I'd seen him around. We went to the same shows at ratty little clubs and drank at the same bar with friends; occasionally we ended up in the same subway car when I was running later than usual for work. Seeing him was like catching a flash of mica in the sidewalk - distracting, shiny and too quick to hold. I could never quite time any of these accidental meetings, but I always knew there would be another.

Something about the way he stooped his shoulders, his hands stuffed in his pockets, the scuffed Docs he wore with his pinstripes made me want him. When we took the train together, I craned my neck so I could look between the commuters and see him dozing off, listening to music, litter jittering at his feet with the movement of the subway cars. More than once he opened his eyes to find me staring at him, picturing what he looked like when fucking or how I would fit against him horizontally.

So, it wasn't a stretch that we ended at the same topsy-turvy party in Brooklyn. New York is smaller than people who don't live here would believe. The music was rapturous, with heavy dark beats and strange ululations from across the world pulsing deep in my sternum as I danced in the giant basement of what must have once been a factory. The air smelled of cigarettes and drying beer, sweat and weed. It was one of those parties that make you feel like you are finally the person you wanted to be when you were sixteen.

I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings, thanks to one space cake and a dose of homemade absinthe, so it seemed rather sudden when he appeared at my side.

"I'll buy you a drink," he said, and I nodded. We headed out into the backyard where we each bought another shot of sketchy absinthe. "Extra sugar, please," and then we mock-clinked our plastic cups and downed the foul, licorice-flavored syrup, leaving a trail of burning down to our bellies.

"Sit with me while I smoke a cigarette," and I nodded. I'd been playing this out in my mind for so long I didn't know what to say. 

"Usually I see you downtown; how'd you end up all the way over here?"

"Same way you did." I smiled. "I took the G."

"Worthless train," he laughed. "It never runs. We are never going to get home at this rate."

"We'll have to take a cab, I guess."

This conversation didn't begin as a come-on. It started as a typical conversation between two people hanging out in Brooklyn late at night who were wondering the easiest and cheapest way to get home at 3 am.

"I am fucking tired," he said. "Do you want to see if we can find a cab?" This was before Uber, before cabs cruised the streets of Williamsburg looking for drunken frat bros who were feeling adventurous — the best we could hope for was snagging a car with what we hoped was a real livery car license in the back window.

We stood outside and shivered while sinister Lincoln Town Cars picked up partiers until finally we were next in the ragtag line of drunks trying to get home.

"Where are you going?" the cabbie called back without looking at us from behind his scratchy plastic partition.

"We're making two stops," he said.

The cab pulled away from the curb and got on the highway.

His knee touched mine, where it radiated heat in all directions. My toes felt as electric as my cunt; my scalp prickled all the way down to between my shoulder blades. Minutely, our hands crawled together on the navy seat cushion, and our spines melted in millimeters until our mouths touched. A dry brush and he pulled back. The air crackled like when I was a kid and my friends and I would take turns chewing Tic Tacs in the dark to watch them spark between our teeth. I stroked the skin beneath his ear – he smelled so good, it was impossible, I wanted to eat him alive – my fingers following his hairline until I could wrap my hand around the back of his neck and pull him to me.

We kissed tentatively, his back bowing towards me, until I scooped my fingers into the neck of his shirt; my fingers raised goosebumps on his bare, hidden skin. The car rolled along the highway, the driver’s CB crackled with voices, but I could only pay attention to the roar of our mouths swimming together and his bony knee insistently nudging itself against my thigh.

And then the car stopped. The cabbie discreetly cleared his throat. I fumbled with my skirt and he grabbed his wallet from his back pocket.

“Thanks, we’ll both get out here,” he said. “How much do we owe you?”

“Fourteen dollars.”

He threw a twenty into the front seat and grabbed me by the hand.

We slunk through the lobby of my building and he began jabbing the elevator button relentlessly. Finally, the doors creaked open and he pulled me in, pushed me against the wall and began kissing me frantically. I reached out and blindly hit an elevator button while he kissed my neck and ran his rough hands up my thighs and around my ass in circles, teasing me with hot proximity.

The elevator door opened on the top floor, so I grabbed his hand and led him up the stairs to the roof. All of New York City glittered around us. We jumped over the railing from the brightly lit, finished concrete side to where chalky rocks covered the cement and it was dark.

One side of the roof was brightly lit, with cheeky deckchairs arranged for sunbathers; the other was dark, unfinished, and covered in chalky rocks. We hopped over the partition dividing them, our boots sending the rocks flying.

I pushed him up against the wall. He reached for me, but I pinned his arms back. He began to laugh, but when I reached my cold hands underneath his shirt, circling his navel and inching up between his pectoral muscles, circling closer and closer to his nipples, that laugh became a gasp. A quick pinch and down to his belt buckle, which I left dangling. He reached to unzip his pants but I slapped his hands away. I stuck one finger beyond the band of his boxers and he groaned. Two fingers, then three, but I still avoided touching his cock. My fingers grazed his pubic hair and he moved his pelvis up towards my hand.

“That was bad,” I said. “Now you’ll have to wait.”

