So Bad It Was Great
Eve Marx
Word Count 668
We fought, and then we had sex. This was our pattern for nearly three years.
We met late in the afternoon on an early fall day; I’d just exited the subway at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth. I was walking west on my way home from my perishingly boring job at a science publishing house when I saw him; tall, burly, curly-headed. Unlike any other guy I’d met in New York City, he had a full beard. He wore a sweat-stained green pocket tee, construction boots, and a pair of dirty white painter’s pants that rode low on his hips. He stood inside a delivery truck filled with fresh produce. His smile was dazzling as he held out an apple in one leather-gloved hand.
Taste this, he said. I didn’t hesitate and stepped inside the open back of the truck. While he held onto the apple, I took a bite. Moments later, we were in an intense lip lock, my ass and back hard up against stacked crates of citrus.
We never officially moved in together. We were never officially in a relationship. He had his place, and I had mine. All the same, he stayed at my place many nights. I didn’t sleep much.
He never claimed whatever it was we were doing was monogamous. He had other women and plenty of other interests. Besides carrots and lettuce and tomatoes, his primary interest was furthering his artistic endeavors. He was writing plays and making music. He was composing new material. I was a stymied artist who couldn’t figure out whether to write or draw and, as a consequence, did neither.
Our intimate relationship was like something out of an X-rated movie. We had sex in cars and alleys. We had sex outside, standing up. During sex, he used crude language, which you would have thought would put me off. The sex was rough and always happened so fast it was blurred.
We were equally negligent about birth control, and it was inevitable I would get pregnant. This was not something we discussed. There was never a question I would have his baby. It was obvious the relationship wasn’t meant to last.
One day I came home to my apartment to find him freshly showered and using my ironing board. He was pressing a nice shirt and pair of pants. He said he was going on a date. I flew into a rage that he would use my orderly apartment, my nice shampoo, nail clippers and clean towels to prepare for someone else. I was still shouting as he finished his ironing and put on the shirt and pants. After he left my apartment, I half-hoped he’d never come back.
When he returned after midnight, he was in a good mood. He wanted to tell me about his evening. I said I didn’t want details. When he wouldn’t stop talking, I opened a window and began throwing his belongings onto the street. He retaliated by opening my closet and flinging my clothes out the window. When he ran out of clothes, he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a wholesale size box of Washington state cherries, which were my favorite. Ten pounds of cherries rained down onto the sidewalk.
Over the next few weeks, there were a few more fight/fuck scenes. We both knew it was over even though, over the next six months, he transformed into a friend who built me a kitchen counter. The last time we met was a snowy Christmas Eve. He was on his way to meet a new woman he said was the real deal. He brought me a present, although I had none for him. He gave me two pairs of beautiful Hanro cotton panties. I like to think it was to commemorate what we had together, which was so bad it was great.
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Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex
