Two

Lyra met Eric at La Patisserie, her favorite café but one they hadn’t been to as a couple. The owners, whom you could hear speaking French to each other, had modeled it on a Paris bistro, with pale yellow walls and large format black and white photographs of a dozen of the city’s famous monuments. On the wall, the Arc of Triumph towered over them.

“I have another secret I didn’t tell you before,” she said after they ordered.

The waiter’s Spanish accent broke the illusion of being in France. He placed their coffees and apple pies on the table, his with ice cream and hers without.

“Tell me.”

Eric’s face perpetually seemed to be on the verge of some private happiness, as if he was expecting the arrival of good news. Behind his glasses his eyes held her so intently she might have been caught in a tractor beam.

They’d been seeing each other regularly for two weeks. His leaving her would hurt, but she was used to loss. She’d chosen a public place to make it easy for him to walk out of her life if he couldn’t handle the story.

“When I was a junior, I went to the university’s big playoff football game. That was three years ago.”

“They had a great season that year,” He dug into his apple pie.

“It was the one before the national championship. I’m not a big football fan, but I was there with some friends. I got into the spirit. Cheering at every good play. Screaming my head off every time they scored.”

His curious smile showed his befuddlement at why she was telling him all this. “They were down by ten points going into the fourth quarter. I wanted them to win so bad. I climbed down the stands and over to the sidelines and found the quarterback. I told him if they won I’d give him the best fuck of his life.”

Lyra’s heart fluttered when he stopped eating and froze. After a few moments he swallowed some coffee, his eyes on her, optimistic again.

“He was tall, and he looked down at me like I was a little girl. He asked, ‘Are you for real?’ I said, ‘Just win the game and you’ll find out.’ The defense held and after the other side punted I asked him what he thought of my offer. ‘We’re going to win this. You stay right here,’ he said, and he went out on the field. They scored and ran for the two-point conversion. The defense held again. It was down to less than a minute left when they got the ball again—two points down. I told the kicker that if he made a field goal, I’d have sex with him too. Some of the guys heard and said why not them, football’s a team game and it takes all of them to move the ball downfield. So I told them okay, if they won the game I’d treat the whole team.”

Eric bit his lip. She saw the rise and fall of his tightened chest. He could see what was coming, his expression nonetheless hopeful.

“I remember,” he said after several seconds. “They made a field goal and won by one point.”

“So I did it,” Lyra said. “I fucked the whole team. The ones who played in the fourth quarter.”

The last boyfriend she’d told this story to called her a whore and left in disgust at that point. She never saw him again. But Eric stayed, staring into his empty cup, ice cream melting all over his plate, the pie only half eaten.

After a pause, he asked, “The defense too?”

“They wanted in.” She giggled. “I didn’t mean to make a pun.”

“And they all got in? Nineteen with the kicker?”

“Some of them didn’t want to do it. The next day, it took all day. I didn’t want to rush them. They won. I promised them a good time.”

Eric stirred the puddle of ice cream with a spoon. “You don’t sound apologetic.”

“It’s something I did. Period.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“The problem was afterwards. I couldn’t walk the next day. I was sore for a week.”

When he accepted the waiter’s invitation for more coffee, Lyra knew he was staying. A relief. She wanted him in her life.

“It’s too bad you didn’t have an official observer,” he said with a wry smile. “You could have made the Guinness Book of World Records.”

Four

Lyra waited for Drew in the airport. Tulum was his idea, a way to be certain they weren’t seen together. Fine with her. She’d never been to the beach town, with its warm Caribbean waters, and back home it was cold. Eric had gone to visit his parents for Christmas and accepted her excuse for not joining him.

She’d made her plans with Drew when she’d gone to receive her prize money. She’d also had several rolls in the hay with Brad, her graduate student guide during her three days on campus, and climaxed each time. A godsend after months with Eric who, she could tell, had suspected something was between them but said nothing.

Not that Eric was a bad lover, far from it. He paid attention to what she taught him and enjoyed pleasuring her. But he saw through her, down to the messy core of her unwholesome being where her disgrace resided, and her body resisted letting go. The single occasion on which she’d come with him was the night he kissed her feet and for once she dominated him, after having Brad in the afternoon. It was her day of triumph.

