21 to 2

A Complete Sexual History

The first time Stefan and I had sex, it was meant to be a rebound. Six years of marriage had just ended without closure, and I needed comfort. I needed a chance to reap the benefits of being alone in the midst of all of the bullshit of it.

He had the air of a stud, sexy and available. A few weeks earlier, he had left Nick and me at the bar, saying, “I've gotta go see about a girl.”

An hour later, he met us back at the Compound. “She was passed out.”

After just a few late nights of whiskey, weed, Perkins, burritos, coffee, movies, jokes, and more honesty than I've shared with anyone I've known less than six weeks, it was clear that behind the promiscuity he was a god damn sweetheart. After the first night, I knew this wouldn't end with a rebound.

“How many girls have you had sex with?” I asked him that first night. I wasn't sure if I was curious or concerned, but it seemed an appropriate question.

“Twenty-one.” He grinned a little sheepishly. “You make twenty-one. And you? How many guys?”

I returned the sheepish grin and rolled over so that I was staring at the ceiling, avoiding his eyes.

“Two.”

“So that makes me--”

“Number Two.”

Number 14 called him last week while he lay in bed with me. He checked the caller ID on his phone, rolled his eyes, and looked at me.

“This is my life,” he said reluctantly.

He only dated her for a brief period, but they have been friends for a long time. She had been in his bar that night, wasted, this girl with a job and a fiance, who never drinks. When he told her he was leaving town for the summer, she burst into tears.

“Oh my god! I'm going to miss you so much!”

He smiled and served her a glass of water. “It's not really a big deal. I'm coming back in a few months. Our relationship won't really change. At all.”

“I'm going to miss you so much!”

She wouldn't leave the bar without a hug, and she came back to knock on the door after she was kicked out.

“You've got to just go home,” he said. “Get home and sleep this off. We can talk in the morning.”

She called him four times before he left work, and he finally answered on his way home.

“We're having an afterparty!” she shouted drunkenly into the phone. “Come over!”

“I'm tired,” he replied. “I'm going home.”

He didn't answer when she called again. Four times between two-thirty, when he lay down next to me, and three a.m., when he finally turned his phone off.

“How is she still awake at three a.m. after leaving the bar so drunk?” I asked.

“She's gotta be doing drugs... she doesn't do drugs. I don't know. She's bored and unhappy.”

“I think we're at that point in our relationship where I should find your old girlfriends on Facebook, look at their pictures, and see how much prettier I am,” I mused a few days later.

“Oh, you probably don't have to do that to know,” he replied. “I can just tell you about them if you want to hear it.”

That sounded like it would get weird. Of course I wanted to hear it.

“It was just a string of sad and lonely people. Just sex,” he admitted. “We were satisfied to leave each other silently in the morning as long as we never had to spend a night alone.”

When I came to the Hart Compound the week before Christmas, Number 20 had left a tray of cookies at the door, an apology for Nick Hart. They called her “Ivy League”, a snob from Harvard who was entertained to be slumming around with them. She called Nick an asshole and Stefan, with disdain, “a bartender”.

They come into his bar a lot, more than any of us knows, I think.

He came up to me at the bar last night, lowered his eyes, and said, “There are five of you in here right now.”

I grinned and looked around, trying to imagine who the others might be. Number 19, 15, 9, 16, and me. I didn't know who any of them were, and none of them knew that I was there.

Number 19 was crazy. “I hooked up with her the night before she went into rehab and was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Number 9. “We were two sad and lonely people incapable of having a relationship. We had sex twice in one night, and moved on.”

Number 15 liked to do a lot of cocaine. They enjoyed a lot of late nights, talking and boozing until 7am.

Number 16. “That was just a one-night thing. A one...afternoon thing, actually. Word on the street is she loved to lick guys' assholes. She didn't do that for me.” He shook his head.

Number 18 was one of those Madison bicyclists who doesn't wear deodorant.

“She was beautiful,” he assured me, “and clean. She just didn't believe in underarm hygiene, apparently.”

I nodded and kept my face blank. Yeah, it was definitely going to get weird.

“How many girls have you had sex with, Lady?” he joked with me to refresh the mood.

I looked him in the eye with a straight face. “Four. Never alone. You know.”

He raised one eyebrow, surprised for a moment, then nodded. “Sure, I know.” Number 12 and 13 were roommates.

He met Number 11 while he was working at the Essen Haus. She was there with a bunch of girlfriends. They all ordered pastel-colored drinks that tasted like fake fruits. She ordered Scotch on the rocks, so he asked her out.

“The first thing she told me about herself was 'I'm never with a guy longer than three months'.”

After they had been dating that long, she finally asked to be his girlfriend. He accepted, but broke up with her the next day.

“I couldn't get that three-month mark out of my head. It was over.”

He met Number 7 on MySpace.

“I had just moved to Madison after a string of failed relationships in Ohio. I was lonely; I wanted her to be my girlfriend so bad.”

Number 8 was his girlfriend for a year when he was twenty-four. They had the same birthday, but she was four years younger. When they visited her parents for the holidays, he had to sleep on the couch in the basement.

“I'm disgusted with myself right now,” he admitted to me. “Sixteen girls in three years?”

“Fourteen of them in the last two years,” I pointed out.

He shook his head. “I could have done without most of them. Just you. And Number 8, she was my girlfriend. And Printer Girl; I guess that worked out. She gave me a six-minute joke.”

Printer Girl was Number 10; she was staying with his neighbor. She was cute, and her fiance had just dumped her. Stefan knocked on her door around four a.m. New Year's Eve, glanced to the guy on the couch behind her, introduced himself to her, and said,

“Anytime you want to fuck me, I'm right upstairs.”

A few days later, she was at his door. “No one has ever said anything like that in front of Mike.”

Number 3 “is currently trying to get me involved in a pyramid scheme. She told me she's starting her own business, and I can make a lot of money.”

Number 4 had lots of tattoos and she was fat. But she was nice, and they both liked Alkaline Trio.

He met Number 5 at a house party and just slept with her once.

“She was in high school. I thought she was eighteen,” he told me.

Number 2. “I had sex with her in the back of my van in the parking lot of her boyfriend's church. She was almost off of her period,” he added. “Her boyfriend wanted to murder me. Because we were friends. But, he stole her from me first.”

He has loved Number 6, Number 1, and Number 21.

He dated Number 6 for two years, until she left him for a rockstar. He fled to Madison to start over, and later brought her here to try again. They signed a lease and opened a bank account. They lived together for six more months, until he left her for his art.

“We still keep in touch. She does a lot less drugs than I do, so it usually takes her longer to call.”

Number One is raising his son.

I am probably just as crazy as the rest of them; only Number 22 can tell that.

Number 21. Our paths crossed with impeccable timing; two artists wanting to avoid the next lonely night, willing to accept the bitter truths of the past, living this moment without a thought for the next because every moment we've ever planned has passed by in spite of our plans.

We'll hold onto his twenty names and my six years, and move onto tomorrow with neither ignorance nor shame; and against the odds, we'll avoid sleeping alone for one more night.