By K O

(Ed. Note: I am but a small part of these stories. KO and I met four years ago on a sweaty, steam-me-up dance floor. Our attraction has given way to friendship. The kind of friends who recognize each other in ourselves. This being New York we rarely get time together. And so it is we write. These are his letters to me, some women have kept him busy as of late. Part 1 of a series.)

Hey S.

I’m back. And here it is, how it went. At least the most interesting parts.

I may have sent you the bit about my meeting this girl about five weeks ago at a wedding in Normandy. I mean, I met her the night before the wedding in Paris and two days later she takes a train to the wedding, like to come crash it and be my date to some degree. There were some machinations involving her boyfriend (out of town but, like, she's got one). She came to just hang out really, because the way we threw it down in Paris was so damn fun -- and so the wedding, then back to Paris, and then I guess, well, the tide just fucking broke. Like we held off, see, through the wedding, the dinner, the dancing, and then the night before I leave, back in Paris, it all comes loose. All 5 foot 9 inches of Estonian couture runway model, heavy French accent, broken English, an elegance that made me want to rip my own head clear off my shoulders, and we’re looking at each other like high-school kids and grinning ear to ear. I leave Paris with us kind of going bananas about each other. I go on business to London, we text all day, the London bombings happen, excitement reigns. I go back to New York , texting, emails, and a week later I'm going to Croatia to take some time off and visit my old man. And I tell her I'd like her to come.

“If I come, do you know that I might have to run, afterward?” She actually said this to me, but I insisted she come.

She arrived in Croatia at my father's house in Motovun, during their annual film festival. It was a pretty ridiculous place and scene for H. to show up into. This town of 400 people is inundated with thousands of Croatian kids for the five days of the film festival. They camp in tents at the bottom of the hill, at night run around drunk on cheap homemade wine (drunk out of used plastic litre-bottles of water), watching Manderlay and other new indie joints in open air theaters, all up in this 1,000 year old hilltop medieval village overlooking truffle forests and a river called the Mirna, which means Peaceful.

Let me tell you it took her a helluva time coming down - from Estonia, through Prague, where she spent the night, then Ljubjana, to Koper by bus, then to Motovun by taxi. So finally she climbs out of that cab, blinking a bit sheepishly in the sunlight, heels on cobblestone, looking more like a woman and at the same time more like a scared little girl than I remembered her. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen and I was keenly aware of that for every fucking second that it took her to get out of that cab. So there we were, looking at each other, like, "shit, we actually went and did this." As I said our romance flourished not when I was with her, but kind of since, in the interim, which is what made it so frikkin heart-in-chest-thumping and crazy-making. I reckon I'd been somewhat nauseous from the last moment I saw her in Paris, kissing her on the doorstep of her apartment, into which her boyfriend was about to move. She broke up with him two days later.

I took her excellently small bag out of the trunk, gestured back towards the bar I had been sitting in;. I had had a couple beers beforehand just to calm my nerves -- you know what it was like waiting for her and staring down that road, waiting for that piece-of-shit cab to snake it's way through the curves leading up the hill. "Do you want a shot," I asked -- but she didn't, which was just as well -- and after a couple of somewhat rather expectedly awkward laughs, us two relative strangers, who had just thrown themselves together in the middle of nowhere, well, we headed off up the hill.

I have to tell you, that as I moved up that ancient hill with all that lanky Eastern European ass sliding up beside me, damn if I didn't feel like a goddamn king. We both had this dumb smile where you want to cover your teeth with your lips but they keep slipping back. That stoned grin that makes you think "have I been smiling like a fool for the last ten minutes, gawdayam!" And yeah I mean, that was pretty much how we kicked it for the next five days. Watching movies, smoking cigarettes, staring at each other, shaking our heads in disbelief, holding hands and drinking wine, sitting on my father's terrace at 4am with plumb brandy, and then gingerly, sweetly, getting ourselves into bed -- where'd we'd be deep into the next day, hiding from the heat of the first week of Croatia’s August.

