forty years of marriage completely blows my mind. I wonder what my view of the world would be like if mine had stayed married. Well, if we’re talking about my parents, I’d probably be a serial killer right about now.

We didn’t have sex that night. Or in the morning. We had something far more intimate.