Eric thought his attraction to her was her mind, her poetry, their endless discussions, the fun they had analyzing movies and going to museums, but that was only part of it. He was with her because she was the best lay he’d ever had. Yet sooner rather than later, he’d go his own way. They always did. She had to secure her own future.

For her part, sex without orgasm was like dinner at a fine restaurant without dessert. You didn’t need it all the time, but you didn’t want to do without forever. Eric walked in on her once when she was under the covers getting herself off. She stopped before he realized what she was doing, claiming she had an itch. She wouldn’t wound his male pride.

Lyra marked the arrival of Drew’s flight as a new beginning. She’d liked him when they met at the university, and found him semi-attractive: penetrating brown eyes, a weathered face as if he’d been out to sea, a gap tooth smile that gave him a boyish look. He had offered her so much money she’d committed herself to the arrangement, even though it would lead to ending it with Eric. She’d leave him before he tired of her.

A taxi took them to the Xela Tulum, a boutique luxury hotel. The receptionist’s momentary shock when he looked at them amused her. He double checked their room, verifying they had only one bed. She understood; people often mistook her for a teenager. In his mid-forties, Drew looked like he should be her father. She tugged at his arm, he bent down to her, and she kissed him. He blushed and walked away in embarrassment. Lyra, amused, watched him pretending to be absorbed in the sunken living room of the lobby. She whispered to the scandalized receptionist, “My sugar daddy.”

Their suite, about the same size as Eric’s apartment where she’d been living, had a calming feel, all soft shades of brown with gently breaking waves in the background. From their private balcony, Lyra looked out over palm trees, a white sand beach and the blue Caribbean beyond. Drew joined her and stood stiffly at her side, still wearing his long sleeve shirt and dress slacks.

She took his hand. “It’s okay.”

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said. “It feels like I’m cheating on my wife.”

“You’re not.”

“It still feels that way.”

“Come,” she said.

She led him by the hand to the king size bed, in control in a way she never was with Eric, except that once. Taking charge, the undercurrent of shame that prevented her from letting go subsided. The power she wielded over men, her reluctant paramour included, was the turn-on. She unbuttoned his shirt and unbuckled his belt, cooing in tones to match the womblike earthen colors around them, calming him the way she might a child.

“It’s okay...there’s nothing to be afraid of...there we go...nothing to worry about...I’ll take good care of you.”

Receiving him on the covers, door open to the sea breeze, she knew the precise moment when pleasure overtook his compunctions, a shift as eagerness replaced mechanical duty. Afterwards, he lay sweating beside her. “I never—”

She brushed her hand over his chest hair, one leg resting on his, pleased with herself.

“That was amazing. Did you—?”

“Yes,” she said. “You were perfect. Now rest up so we can do it again.”

He did and they did. His discomfort with her eased over rooftop cocktails and dinner conversation in the open-air dining room. She managed to stimulate him into another round before bed.

Again and again, day after day, she aroused him for sex, reading and writing in her spare time with a pillow under her to tilt her pelvis, taking showers instead of baths and wading into the sea only to her knees. Protecting his seed inside her.

They walked on the beach, visited the clifftop Mayan ruins, and ate in other restaurants. But above all, they had sex—so many times she felt sore in a way she’d been only once before. It would be worth it. A top university had let her know an offer was coming, her job to begin in the winter term in another year. Perfect. When the pregnancy was over and Drew and his wife took possession of the baby, she could make a fat down payment on a house near the campus.

By the time she and Drew boarded the plane back to the States, Lyra was certain it had worked. Melancholy overtook her on the flight. She loved Eric and abandoning him would hurt them both, but she had had to leave before she began to show to avoid compounding his pain. She would be on her own and lonely again, but the promise of her new life as teacher and poet in residence uplifted her.

One

Eric was used to hearing a lot of bad poetry during The Reader’s Nook open mic nights, but he perked up when the short blond read her verses. Her stark images burst to life in the lyricism of lines that played with language and rhythm in a unique vocal tapestry. She read confidently, with intonations that added a dimension to the words. His turn came soon after; he took up his allotted five minutes in poems of epiphany and transformation. Afterwards they sought each other out.

“I loved your poems,” he said. “How your words danced. They were the best of the night. You lit up with the applause, too.”

She blushed and thanked him. “I liked the one of yours about walking in the forest, the new life inside the decaying log. That’s me when I’m writing poems.”

He thought to tell her she was too young to be decaying, but kept it to himself. Her name was Lyra, and she wrote articles for a Substack newsletter. “At least it’s a writing job.”

