Taming Gregory

It only takes one intriguing detail to get me curious about someone. Some little quirk makes me want to seduce them, get inside them and look around. I met Gregory at one of my shows after I interrupted a conversation he was having with a friend. I like long hair on men or women - he caught my eye.

“Gregory,” my friend told me later, “wants to make love to a panther. He wants a sexy black slinky powerful panther in heat, like one he met during a wild animal rescue in the Everglades.”

I thought about that for a long time.

I wasn’t hooked until I touched him. We saw each other for perhaps the third time at a crowded party. It was too loud to talk easily, and I shivered at the unexpected intimacy of his breath against my ear as he came in closer after shouting hoarsely to be heard. I think he said “You look great tonight.” I didn’t think I was his type – I’d seen him with his ex-girlfriend, a petite, flat-chested dancer. I’m taller than he is, curvier than his ex. I shouted back, “I’m not a panther, I’m more of a lion.”

“What?” he shouted back.

“A lioness!” I tried again, shaking my dark blonde mane. I do like my wild hair, longer and thicker than most blondes. Gregory shook his head, looked up at me, and grinned.

We were caught in a doorway and couldn’t go in or out because of the hot press of people on both sides. I hadn’t taken my coat off, and I was sweating. I leaned in closer to hear him, to catch his scent. I've always said I make all of my relationship decisions based on smell - and my God, he smelled good.

His hand was on the doorframe near my head. I reached up and lightly stroked his wrist, trying to flirt physically since conversation was impossible. Whether it was my touch or his sensitivity, I can’t say, but I was looking into his face and I saw him react to my touch with a singular intensity. I instantly forgot everything around us, held his gaze, and deliberately, almost cruelly, kept touching him.

It was dark, and his brown eyes were so close to black, I couldn’t see if his pupils were dilating, but I saw his breath catch in shock. His other hand reached under my coat and held onto my waist. I suppose I should have kissed him, but instead I turned my head and licked his wrist, where his veins pulsed under his skin. I slid my tongue up to the center of his palm, and even through the noise of the party I heard him gasp. We touched for a long time before the party flowed around us and laughing friends pulled us apart from each other.

A week later I brought him home. We rolled all around each other in the hot, noisy, dark - kissing, clawing, biting. For weeks I traded sleep for this extraordinary passion, pulling fire from his veins. In the sanctuary of our bodies we shook, wept, cried with laughter, came together too many times to recall. Sometimes I would have to hold back, try not to show my impatience for his orgasm. I was hungry to share it, tug it up through my stomach into my heart, wanting to pull him into my womb like giving birth backwards. Is this what I wanted? Is this where we wanted to go? It was too late to be scared, too late to take it back or start over.

I believe in two vital and contradictory truths about relationships. The one truth is that you have to assume that you can never change the other person. You have to accept them for who they are and not expect them to change. The other truth is that people do change each other, in fact you cannot have any interaction with someone without being changed by it. We inevitably change each other, whether we mean to or not.

"Helping someone is the same thing as messing with someone."

- John Irving

The first time I held Gregory, I wanted to heal him, which is a dangerous impulse. He thought maybe something was wrong with him - for always needing sex, for always craving touch.

Maybe his mother or his father had hurt him, punished him, disconnected from him. Maybe they didn’t even mean to be unkind. So much is said in the moment we pull back, when we won’t connect, when we don’t touch. Or maybe it was just that civilization is too restrictive for a few ravenous young souls, maybe the same ones who inspired medieval stories of werewolves and vampires.

I chose to play the mother, the lover, who accepted him as he was. The one who would not judge him, the one who would find every square inch of him beautiful.