At 24 years old, I thought I knew all about death. It had been five years since my father died while crossing an intersection in his big Mercedes sedan. When the airbag deployed and hit his chest, his heart exploded, and he died on impact. After that, a part of me became very serious and reflective. I nearly drowned in an ocean of grief.
While sitting in traffic one day, I thought up a love story. It was about two women who met and fell in love quickly and intensely. One of the girls died after being struck by a bus while riding her bicycle. I saw it as a uniquely un-American love story because of the unhappy ending.
How would one go on without the other? I wondered. I’ll write that story one day. I’ll tell the world what happens after the death of your great love.
Shortly after that, maybe a few months later, I met Skylar. I fell hard and fast. She moved in with me after a mere five months. Then, a year later we moved to New York together. However, as time passed, I tried and failed several times to break up with her.
Skylar was an alcoholic. After four drinks, something in her brain chemistry changed, and she became an endless trash chute, pouring mass quantities of any kind of alcohol directly down her throat and into her liver.
She’d go into the bathroom at clubs and drink left-behind bottles of beer that other people had abandoned on the back of the toilet or the sink as they washed their hands. Skylar didn’t care if all that was left in the bottle was backwash. Down it went.
I tried to end the relationship–I really did, but I was caught in a toxic tide. Every time I wanted to leave, I just got pulled back. The sex was unique and weird. Because of that, I couldn’t get enough.
Skylar would spend hours between my legs examining my pussy, picking at ingrown hairs, eating me out, fingering me, talking to my vagina, and singing it songs.
She was both very feminine and very masculine and could easily pivot between both at will. Skylar instinctively knew everything I liked, and she did it all.
The first time we made love, she licked the back of my front teeth. I’d always wanted someone to do that. She understood that sticking her fingers in my mouth and opening my jaw to make more room for her tongue was something that would make me pant with desire.
When we moved to New York, I threw myself into my new life. Skylar and I had bought a Vespa, and we met this other woman, Leslie, who also had a Vespa. We formed a Vespa gang and scooted around the city.
I told myself that Skylar would change–that New York would change her, that art school would make her different. Nothing changed.
In fact, her drinking was worse than ever. She started to become violent when she drank. And she lied about drinking. I could usually tell when she was drunk, but one night, she insisted on driving, promising me she hadn’t had any alcohol. It was a long ride home, and her body swayed back and forth on the bike. I thought she’d fall off. But she refused to pull over.
I cried all the way home.
I was so desperate to get out of the relationship with Skylar that I began an affair with Leslie. I wasn’t even attracted to Leslie––not really. Truth be told, she scared me. She was intense and angry. But we fucked a few times, and I felt it gave me the strength to leave Skylar.
One night, the three of us went out, and I resolved to leave Skylar.
That night, Skylar only had one beer (that I saw, at least). We all decided to go for a late-night cheesecake at Junior’s in Brooklyn because we’d always wanted to go and never had.
Leslie found parking first. Skylar dropped me off to accompany Leslie and then went to park our scooter up the road.
“I’m breaking up with Skylar tomorrow,” I whispered to Leslie. “I can’t do it anymore.”
“Are you sure?” Leslie’s eyes were wide and moist. She thought I was breaking it off with Skylar because I was in love with her. I wasn’t.
“I’m sure,” I said, staring off into space.
I heard a truck whizzing by. Then, there was a strange smack and the panicked screeching of wheels. The truck halted.
Something was wrong.
Wasn’t Skylar coming that way?
After that, everything became wonky. I heard someone slam a door while another person screamed, “No! No! No!”
Skylar had been gone too long.
Is she… is she up there?
I started running toward the truck, and when I saw legs on the ground, I threw my purse onto the street and sprinted.
“CALL 911!” I shouted back at Leslie.
I arrived at the front of the truck to see Skylar in a mangled heap on the ground. Her legs were twisted unnaturally. There was blood everywhere. Her body looked like it should be in a chalk outline at a crime scene. Clear liquid streamed out of her, running down the street.
I rushed over. The man tried to move her to see if she was alive, and I screamed at him because I’d always heard that you should never move an injured person because you might break their back and paralyze them.
There was no pulse when I put my fingers on her neck. She wasn’t breathing.
“Skylar,” I said, my voice clear with shock, “are you alive?”
A crowd formed, and people began to shout at me. They were angry at me for some reason. To this day, I don’t understand why.
Skylar opened her eyes slowly. Confused, she looked around. Her eyes darted side to side, taking in the commotion.