Since graduating from the MFA program a year earlier, her work had appeared in some of the best online and print literary magazines, ones that Eric read and admired. She’d even had a short story published in The Georgia Review. “I have this love-hate relationship with writing. It’s agony but I can’t stop. When I’m finally done with a poem and I’m ready to submit it, it feels like a relief instead of an accomplishment. Getting an acceptance tells me I’m worth something.”

“What makes you think you’re not?”

She looked away and shook her head in response. She’d said more than she meant to, he realized, embarrassed by confessing her insecurities and low self-esteem to a stranger.

Eric moved on, boosting her obviously fragile ego. “I can tell the difference between really good poems, like the ones you read, and mine.”

“Yours were kind of intellectual. But not bad.”

He was a graduate student nearing completion of the MBA program. “I wish writing was as easy as developing a business plan. I’ll sit in front of a blank screen for an hour, trying get a first line to come out. Then half the time it’s a bad one.”

“Sometimes my poems find their own first lines. There’ll be something inside me aching to escape, and I don’t know what it is until I see it in front of me.”

“I get the impression that you don’t like what’s inside you.”

She looked away again towards shelves crammed with books. “Well, it’s been nice talking to you.”

“I’m sorry. That was rude. Don’t go, okay?”

“We’re turning out the lights,” the host shouted.

“There’s a pub around the corner. Come with me, okay?”

She accepted his invitation. Eric ordered a local craft beer, Lyra a glass of wine, and they talked poets and poetry. They’d been to the same Billy Collins reading on campus a year earlier.

They read a few more to each other from their folders. The power of her poems, even the elliptical ones, astonished him. Cute, with blond shoulder-length hair and an intense blue-eyed gaze, she displayed an extraordinary intelligence. Eric was hooked.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked, pretending to be casual.

“We broke up a few weeks ago. What about you?”

He shook his head. “No one’s been interested in quite a while.”

“I am,” she said. She placed a hand on top of his, pressed gently, and released.

The invitation charged him up with giddy anticipation. Later, in his graduate student apartment, she allowed him to undress her, and he kissed her in her soft places. She took off his glasses and shirt and insisted on the pants, too; he sat on the bed while she tugged. She had short, stocky legs, a flat belly and, as if transformed by the bedroom, the mischievous face of an adolescent imp. She climbed on top of him, her hunger so intense he knew it had nothing to do with sex.

Later, they read to each other from poetry books on his shelves, Amy King and Simon Armitage, and made love a second time. Tucked in, they shared secrets until deep into the night.

Hers: her mother’s brother sexually molested her from the time she was ten until she was fifteen, when she escaped by going to live with her aunt and uncle on her father’s side. “One time my uncle was coming to visit and I said I was afraid of him. My mother asked why. I told her. She slapped me and sent me to my room for lying. Her brother would never do something like that, she said. I was twelve. It made me feel like it was my fault.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I feel like bread that’s been left out and gotten moldy. One reason I write poetry. It makes me feel clean, at least for a little while. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

How sad. She considered herself garbage and tried to make up for it through prowess in bed. Keeping his thoughts to himself, he told his secret: “All the women I date say I’m too in my mind. The last one waltzed out in the middle of dinner. Said she couldn’t find my heart. I don’t know what to do differently. You’re the first one I’ve made love to in over a year.”

Five

Eric, alone for the past year in the apartment and close to graduating with an MBA, still wondered what went wrong. Before the award ceremony, Lyra had been loving, affectionate, talking about their life together as if it would go on indefinitely. At Christmas she said goodbye with a wistful I-love-you. He remembered his distress at her uncharacteristic aloofness when he came back to the apartment on New Year Day. They didn’t make love for a week, and when they did, indifference replaced her typical spirited performance. She denied anything was amiss, but two months later she told him she was leaving.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s time to move on, that’s all.”

Eric, perplexed, demanded an explanation. “Move on to what? Is there someone else?”

She’d taken his hand. “There’s no one. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just me. I’m moving away. Far.”

He retrieved the folder with her poems and found the one she’d written with the baffling title, “The Pregnant Present,” reading again the stanza he assumed was written about him and her. It perplexed him and she’d refused to explain it.