She had been trying to leave modeling for the last two years, just graduated from a Paris graphic design school, recently discovered filmmaking and seemed smitten by it. Her first film, which we watched in her apartment the night after the wedding, was soft, dialogue-free, about a girl waking up in her apartment, somewhat under-the-weather from something, longing, a hangover, something. She takes a bath, makes tea, and smokes a cigarette, as the city around her wakes up, which she hears through open windows. And that's pretty much it. A perfect short, ten minute movie. When I saw that, after having spent a couple days with her and falling for her beauty, sweetness, Estonian-ness, seeing that piece she made just clinched it for me. And here she was in my father's house, in this hilltop town, during this film festival, shivering from fear in my bed.

Kissing her face, her chest, her arms, in that bed the first night, she was like a 15 year old girl, rigid with expectation, maybe some dread, eyes wide open one minute, fiercely shut the next, breathing heavily, sweating. I'd pull away from her and look down on her, see that her hand was clutching the sheets. It was so overwhelming to look at her long fingers, the sheets tucked between, I repeatedly had to throw myself back on my pillow and stare up at the ceiling with her.

We didn't have sex that night, and as I remember it, not for the next couple of nights either. We were scared as hell, like, I was too damnit. I mean when we finally got to it, I figured I'd finish right away, if not before, if you know what I mean. One night she went down on me, slowly, as a young girl does, kissing my neck, my shoulder, running her hands across my chest, kissing my stomach, you get that expectant little quiver in your chest as her hair falls on your body, her hands on my thighs, wrapping around my cock, then kissing my hips, as she slowly moved her head down onto me. It was excruciating. She'd put me in her mouth, but she was also kissing me, lightly, pressing her face into me. I remember shaking my head and grinning, a far cry from the New York girls that had filled the last couple months of my life. I grabbed her by her hair, pulled her off of me, I didn't want to come like that, and had the feeling she didn't want me to either. She was timid, shyly saying hello to me, and it was killing me, the peacefulness of it all. We had what seemed like all the time in the world -- ten days together, an island away from our lives to discover each other. And that's how we approached every thing we did.

The town folk who've adopted me over my visits to my father would kiss her warmly and make jokes to me about the church schedule, "we can organize a wedding in a matter of days, you know that right?" Speaking in Croatian, they'd look at her and me, pinch my cheeks and tell me I've done good. We couldn't stop smiling, she'd ask what they were saying, I told her that the old folks in the town were speeding up our courtship, and she'd ask me to translate back to them, "look at my hips, clearly I can't have four children!" which was just a killer line. This woman knows peasant life, despite having grown up in the capital, Tallinn. She spent weekends and summers in a village, milking cows and herding sheep. She told me a story about how her mother, now a prominent doctor, would have to rise at 4am to graze the cattle when she was a kid. She'd clamor out of the hayloft where she slept and go barefoot -- however the dew on the grass was so cold at that hour that her feet would get numb. So she probably, like other peasant girls of her age, would heat her feet in cow shit as she walked, then alternately clean her feet in the cold dew -- and like that -- back and forth from the shit to the dew -- would herd the animals across the fields each morning. And you know me, I was goddamn sold completely, this was the pedigree I've been looking for!