“Someone call 9-1-1! Please! Help me! Call for an ambulance!” I shouted out to anyone who would listen.
I looked down at Skylar, who tried to move.
“Oh my God,” I cried, “please, stay there. Don’t move. Please, it might make things worse. Do you know where you are?”
“What?” she replied.
Holy shit, she’s got brain damage. She’s going to die.
Sirens blared, and a herd of policemen and EMTs cut through the crowd. They rushed to the ground and started cutting away her clothes.
“Ma’am, you should probably stand back over there. We’ve got to get her on a stretcher and to the hospital,” an ambulance worker said, firmly.
I stepped backward, not wanting to take my eyes off of her.
“Wait, don’t go!” Skylar shrieked. “Don’t leave me alone!”
I screamed back, “I’m right over here, baby! I’m not going to leave you. I’m here!”
Leslie walked over to my side, her face frozen and emotionless. She didn’t say a word, which made me angry.
The EMTs popped open the heavy double doors of the ambulance and loaded Skylar in. It was then that I lost control of my emotions.
Fuck! They’re going to leave me, and she’s going to die alone in there!
I shook horribly. Every part of me trembled, my teeth, my fingers, everything. “Please, let me in here! I have to go with her. I don’t want her to be alone!”
Skylar was screaming out for me. One EMT looked at me sympathetically and said, “Yes, of course. Come in, and just sit over there on that bench.”
I was afraid to touch her. I knew deep in my soul that she would die.
But she didn’t.
We went to the trauma unit, and Skylar disappeared for hours and hours. Before long, it was morning.
When Skylar finally moved into her own room, I refused to leave her bedside. I sat in a chair next to her and read Catcher in the Rye out loud to her.
In the moments that she slept, I thought back to the story I’d invented some years back.
I did this, I ruminated. It’s my fault. I called this into my life when I dreamed up that story about the lover dying. I have to fix us. There must be a reason she didn’t die. Maybe we’re meant to be together.
Days passed like that. Skylar had numerous surgeries. Her pelvis was broken. Leg bones. An ice cream scoop’s worth of flesh was lost on the pavement.
After ten days or so, the doctors removed her catheter. Skylar was on heavy pain meds and, therefore, in good spirits.
“I can’t go to the bathroom,” she explained. “Will you help me?”
With a broken leg and many wounds, she tried to lift herself as I slid a rosey-beige-colored bedpan underneath her. After struggling for several minutes, she finally let a warm stream of urine fizz hot into the bedpan. I felt the warmth of her pee as I held the plastic pan.
This feels nice. She’s alive. I love her so much. I almost lost her. I could have lost her forever.
“I really want to take a bath,” Skylar sighed, touching the few parts of her body that weren’t bandaged.
“I’ll help you, baby. Don’t worry.”
I pulled the curtain around to cover the room from the great glass windows and doors that looked into the hallway of the Critical Care Unit. I softly untied the blue strings of her hospital gown and let it drop to the side of the bed. Carefully, I sponged her skin with a washcloth from the bathroom.
I patted her gently and moved her neck to the side so I could reach her shoulders.
My moves were thoughtful and soft. I lifted the towel in and out of a soapy, yellow tub. I bathed her chest, her breasts, her belly, her inner thighs. I spread her legs and saw the mass of ginger-colored hair at the bottom of her pelvis. I dipped the sponge in the tub again and again as I pressed through the thicket of hair toward her vagina.
Inside her labia were bits of dirt and road. My face flushed. I felt aroused by cleaning her in this intimate moment. I looked lustfully at her vagina.
“You’re turned on,” Skylar said, smirking.
I bowed my face in shame.
“Look at me,” Skylar said, her voice husky.
My bashfulness was turning her on.
“I can’t believe that I’m getting aroused by you bathing my dirty pussy in this hospital bed, even with a broken leg and fucked up body.”
I nodded and kept stroking away softly at her tiny, orchid-shaped pussy.
Not all vaginas are this beautiful.
“Go down on me”, she commanded me.
“I can’t. I’ll hurt you.”
“I feel great,” she insisted.
I rolled my eyes.
“Please? Come on, are you really going to turn down a cripple? Have some compassion.”
I chuckled.
“God, Skylar. Okay, fine.”
I tied up my long hair into a messy bun and hovered my lips over her pussy, breathing hot air onto it.
“Do it,” Skylar begged.
I dipped my tongue between her legs and licked her softly for half an hour until she whimpered with a light orgasm.
Then we held hands and cried.
