Picture, typical upscale party. Big place – not quite a mansion, but too big to be a house. Shelves are stacked with great books, classics, never touched or opened. Display cases full of old movies, overlooking a CD rack stocked with the latest trashy Hollywood hits. There’s food and booze and loud music, and it’s stylish, but not so upscale that people won’t let their hair down, so there’s plenty to drink and feel good about.

There’s a girl from Iowa, a sweet redhead with a sad little smile and a fashion-model body knocking back shots at the mini-bar. I’ve been drinking hard, and the music is pumping, and I’m feeling good – so I walk across from her and take a seat.

I smile. She smiles. I suck at this part, but that’s okay – awkward is the new cute these days. Within minutes she’s chatting it up with the witty, urbane, yet endearingly shy Eric; that silver-tongued devil that feeds them the good ones, trite, self-flattering conversation under the guise of boyish shyness, a bit of tongue-in-cheek embarrassment. He is a miracle worker, a film of fake modesty that simply oozes earnestness. Let the big shots have their bravado, let the swanks have their swagger: I had Eric, the good guy, the hands in pockets and aw-shucks grin, and his own ‘I-normally-suck-at-socializing-but-I-just-like-you-so-much’ brand of cute reminding them how much they want him.

I tell her that I’m a writer, and I can tell she’s getting ready to leave. Eric the good guy is credibly panicky that she’s going for her purse, and stumbles in a few quirky words about still being able to support himself. I tell her my payroll when she asks about it. She settles down after that, strawberry blond all over my face, lounging comfortably, happy to be hanging out with the one guy around who wasn’t a sleeze or a jerk or a prude. I’m drinking hard, and I’m doing pretty good – I know I’m doing good because she’s drunker than I am. Can I pour you another drink? I stare at her and my eyes seem to alternate focus between her face and her breasts.

Some basso dancehall song that I’ve never heard before comes on the stereo, and she tells me excitedly that this is her song. We hit the floor for a few, and Eric the good guy maneuvers himself to be pushed into the middle of the throng, jostled by the egging crowd into a charmingly self-conscious flurry of breakdance that seems to surprise everyone, that echoes to Miss Strawberry Iowa Blonde an ever-so-suggestive universal truth: if you can dance, you can fuck.

We cat-and-mouse over to the corner sofa, where we both collapse in a tangle of hair and legs and whiskey. There is a woman there already, fat and pallored, telling us to get a room. I marvel at the rotund frame and the faint patches of color around her lips, tell-tale signs of scurvy and one too many Big Macs, and stew in the delicious irony that here was a three hundred pound mountain of a woman, starving to death in front of me. I whisper this loudly to Miss Strawberry Blonde, and we break out in a fit of hysteria as the fat lady leaves in a huff.

The couch to ourselves. I lay back, and she climbs on top, and kisses me, hotly, deeply. She tastes like strawberries. Eric the good guy tells me to pull away, brush her hair back, and smile at her. Eric the good guy wants to draw it out, turn it into a Hollywood scene; he is enjoying the game. But there’s something about that kiss, magnetic, that pulls me in, in, spiraling beyond any reason or desire to stop; a combination of lust and booze and pent up emotions that was as human as the two entwined figures on the couch itself. We pull away from each other only after an eternity, panting heavily, sloppy and drunk and for the moment, utterly and hopelessly in love. A postmodern couple in a night-length marriage of dim lights and alcohol. I kiss her cheek, her neck.

She staggers off from top of me, and for a second I am vaguely panicky. What’s wrong, are you leaving? No, no, just come with me, and she grabs my hand in hers, yanks me off the sofa, and we lose our balance and collapse against the half-wall stacked with empty plates and bottles. There’s laughter from people around, but it’s the happy, oh-look-they’re-even-drunker-than-I-am sort of laugh. We wave our goofy, wide-smiled apologies to the crowd and she hauls me off, stumbling, into the garden.

Quiet.

That’s the first thing that hits me as she slides the door shut. Quiet, and cold. Some part of me chimes that I didn’t think this through, because it must be below ten out and I’m only in my t-shirt, but she takes my hand in hers again and before I know it we’re swept off in a surreal adventure of stumbling through the yard and tripping on tree roots and giggling and touching and doesn’t that swing set look so cute no it really doesn’t miss and if you sass me again I’ll eat your face right off haha and falling in a heap in a corner with rosemary bushes and wooden fencing to one side where it was dark and quiet as she wraps her legs around me and kisses me hot and deep till I can’t even feel the cold anymore.