Our animated densities mingled
In the interim-net of things
The virgin fruit of your
Diaphanous joy hovering low
Over the whirlpool of my love

Her things packed in her car, Lyra had offered, “Let’s have one last fuck,” but Eric couldn’t say goodbye so casually. Their lovemaking was a way of connecting, not of parting. The distance in her eyes said she was already somewhere else.

Months later, Eric came across a poem of hers in The New Yorker, a new height of prestige. The brief biography noted her recent honors and the university where she was teaching creative writing. He considered sending a letter of congratulations. But she hadn’t been in touch, and he suppressed the impulse.

He’d accepted a job with a multinational company in Texas. So he, too, would leave the city where memories of her inhabited his interior like a squatter that refused to leave.

Three

Eric was thrilled when Lyra took first place in a prominent poetry competition open to those who had never had a book published. Her submission contained seventy-three poems, and the win came with two thousand dollars and publication of her book by the sponsoring university’s press.

“You didn’t even tell me you entered the contest.”

“I entered it before I met you. I enter so many of them.”

“I knew you were good, but this! I’m so proud of you. We should do something to celebrate.”

“Let’s fuck our brains out.”

He suggested an alternative, dinner in a highly rated restaurant he couldn’t afford.

“Sounds wonderful, on one condition. I want to do it in the bathroom. I never had sex in a public bathroom before.”

Lyra never said “making love.” Fucking, having sex, doing it, all degraded the act that gave physical expression to their intimacy. An incredible lover, she had already taught him so much. Ways to touch her she swore would endear him to any woman. Positions he hadn’t experienced. He’d made love more in the several weeks they’d been together than he’d had in the rest of his life combined.

Her craving for sex—something was wrong with her. Assurances of his adoration didn’t assuage her conviction that she was unlovable; she said she didn’t believe him. Yet sex had to be more than a lure to ensnare a man. She’d once asked him to take Viagra so he could be inside her for hours. He’d stayed hard to the point of discomfort and boredom. He never did it again.

A month after her win, Lyra flew to the award ceremony, leaving two days early for a local television interview and guest appearances at creative writing seminars. When Eric arrived, the auditorium, packed with students and faculty, marked this as a turning point.

When Eric arrived, rushing to get there on time after his plane arrived late, he stopped at the back of the packed auditorium. Was he in the right place? He’d been expecting something similar.

Scintillating onstage, Lyra struck him as beautiful. An elegant dress replaced her habitual jeans and pullover, her movements graceful and her face sunny. After she read a selection of her poems and the applause died down, he repressed the urge to shout, That’s my girlfriend. The brilliant poet Evie Shockley, who’d been the contest judge, came onstage to interview her.

Admiration surpassed his considerable pride when she answered Shockley’s question about the importance of poetry. “They say the poet allows the reader to have an experience of the world. But what’s important is that poetry gives us a way to experience ourselves in relation to a reality conjured by words. If stanza by stanza the poet’s experience reverberates deeply enough, something timeless and boundless is shared between the reader and the poet.”

Eric was the first to clap for that, and the audience joined in wholeheartedly. The moderator asked Lyra why writing poetry was important to her.

“There are two things in the world that make me feel truly alive and connected to whatever holds all of us together. Loving someone and writing poetry. I never feel that the energy behind love or writing comes from my mind or even my heart. It comes through me from hidden spaces I share with all of humanity, what Jung called the collective unconscious, and for that I am forever grateful.”

Eric had never heard her so eloquent. A pang of anxiety wrenched his insides. Her new celebrity assured a career as a poet that would require her to move away.

He met her backstage, where she introduced Drew, the competition organizer, and Brad, a graduate student who seemed to resent Eric’s presence. He shrugged off the easy familiarity between Lyra and Brad as a consequence of their time together as he escorted her around the campus.

Lyra took a bath in their hotel room while Eric sat on the bed, overtaken by the love for her that had been swelling until it was ready to burst out of him. When she came out, naked and drying her hair, he kissed her and said for the first time, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I really mean it.”

“So do I.”

“After your royal performance this evening, you reign. You’re my queen and I’m your subject.”

“Really? Then kiss my feet.”

Eric got on his knees, kissed one foot and then the other.

“Now get undressed. I command you to fuck me like a worshipping slave.”

That was easy. He adored her, emotional warts and all, and tonight he revered her. If she relocated, he would follow her after graduating, develop his career wherever she was. He would propose, she would accept, and they would be together. Always.

May 5, 2025