After four days in Motovun we rolled on. We got a ride from a friend to the coastal town of Porec. Porec has a sweet old-city district, like any spot on the coast, but it being the height of the tourist season, the throngs, many of whom are Croatian, kinda kill it for you. And like anyone falling in love you don't see much beyond the person in front of you. So we ate relatively quiet meals, squinting as we looked at each other, like we were trying to figure each other out without words, and drank wine until we got bold enough to get naked again. It was in the shower of our strange little hotel that we had sex for the first time, and like any soapy, standing-up-drunk (but completely capable) shower-fucking scene, it was as perfect as could be. You know when you're kissing passionately, and you pull back, and look down at her lips, see her eyes closed, brow furrowed, mouth slightly open, and water is streaming off of her, off her lips and chin, her eyelashes wetly fanned out, and you look down further and see her small breast, her nipple grazing against the chest, the bone of her hip, her toes clenched against the porcelain of the tub -- pulling back and seeing this is the stuff of magic, I mean it almost doesn't make sense, it's so amazing to me that it's just mystifying. This is how it was holding her, both panting in each other’s arms, me hard as hell pressing against her stomach. We pressed our mouths into each other as though we had just created life itself, as though we had accomplished the greatest feat of passion for which God had intended for man and woman to create, I mean, yeah that's ridiculous but that's just how it is -- in your standing-up-drunk shower-fucking scene...

And so from here on in it was, as we like to say, completely on. The floodgates, etc., just mayhem. A new look in our eyes, no longer so soft and expectant, now just kinda raw and horny. Again, it's something that made me feel somewhat sick, head spinning, just looking at her I'd begin to grow in my jeans. Pavlovian, it was, just simple and animal and completely glorious. We got out of Porec, rented a car and headed toward the Alps in Slovenia.

The way into the mountains took us through all sorts of villages and ridiculously retarded signage. They'd only tell us which town was next rather than calling out any more major destinations on the route, and I mention that because it had us very soon bumbling down some narrow little roads, into some dirt paths, and ultimately into a forest on a goddamn tractor path. The kind of "you're definitely not on the right road" type of thing that would have any man turn the fuck around, but the exact opposite reaction came from her, not surprisingly -- let's just plod on. It was late in the day and I wanted to get to this lake, this amazing lake surrounded by mountains, which was hours away by my calculations, but I kinda knew where this dirt road was headed. Two teasing sessions in the car had left me, well, feverish, and at a small clearing in the path I pulled the car over, a muddy little patch, and we turned off the engine, kicked the seats back, opened our doors, and lit cigarettes. Rain had been threatening off and on for the past hour, and now it came down onto our windshield in heavy drops, filtered through the trees. I stepped out, shoes slipping in the mud a bit, and walked around to her door and pulled her out. "In a forest!?" she whispered, both asking and telling me and I moved her down onto to the hood of the car. And there, for the second time only, I saw her again completely, her eyes clenching and unclenching, brow tightly furrowed and then twitching, as I moved in and out of her. I pulled her shirt up to watch her breasts move, then to kiss her nipples, pressing and circling my tongue around it, flicking and sucking her, holding her other breast and nipple tightly between my fingers. She held her shirt in her mouth so that I could use my hands to steady us against the hood. "If you could see what I see," she said, "your face, the trees... ." I pulled her hips up and stood up so I could see myself entering her, slowing down a bit to watch, and then hearing her growing louder as she was about to come, thrust myself into her, holding up her ass and hips, pushing myself deeper and faster into her. I've never fucked anyone harder than I did then, it was something beyond me, it was violent and hard and fast and hard and we came together nearly screaming, her head thrashing side to side, her hair wet on the windshield.

So yeah, after all that madness, a couple days after our time on that lake that we drove up to, she flew back to Estonia. She's working on her film I think, that's what she said she'd be doing. The night before her flight she said again that she'd need to be out of touch for a bit, that she feared she'd need to curl up away into herself after this-- but I believed, hoped, that she wouldn't. Effects of the recent break up with her boyfriend, or whatever. Presumably, in part, at least, a result of meeting me. The only thing that makes sense is that, at least, she warned me about this. She's a funny girl. I suppose I hardly knew her, although I didn’t realize that until right now. I'm a bit angry about it all, which she said I'd be. And I guess there it is. I've had to reduce her to these scenes, which isn't how I wanted to hold on to her. No email or text has been answered for more than two weeks now.

I hope you're well S. Just wanted to get back in touch, let you know what I’d been up to.

much love,

KO