I shouldn’t’ve even been there. Or I should have taken my boyfriend except I didn’t have one. The creep met someone better better than two weeks ago and I was horny as fuck. It was a party, English Department faculty, and I was a senior in English, okay, but these were all old guys and their wives. And girlfriends. I mean some of them were assistant professors, so not so old, maybe mid to late twenties. I was there because I’d written a story and it got an award and my writing professor said there was a get-together at his house and I should drop by. I thought there would be others from the class, but there weren’t. Just me and about twenty odd old guys, some of whom I knew from taking their courses. But they all seemed eager to talk to me, and I nodded a lot and sipped my wine and the evening went on and on and I sipped more and more wine, and every time I came back from the bathroom there was more wine.

So in other words I was more than a little tipsy, to use a word the old guys probably would have used. Smashed. Ploughed. Shit-faced. Zonked. Blitzed. Plastered. Maybe not that bad. One guy I didn’t know from classes was talking to me, I think he was a fairly famous poet, and he had his hand on my knee, and I didn’t know how to get it off. It wouldn’t have been so bad except I’d left the last bathroom visit a wee bit too long and my panties were wet so I’d left them behind. I was half following this guy’s words, mostly thinking about his hand. Above the knee. “I used to be in good shape,” he said. “I could do twenty-five pushups like it was nothing. Now. Now I’d be lucky to do ten. Ha! Five. One. One fucking pushup.” He was looking at me so intently. His finger circling. Winding. Working more and more under my dress, closer and closer to where I shouldn’t have been as bare or wet as I was. And his eyes were intense, you know? Like it was my job to contradict him. To tell him he could do endless fucking pushups. I thought I should say, “Maybe if I was under you to cushion your push-up,” and horrifyingly I actually had said it. I think. And I was thinking, Oh fuck no! Because it should have been “If I were under you,” subjunctive, not “If I was under you,” and it would be a push-down, that part of it, not a pushup. “God, I’m such an idiot.” I said that too. And the guy said, “Yeah, that would work.” And I said, “Don’t you know your subjunctive?” And I moved his hand away and stood up. But I was tipsy, and I fell into his arms, and he caught me. He caught me like I weighed nothing.

As it turned out, he did a lot more than twenty-five pushups, or pushdowns, or whatever, and I was there to cushion every fucking one of them.