My Blood Ran Hot

I see you as you walk into the room and I feel my blood run hot. All long limbs, smooth skin, and a quick voice. Now’s not the time, I think to myself. But I can’t help it. I watch you as you speak to everyone else but me. I watch your lips curl into a laugh. I watch the tendons in your wrist flex as you write. I’m getting distracted. Every movement you make this morning I see in my memory of last night. 

When I tell the story I can pretend that I was reluctant. I can pretend that I was naive, but we both know I wasn’t. I wanted you. I wanted your skin, your mouth, your hands. And you wanted me. You ran every one of your fingertips across every inch of my skin and devoured my body. My desire was powerful but it wasn't enough. I wanted to be perfect. Certain ideas prevail no matter the partner, but I didn’t care about those. I needed your nuances, your secrets. I needed to know what I could do so that I could permeate your mind and make myself irresistible to you.

But there’s no way I could’ve known those things. You don’t tell your secrets to someone you just met...yet it seemed like you knew the secrets of my body without ever having to hear me say them and that terrified me. It terrified me because I hadn't known I was out of my element. But it became apparent quickly that you seemed to know exactly how to touch me and I had no idea how to touch you. Everything I did from that point on became laced with doubt.In the moment when I realized your actions betrayed nothing but confidence, my mind abandoned me. My want dissolved into anxiety. What if I was doing something wrong? What if my body looked unattractive from this angle? What if everyone you’d been with before was better?My mind took my lack of knowledge of you and transmuted it into insecurity, which in turn, suffocated my passion.

My mind never considered the possibility that you wanted to impress me as well. It wasn’t about my want anymore, it was only about your want. I wanted to be wanted more than I wanted to satiate my own want. If I couldn’t satisfy you, what good was I? So when you walked in the room, my blood ran hot, not from lust, but from embarrassment. I was embarrassed that I had let everything in my world tell me that my own pleasure wasn’t as important as yours. 

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This piece was inspired by some of my thoughts that have pervaded my mind over the years in my sexual encounters. I feel like from my earliest memories of these types of situations, I remember wanting to feel wanted more than any other feeling. I wanted to be so mesmerizing and irresistible to someone else, more than I, myself, wanted to feel good. And while there is a peculiar kind of power in becoming that seductive to someone, it’s also difficult to achieve, and certainly not lasting. It has taken me, and is still taking me, a long time to consistently put my energy into feeling good instead of worrying about what my partner is thinking of me the entire time. Honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing for me to release it now when I’ve always been such a strong advocate for women owning their own sexuality. Because I still fall into the trap of wanting to please my partner so badly that I will compromise my own pleasure to do so, and that’s not ok. It ends up being hugely frustrating for everyone involved and it’s something I continue to be aware of in my interactions.