I could learn to like this whole sex thing

Toronto is record hot for this time of year. Princess stays with me to escape her non-air conditioned apartment. We're legit now: she's met the parents and the Soulmate and all that. We're still deciding whether we'll face her parents head on or escape from them.

Princess is a strange combination of shyness and awareness of the fact that she looks like a supermodel. When I tell her I like Christina Hendricks better than Zhang Ziyi, who she resembles, she turns to ice - she thinks I'm saying I like curvy girls better than her ectomorphic beauty. Not the case at all. But a strange kind of proof that whatever her insecurities (she also thinks she's flat chested) she's also well aware of what she does to men. To me.

She's a virgin, but as I take her clothes off and kiss and hold her, she has this worldliness and acts like none of this is any surprise to her. It takes a few times to learn her but I am a good student and I learn how to please her, and she turns me on like no one ever has. I never thought I'd say that since Music. I never thought I would find anyone to equal her, but Princess excites me more. Princess makes me feel more certain, more aligned, more true.

So, at 5am, for the second time in the night, we make love. She doesn't like fingers. She takes a long time to come from my tongue on her, and she does so in a very low key way - a quiet little shudder, not the rapid breathing and rhythmic moving and sometimes screaming I'd gotten used to - though as she gets past her shyness and realizes what turns me on, she's getting a little louder. I'm on top of her, and behind her, and then she's on top. I slide down: "What are you --" and she moans as I put my mouth on her, her above me on her hands and knees. She comes like that and I go back behind her and take her again. "Mmmm... that feels good."

I whisper in her ear the whole time, that I love her, how beautiful she is. She just moans. "I love you too," she whispers. She's a little obsessed with cleanliness and thinks her body is dirty. I explain to her that I'm not attracted to the way her soap smells, which is very nice, but to the way she smells. After I've gone down on her she won't kiss me. But now she's sweaty and hot and a beautiful mess. "Can I come, or do you want to do it longer?" "Just come," she says. I do. I take the condom off, wrap it in a tissue, and collapse next to her.

"I like this whole sex thing," she says, smiling.

"Well, if you ever want it, you know who to call."

"Thanks," she says, rolling her eyes.

I miss no one, I think of no one else, now. I can feel Voice's absence and it's a very good thing. I don't feel uncertain about myself. I don't walk on eggshells. I don't fear the future. I don't fear a future of never knowing if she's with me. I trust the Princess when I open my mail in her presence or get a call in her presence, when either of those things with Voice would lead to a fight with her interrogating me about who was calling and why. I trust the Princess when she gets texts or calls in my presence and don't wonder if they're another secret lover like me. The amount of energy that went into holding my sanity (barely) in that situation - I am only realizing how much energy it was now that I am slowly getting it back. I am going to marry this girl. I have never felt so ready or so sure. I already belong to her.

Secret relationship, secret breakup

I'm babysitting and watching 'Dreamgirls', falling in love with Beyonce again. Eddie Murphy's character is about to go on stage. His girlfriend, played by Anika Noni Rose, gives him a kiss for each year that's gone by with her as a mistress and him still married and promising to leave his wife. 8 kisses. I would have given 4.

An interrupted 4. A 4 with several periods, including one a year long, where I saw a lot of other women. But in those years, even when we weren't talking, we both knew that we loved each other. We both knew that we were friends.

So this time, when I tell her I've fallen for someone else, and she goes in for hostility and defamation, it's a surprise. It's painful. A surprise for her, since every time I left over the past four years, it was not real. And this time it is.

"I can't wrap my head around it," I tell Roommate. "We're supposed to be enemies now? After everything?"

He shrugs.

I'm the kind of guy that would want to be able to get a coffee with her, or a dinner, and hear about her latest relationship adventures. I don't put borders around relationships. I've suffered for my inability to do so, certainly with her, probably in general. But I can't do it any other way. So the realization that my dream of friendship isn't going to happen is slow, and painful.

And I miss her. I watch videos of her songs. I check her twitter site, which she's been using to send coded messages of hostility my way. She tells our friends to tell me she's over it and doesn't care, now she sees I'm really pathetic.

The scandal protects me. She can't defame too much without revealing her dirty secret - me. So we both have to suffer in silence while we pretend indifference.

She tells me to never email or call or contact her again. She recently bought me an elaborate gift from five different stores in the mall. She tells me she wasted money she didn't have on it in our last conversation.

I go to each store, return each gift (the DVDs, the electronics, the clothes...), get a receipt, create an itemized ledger for the full amount, get cash out of the bank machine, bundle the receipts and ledger into an envelope, and leave it for her with the last of her stuff that I had. Money you didn't have, I write. You have it now. Thanks for the tweets, I don't write. That would be to tell her that it affected me.

Four years of friendship, four more of love, and it really comes to this? Could I not have hoped for better? Or should I, as everyone warned me, have known all along that this was all it was ever going to come to, because this was all it was? My body can't believe it. But my body came to fear her rejection and her contempt and her lies more than it longed for her. I really did hope for better.

The door's open, just a crack...

She's my friend's girl. They're off and on. Off, right now. She's in town for a few days. She stays with me, it's only sensible. Roommate is not at home. When we hang out in public she leans against me subtly. She hugs me for really long when we greet.

I set her up on the couch. Turn the heat up. Go to my room. Close the door tightly. Then I open it again.

I put my head to the pillow. 45 minutes later she walks in and crawls into my bed. "I'm wide awake," she says. "Is this okay?" She snuggles up to me and strokes my head and pulls my hair. "Yeah," I say. Our heads touch, and we are kissing. She likes to do it on top, holding me down, moving at her own rhythm. I smile and try to stay focused. I'm thinking about someone else. Voice flashes into my mind. Voice crying when I tell her I'm leaving. For real this time. Not like the last three times. So many betrayals.

In the morning I take her to the airport. We talk about her rocky relationship with my friend like we hadn't been making love two hours before. Or maybe like we had, and it makes no difference. This one will always be a secret. It all felt inevitable. But now it's done and it feels wrong.