Blank.

When I come to, we are alone, hidden from view behind a giant dead maple tree that stood sentinel against the frightening one-eighty degree sweep of pinpricked sky. She is on top of me giggling incoherently about how big of a lightweight I am and how she had like, a gazillion more shots than I did and still didn’t feel a thing. I am suddenly quite aware of the texture of her skin underneath her caramel shirt. Eric the good guy rears his head, fighting through the alcohol; and he knows what she wants, what I want. He knows the right way, the touch that’s passionate, not needy, firm but not demanding, the perfect approach that’ll have them talking to their friends the next day about this perfectly romantic encounter with this perfectly tender gentleman – and that’s what he’s is about, really, this good guy – the talk, the image, bearing of positive judgment, high-maintenance porcelain façade covering an all-too-human face.

I slide my hand underneath her shirt and feel her shiver, and I know it’s going well, but she suddenly collapses and leaves a painful bump on both our heads, knocking Eric the good guy completely out of my mind.

“You’re drunk.” I say happily. I watch her glassy-eyed response cross first into anger, and then slide into a vaguely happy sort of smile as she just giggles and nods agreement.

“It’s really cold out here.”

“I wanted to be alone.” She says as she clambers over me and hugs me for warmth, and somehow I find this extremely funny and start giggling all over again.

“I saw you…” I open my mouth. Then I find that I’d forgotten what it was I’d been trying to say, so I start on a new tangent. “I saw you talking, in the kitchen. Before. You looked so sad.”

“So did you.” She replies.

“Why?”

“Broke up. Boyfriend issues.”

“Why?”

“He was a big jerk.”

“Ah.”

She lays her head on my chest. I welcome her warmth.

“What about you?” She asks. “Why are you sad?”
I think about this for a second.

“Nonspecific angst.” I tell her, and I feel her shudder from a small laugh. “I have…” Pause to reorient, because the sky seemed wobbly. “…I have the greatest medical doctors of our age baffled by my ailment.”

We’re shaking with laughter now.

“They all want me to tell them where the pain is. I tell them that it just hurts everywhere I touch.”

There is a small pause, and she lifts her head from my chest. Her eyes glitter as she seriously tries to focus.

“Maybe… Maybe your finger’s broken.” She gasps.

Now I lift my head. I can see the big grin spreading across her face and I can’t help it, I start grinning too and now she’s laughing and I’m laughing and we’re suddenly caught up in the hilarity, and she kisses me, a pair of giggling idiots, trying to stifle whooping ha-ha’s with each other’s lips. I slide my hand under her shirt, just like Eric the good guy would have done, but it’s not him this time, it’s me, me, acting out of impulse, without a care or concern for pretense or control or the cracking, discarded mask on the ground. She has trouble undoing my pants and cusses, and ruins the mood for a bit, but a second later it’s all good and it’s funny and sexy again as she leans down to darken the sky with kisses, and we exchange drunken hollow I-love-you’s through heated lips, and I can feel her breathing faster and I’m breathing faster, noting the way her ankles locked around my thighs, moving and gyrating like a gymnast with whirling strawberry hair that keeps thrashing at my face until I feel her tense up and accelerate in a flush of heat and my arms are buzzing in anticipation, and we fall, fall, tumble into the night for that final lift and collapse, as the stars careen jealously in the sky.

Still.

Silent.

Her breaths crash like waves around me, and she smells like strawberries. We stay in sublime stillness, unbroken except for crickets and the occasional passing car. We are the silence of unread books, of words that catch in your throat before you could say them. We are the silence of barely contained after-sex heat, where the whole world seems to explode harmlessly around you. We are silent and still, and we are ourselves.

I know that tomorrow we shall have to wake up and be sober again, and exchange the awkward sorry-about-that’s and I-wasn’t-thinking’s; or, if I really feel the urge to avoid responsibility, the failsafe I-can’t-remember-a-thing. Tomorrow, we shall be two strangers again, and I will once again don the persona of that silver-tongued devil, Eric the good guy, and she will slip into whatever strawberry flavored persona that keeps her world at bay. But I don’t regret this at all. I’m glad that I had the chance to stop being Eric the good guy, for once, and be just me, myself, naked and exposed to the world with only strawberry blonde hair in my face.

There is no world.

There is no Eric the good guy.

There is just me, me and beautiful Strawberry, the girl with no name, lying on a stranger’s grass as the stars tumble on overhead.