"Should I scoop you?"

“Should I scoop you?” he asks. I say I am tired and he says maybe we should make it for tomorrow since he wants a lot of time with me and I am tired, but I say no, scoop me now, because there is a relaxed attention in his voice and I want that. I want to be there with that slumped on a couch.

And an hour later, he’s scooped me in his broken down Mazda and driven passed Lake Merritt and I am there, slumped in the navy blue couch, next to his relaxed attention. He pinches the dough on the side of my waist when we laugh. An alarm goes off in me, the animal alarm, that he has harkened the mating call. This doesn’t tickle me and instead I stay stiff and ignore it while I keep talking and laughing.

He takes out his rhyme book, a book with a commercialized Asian-buddhist cover and parchment paper with his scrawled lines. He leafs through and performs a few of his latest raps for me, each one preluded by a “Check it, yo-“ They are vague raps with limited vocabulary, all rhymes ending with simple vowels, even though my sleepy brain does slip delightedly into some of the staccato. One starts about “stare into your soul, it’s scary I know..” and then gets vaguely political about how the streets are rough. I ask him if he’s ever lived that and he says, yeah, wow, definitely- he was once living out of his car for 2 weeks.

I look at the clock and it is 11:30pm. I want to catch the last BART. He says I am welcome to sleep there but I say I am not good at, um, sleeping, um, in new places.

He unscoops me back at the BART station. He mentions what about tomorrow night, and I say yeah but I can’t make plans when I’m sleepy. I get out and I don’t even bother to give him the friendly hug over the gears and armrest and steering wheel. I cross my arms over my chest just because it’s 11:40pm even though it’s not cold.

Why didn’t I just have sex with him? I could have done it so easily. Just reached over and smashed my face into his, smashed his large hawkish nose and pressed the skin of my cheeks into his slightly porous, post-Acne marked cheekbones. I could have rubbed my hands along his waist and yanked up his baggy wanna-be gangsta jeans. I could have lightly brushed my fingers along his scrawny arms and poked off his wanna-be gangsta ring on his pinky. I could have looked for a moment into his sweet slitted brown eyes and wiped his forehead under his newly mowered bangs, and called him “baby.”

I could have filled up so hard and so fast with attention for him that I could have forgotten all thoughts of my emptiness and it would only be me, and Mark, and his inflated dreams of making music and selling his $1200 beat-up, smog-check-failing Mazda that he can only drive with the brights on. Me and Mark and his large angular nose. Me and Mark and his witty gangsta phrases and his sweet tinkled laugh at my jokes. We’re always squealing and laughing together, the energy spiraling up into a cavorkean havocing crescendo. But I’m afraid we’d get to a point where I’d be on my knees on top of him like a hyena. He’d be cowered and drooling under me. It’d be serious, him tender and yearning, me stabbing. And I’d laugh at him. I’d look straight at him without saying a joke, just drunk and slippery with sleepiness, and I’d cackle in his face, just to keep myself awake.

I think I hurt him last night, like a little bite, because I did not touch him, and because I looked at the clock at 11:30 and said time to go home. I hurt him with the bite of disappointment. But this hurt was also instead of the hurt of having sex with him just for the hell of it, just to fill the time of my cavernous and quaking, listless soul.

And then I come home to wake up and wonder how asexual I’ve become, and how all I could use is a good romp. How sterile and unbent my body is. I need to go to a circus class and throw my head under my pelvis and reach my crotch to the sky, let it catch some wind so maybe it can fly. Maybe I should have spent just one night in his bed, nibbled his ear, and pretended that he was the universe put together in one bicep.