That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields Read Free Page B

and trying to pretend she’s not. I’m lost and trying to admit I am.
    As University of Washington undergraduates, Jake and I were the love interests in a play about the suffrage movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. He had a straight, sandy-blond ponytail that went down to the middle of his back—didn’t really work for the time period we were depicting, but oh well. He put it in a low bun. I remember thinking that wasn’t very sexy. He wasn’t the best actor, but he’d known and survived “real life.” I was twenty and couldn’t imagine how I was going to be able to support myself with a real job. He was twenty-six, had gravity, was gentle, raced bicycles (and as a result, had very muscular, shaved legs). I’d started messing around with girls before dating him. He made out with one of my best gay male friends at a gay club—a big, open-mouthed, face-engulfing kiss—to show he was open to homosexuality. That was bad acting and it bugged me.
    He had that serious, intense look Carl had and pouty, square lips, which reminded me of my great grandpa (a little weird). Similar square hands, movements. I could imagine his lips turning into the lips my great grandfather had at ninety, from a pout to a sag—a little bit of drool on the sides. That grossed me out, too.
    He didn’t tell me he had a girlfriend. He invited me over one Saturday morning to his studio apartment to “rehearse” outside of rehearsals. We rehearsed how we were going to have sex later. We would have sex after he told his girlfriend he didn’t want to be with her anymore. She was in the audience directly across from us the same evening, and she wasn’t very happy to see her boyfriend with a date later that night. I thought the whole thing was a little sketchy: he had to try me out first, then he could leave her. Still, I understood.
    We started dating, and I started seeing a psychologist. I’d come back from my weekly therapy sessions and Jake would ask me how they went and then we would talk about everything I’d said and he’d analyze everything I’d just analyzed. He started to get inside my brain, question every sigh, every smile, every movement. I let him. I became his patient. I needed all the help I could get but couldn’t handle the brain invasion. I had no space for myself anymore. He was always either sleeping with me,eating with me, or looking at me very closely. Another thing he did that bugged me: when he made tuna sandwiches, he slowly and meticulously scraped every last teeny-tiny bit of tuna out of the tin can.
    He was the manager for a building of tiny studio apartments with Murphy beds. On Capitol Hill—slightly dumpy verging on ghetto. He hired me as his assistant for ten bucks an hour to help renovate apartments when the weirdos moved out. (One tenant went to jail and had a collection of girls’ driver’s licenses in his greasy kitchen drawer. He worked in the morgue, would go and collect the dead bodies from crime scenes, and kept a collection of the girls’ ID cards. Shiver. We had to cut his sofa in half with a chain saw to get it out of the apartment.) I had my first doggy-style orgasm with Jake on the floor of one of those nasty places.
    He was an avid hiker-camper-outdoorsman. We went camping in areas where there were bears. He knew how to do all that stuff and made me feel safe about it.
    One day I asked him how many girls he’d slept with and he said approximately five hundred. What?! He said the best way to get to know someone is to sleep with them. The more quickly the better. Direct entry past their persona. In my head, my mom called him a sleaze-ball sex addict. How could he just sleep with anyone?Did he have no criteria? Did he care only about fucking? I was so mad. Surely he was going to fuck somebody else while fucking me. He clearly couldn’t control himself. I wanted him to want only me, even