What I'm Also Reading

My friend Zach stopped by for a few beers. We'd been pretty good friends in high school, gone our separate ways for college, then wound up in the same city, more or less by accident. He was a sweet guy, eager and a little sentimental at times, which probably gave us something in common. We were sitting on my couch, drinking, talking shit.

"How goes it with Sharon?" I asked.

Zack sat up a little. "She's amazing."

Sharon was his new girl, a tall, elegant redhead, a little older than us. She had the kind of voice you always imagine a phone sex operator would have, moist and soothing. The unusual thing about Sharon, she had a plastic eye. . . .

"There's something about her." He made an expansive gesture. He'd drunk four or five beers by now. . . .

Zach got up to get another beer. He was staggering a bit upon his return.

"There's this one thing," he said. . . . "In terms of intimacy. She likes to do different stuff."

I remembered now what had always creeped me out about Zach, which is that he had a tendency to say a little too much when he was sloshed. One night, back in college,, he'd mentioned that he was sort of attracted to certain short-haired breeds of dogs. "Not enough to do anything," he assured me. Still, it had pretty much killed the evening. . . .

"I don't want to freak you out," he said.

"You're not going to freak me out," I said.

"She likes for me to rub her eye," he said. "The area around her eye. . . . She has to rub this balm in, to keep the flesh moisturized. So this one night, a couple of weeks ago now, I rubbed the balm in for her. Does this sound creepy, man?

"I could see how much it meant to her, you know, to have me accept that part of her. And the flesh there , it's extremely sensitive, the way scars can be. It was kind of a turn-on for both of us. So it just sort of evolved from that. . . . That's what we all want anyway, to have our lover accept the most damaged part of us, right? So from there, it was a pretty natural progression."

"What was a natural progression?" I asked

"That she would want me to rub myself there."

"Like a massage?"

"Sort of," he said. "But not with my hand."

"Time out," I said.

I will never ask for a Time Out at this point in your story. I will never tell you that I'm creeped (or freaked) out by anything you do in the bedroom. I will never tell you that you have "over-shared" or given me too much information, and do you know why? I'll tell you why: Because I'm your "I'm fucking my girlfriend in her ocular cavity and I need to tell somebody" friend. That's why.