I lifted my skirt, pulled down my panties and stepped out of them, balled them up and put them in his pocket. I dipped two fingers between my labia, then smeared the wetness on his mouth. He looked absolutely shell-shocked, but he had learned he wasn’t supposed to move until I told him to. I teased myself, rubbing in circles around my clit, until I couldn’t wait and went for what always makes me come. With my eyes on his face, I began jerking off in earnest, with one finger on either side of my clit, rubbing the barbell in my hood up and down, going from the top of my clit down to my hole until I was on the precipice. 

“Now,” I said, and he released his hands, grabbing me almost viciously with one hand on my breast and the other fumbling in my pussy until I arranged his fingers so they touched me the same way I had been touching myself. 

“Two fingers, three fingers, watch out for my piercing, oh holy fuck," I whispered hotly in his ear. “I am about to make a mess, do you want that? Do you want me to gush all over you? Do you want me to?”

He was nodding and murmuring and biting my ear and my neck and whatever he could reach under my shirt so I didn’t wait for an answer. I couldn’t wait. The energy built inside of me until it blew out the top of my head and out of my pussy and I squirted all over his hand. I was coming and coming, shuddering on his hand, grasping his wrist so he couldn’t move it. I just kept grinding on the heel of his hand, and the liquid kept pouring out of me. Beneath us the street lamps glowed orange-y yellow light, and above us was the black sky dotted with klieg lights and it was too beautiful, this stranger that I already knew and my wetness on his hands and my body so electric with orgasm. I felt like I’d been turned inside out, and everything in me was so fucking thankful for being alive that I started crying.

Slowly he withdrew his hand, even though I couldn’t stop quivering, and he licked his fingers off and kissed me with a soft mouth that tasted like my cunt.

“That was,” I gasped, “amazing. And now it’s back against the wall with you.” 

My hands were relentless, and wherever they went my mouth followed. His belt buckle jingled against my torso, and I looked down to see his cock poking out from the top of his shorts as if struggling for air. I slid my hands down, down, tracing the muscles pointing like neon signs to his cock. I accidentally brushed him with the back of my hand, and he jutted his pelvis against me again. 

This game is as good as the seconds before a first kiss or the first time someone slides into me. The first touch of a new cock is always stunning — the soft skin that’s never seen by the sun, wrapped around muscles that flex and twitch beneath my fingers, and the faces he makes, the sounds.

“Slow down, slow down,” he whispered in a crackly voice. “I don’t want to come yet.” Somewhere beneath us, a drunk yelled at a cab, a fire truck drove by with its siren on, a TV blared. The sounds of people living their lives around us — and sleeping too, since it was close to 5 am — was as comforting as it was dangerous. 

The rocks felt cold and sharp on my knees when I knelt down in front of him. Pre-come dangled precariously from the dark pink head of his cock. I carefully licked the drop off, let him feel my breath and the heat of my mouth, almost enveloped him without actually touching him. I bent my head and rubbed his cock in my hair, against my neck and cheek, and finally took him in my mouth. His breath exploded.

“Thankyou,” he muttered in a rush, and began easing in and out of my mouth. I used one hand to keep him from hitting my tonsils and the other to slyly inch my way down past his balls to the seam of his body and beyond.

“You are making me so hot, I want to touch myself, you know that?” I murmured around his penis.

“I wish we had some condoms.” Each word was punctuated by a breath.

“Oh yeah?” I was working him back and forth between both hands now. “You feeling lucky, punk? Here, you take over.” He jacked himself while I fumbled for my purse in the semi-dark. I handed him a condom and watched him work it on, still stroking himself. His face was just how I’d pictured it all those mornings on the subway: concentrated, like he was having an intense dream, his teeth biting his lower lip.

“Leave your pants on,” I said, my fingers back on my clit, rubbing the shiny steel barbell piercing my hood up and down against my most sensitive bit. He dropped down next to me and put three fingers inside me. I grabbed the back of his head and kissed him hard, and he pressed back, our teeth knocking into each other, almost ripping our lips as he finally surged into me and we both exhaled into each other’s’ mouths.

The rocks poked into my back, my neck, my scalp, and I reached behind me and grabbed handfuls and threw them in the air. They rained back down on us. He worked my clit while he steadily stroked in and out, rhythmic as rowing a boat. He hit my spot, and my muscles clenched around him over and over again until I was almost pushing him out with my contractions. The sounds that escaped me were crazy, guttural, nasty noises, and he replied in the same language. He fucked me harder, and I scrabbled at his back with my nails and dug my heels into his ass and it was more like a wrestling match than sweet lovemaking as the sun came up. 

His pace grew faster and faster, and my cunt was still grabbing at him because I couldn’t stop coming, until finally he pushed all the way into me, his pelvis against mine, and I felt his cock pulsing with his orgasm. He held the condom to the base of his cock and pulled out, then fell down beside me on the rocks. Church bells rang six times as we stared into each other’s eyes, barely blinking. Up close he had light brown freckles across his nose. My glasses had been tossed somewhere in the middle of our roughhousing. Both of our knees were battered and bruised.

We lay there in silence, eyes locked and bodies cooling, while the city slowly woke up beneath us.