The CuisinArt

Once, in a magazine, he’d read that a liberal application of foreplay could compensate for a sub-par sexual performance. Using this as a template, he made his way down to frolic face first in her forested meadow. There he smelled familiar flowers, heard the soar of familiar moans above, and felt at ease. New plan. He would continue these oral acrobatics until she passed out—or at least until her parents came home.

Concerning gravity, what goes up must come down, while concerning foreplay, what goes down must come up. An unbreakable law of sexual thermodynamics, and it had slipped his mind. In time she wrenched his tongue from her nethers, and placed it between her teeth. He knew then that his plan had backfired. Instead of placation, he had achieved titillation, turning a presumed penetration into an inevitability.

The woman wasted little time. She reached across the bed and produced a condom wrapped in orange foil. Lifestyles. Ribbed for Her Pleasure. The man let out a sigh of relief. Good, the ribs will take care of everything.

The man understood the principles of what was to follow. Shaft. Hole. Insert. Remove. Repeat. But three years of rabid porn viewing had muddied his certainty about the particulars. Porn is a world of receded testicles slamming against prolapsed anuses, and 10x zoomed vaginas oozing ejaculate. Porn is a world concerned only with the ends: one that has little time to point out the means.

His penis, an object of unprecedented familiarity, felt suddenly alien and obtrusive. Confused, he started to poke her. Distraught, he poked harder. In a little under 17 seconds he managed to probe her navel, buttocks, and grundle without once making the slightest contact with her labia.

Then it came as a shooting star: sudden, explosive, ultimately fleeting. The nothingness of air gave way to a warm nestling, and even the woman’s face, previously contemplating the mold stains on the ceiling, showed a slight tweak of the eyebrows. But it left sooner than it had come, leaving him yet again to flap his latex sheathed rod in the wind.

It was then that the woman, in a quite literal fashion, took matters into her own hands. He did not mind the ease with which she slipped him inside, but her sudden change of direction left him suspicious.

Moans followed. Not sexy. Monotonous, rehearsed. Like vocal exercises in drama class. He checked her chest for clarification. No flush. No contractions of the vaginal walls, either. Certainly no increase in wetness. In fact, with each passing second he sensed an increasing aridness. Her moans turned to grunts. Her hands flailed, pulling and tugging at whatever she could find.

No, he thought to himself. Something is not right. There’s no way I’m this good. There’s no way I’m even fractionally this good. A woman flopping and floundering perhaps. But a woman writhing?

The revelation came with a swiftness he wished his hips could emulate. She was preparing to fake on him.

A man confronted with unspeakable evil has but two courses: submit and be consumed, or become that very evil in the hopes of destroying it. The man chose the latter. He chose to become what he feared most. He chose to fake his own orgasm.

The desertification of the vagina was almost complete. Time was of the essence. Using what little wetness remained, he built to a steady rhythm. He pulled out only as shallow as he dared, knowing if he slipped out entirely the lips would close forever. In time he began to palpitate his own breathing. Moments before she closed the deal, he pushed himself the full depth of her, closed his eyes, quivered his right leg and held his breath. After a believable three seconds he exhaled an exaggerated breath, fluttered his eyelids, and let a small droplet of saliva splash onto her breasts. He fell atop her, wheezing, snorting, his lips mashed against her collarbone. It was a revolting sight, no doubt. But she could not argue with its authenticity.

“Get off,” she grunted

Not one to upset her further, he pulled out and ran to the bathroom to dispose of the evidence. There he shed a tear of respect for the fallen condom, en route to sexual purgatory, never fulfilling its intended purpose. A face full of denim welcomed him back into the room. He peeled them off to find the woman already dressed, clacking bubbles with her lips, avidly tapping the keys on her cell phone. The man dressed with haste and silence, not quite sure what to say.

She took the initiative.

“Remember the number I gave you when we left the bar,” she asked.

“No,” he answered truthfully

“Good,” she cut.

But a wave of embarrassment did not follow. He felt instead a warm and impregnable numbness. As a somnambulist he left the room, head in clouds, toes dragging across the asphalt. There had been no ejaculation. No pleasure. No ecstasy. The whole experience had more or less resembled a siege on a castle wall. But he was no longer a virgin, because as long as you get it in it still counts, right?

That night he regaled his younger siblings with the mysteries of the fairer sex. He phoned friends, and hinted of a story to tell. A story, unknown to them, that he would embellish and transform at his leisure. No one needed to know every harrowing detail of room 24-17 B. He’d keep certain facts intact—lack of stamina, mismatched experience—for believability’s sake. But the rest was his to do with what he would. Once home, his newfound manhood would glisten and shine amid the drab virginity of his friends. They would flock to him, honor him, admire him, and with a gracious wave of his hand, he would bestow onto them all that he had learned.

In the land the virgin, the man who kind of, sort of, almost had sex is king.