When she opened the apartment door, I knew she had recently had sex. I could see it in her tousled hair and the dreamy post-coital bliss in her eyes. I could even smell it on her. It was like an aura. An image popped into my mind of her tiny naked body arching up against me at that moment in the sex act when control dissolves, passion wins and you speed past the point of no return on a black diamond ski run.
I cleared my throat and held out a dog-eared copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Tom, my best friend and her new boyfriend, had asked me to give her. “This is for you. It’s for your 20th Century novel class.” I felt like I had to keep talking. “Tom highlighted some passages he thought you should read.”
“He’s so sweet.”
She took the book and examined the cover, read all the blurbs on the back, then riffled through it, pausing to read and smile at some of the marked passages. I waited in the hall, transfixed by the gracefulness of her movements. Then she looked up at me with a coy smile.
“Cool. It’s Jason, right? Do you want to come in? I just made coffee.”
As she spoke, she reached out and touched my arm, just above the wrist. I recognized the gesture from a psych course I had taken. The prof said that if you want to get the attention of someone who is talking to other people in a group, to connect with them, you touch them lightly on the forearm. Unless they are a psychopath or a narcissist, they will respond to the touch as if you’re a child who needs their help. It’s deeply embedded in our DNA.
“Maybe I better not.”
She stuck her lower lip out, tilted her head forward like a pouting child and gazed at me with huge disappointed eyes. My moral backbone crumbled.
“Okay. A coffee would be nice.”
I cringed. I was going to be a writer and the best I could come up with was “A coffee would be nice“? It’s such a flaccid word.
“Come on, then,” she said, and with a brilliant smile took my hand and led me into the living room. Her hand was soft, cool, moist. The smell of sex drifted with us.
By the way, she was wearing an oversize man’s dress shirt, unbuttoned at the top, with nothing under it. Puffy pink slippers. Does that make me more or less guilty?
Anyway, she pushed me down onto the couch and stood looking down at me for a long moment, then danced to the kitchen to pour the coffee.
“Cream? Sugar?”
“Black.”
“You got it, tiger. You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? I love tigers.”
I said, “I love them too.” But I was being nice, because what I really thought was, That’s the wrong trope. I’m not a tiger, I’m a gazelle and you’re the tiger.
She brought the coffee in in two mugs, set them down on the coffee table and arranged herself on the couch beside me. When she leaned forward to retrieve her coffee, I could see all the down her cleavage to her nipples and beyond, confirming that she did indeed have lovely, pert tits. As she folded her legs up under her, she momentarily flashed a thatch of pubic hair. She laughed and exclaimed, with mock indignation as she repositioned the shirttails over her lap, “Hey, perv. Don’t look! And don’t you dare tell anyone I don’t shave down there!”
I was sure I wasn’t the only man in on that secret.
The situation was skating out of my control. I was being led to the top of that black diamond run and I needed to take control of the room so I could take control of myself.
“So, what’s your real name?”
“Tom didn’t tell you?”
“He said he calls you ‘Pussums’.”
She picked up the book I had brought and waved it in my face, exclaiming with mock astonishment. “You haven’t read Women in Love?”
“No, that’s Tom’s thing. I’m a creative writing major.”
She laughed, a delightful tinkling laugh, so charming, so innocent.
“‘Pussums’ is that name of a girl Gerald Crich sleeps with.”
I must have looked puzzled. “They’re characters in the book.”
“Oh.” I paused to absorb that information. Then, “And that’s okay with you?”
“What is?”
“Calling you ‘Pussums’.”
“Why not?” She punched my shoulder, hard. “It’s literary, dude.”
“Ouch!”
“Oh, did Pussums hurt you-ums. Here, let me kiss it better.”
Suddenly, in a move as smooth and elegant as a ballet enchainement, she straddled me and was leaning against me, kissing my shoulder through my shirt. “Get this off so I can kiss you better,” she commanded, pulling my shirt over my head and kissing my bare shoulder, licking and nibbling it, then kissing my neck, my cheek, my lips, softly, voluptuously, like butterflies landing on flowers, then aggressively, her tongue deep in my mouth. She ripped off her shirt. Her breasts were cool and soft against my chest. Her sexuality overwhelmed me, dragging me down the black diamond run, unable to turn back.
I don’t need to tell you the rest.
After that day, I couldn’t face Tom, so we drifted apart. I never saw Pussums again, but the hour I spent with her has been an undiminished and unresolved question mark, a thorn, in my psyche ever since.
© 2026 Paul McLaughlin
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