This is the story of my best friend Stitch, and the night we didn’t fuck on a welding table.
Predictably, my best friend is male. He is, in fact, the epitome of male. He is a heavyweight rower, hopefully (I still cross my fingers) Olympic-bound, and a sculptor. We came through our college art program together. He is my adopted family, my refuge. Stitch is my haven. He is also vanilla, monogamous, and Christian.
Stitch has deep-set eyes with smears of midnight blue slung around them in half-moons. He has thick black brows, thick black hair, a thick, rich voice. I am not a small woman, but his hands can span my waist and the breadth of his shoulders doubles my own. One of the first nights I met him we sat in big brown leather chairs by an open window, somewhere I forget, and he read me the Song of Solomon from his battered bible.
He occupies a strangely shaped place in my heart, not so much other-manly as other-worldly. He’s the man I would have wanted if I had grown up my own sexual complement. I was in love with him, for a laughable gap of months, the way sometimes little girls are in love with rock stars. That totally impossible, sexually incompatible, logically incomprehensible kind of way.
This story is the beginning of that laughable gap.
Eight-thirty on a Thursday night in spring four years and seven months ago, Stitch called me. I was sitting at my crappy desk trying to thread seed beads. The light was weak, I hadn’t bought new bulbs for the lamp, and my eyes hurt. I was short when I picked up the phone, a bit of a snap in my speech.
Stitch’s voice is a rumble over wires. “Hey, I mean, hi, am I interrupting?”
“Yes,” I answered. “You suck, and I hate you.”
He made an ‘Mmmmhm’ noise, the half laugh of someone who knows me too well. “Do you want to come to the studio with me? I have a thing to finish for tomorrow.”
“I don’t really have any studio work to do right now.” I knocked a few seed beads off the desk. “But no, I’ll come. I want to get out.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I know.”
The sculpture studio of our art department was eleven blocks uptown, one of those flung-off outlier old buildings skirting the edges of where I don’t walk at night. I met the boy on the sidewalk of 117th, stuck my tongue out at him, and buried my head under his chin as he wrapped me up for a moment and blocked out the light of the street.
Stitch wore a mechanics suit in dirty blue, a one piece canvas sheath with a zipper up the front, and a black beater underneath. It was open past his navel, letting in the warm night, and the shape of his shoulders showed through. The bitter smell of his sweat filled the creases of the canvas.
“I didn’t mean to drag you out,” he said.
I thought of the seed beads rolling over my floor. “No worries, lil bro.”
“You really don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” He sounded genuinely worried, and his brown eyes had gone liquid and wary.
“I’m here already!” I cried. “I’ve come, I’m breathing deep and half asleep, I’ve come for fucks sake - Will you calm down?”
His eyes went from wary to warm. “That was brilliant. Did you think of that yourself?” He was smiling at me indulgently.
“Sometimes I am funny, you know.” I glared at him sideways. He smirked again. “Jackass,” I snarled, but it was too late; I was laughing.
Stitch was in the middle of a metals class that semester. The metal studio is on the top floor of the building, and has two steel tables and a double barn door in the corner that opens onto the roof. The roof was his favorite place to test theories; Stitch had a penchant for setting his sculptures on fire.
He gathered tools and scraps and three sheets of steel together while I puttered about in the corners of the room, knocking my sketchbook against things. Working studios are a fabulous place to putter; half-finished pieces abandoned by freshman were tucked in corners, bins of bits of sawed-off copper rods and shiny stacks of solder neatly lined up on wooden benches. The room was empty but for us. I swung myself up onto one of the tables, tucked my legs under me and watched him move, a pencil in my hand quickly forgotten.
There is something undeniably butch about men welding or soldering steel. Welding is a focused stream of slow, strong motion; the torch can give the illusion of kicking back, making the hand shake and causing bubbles in the metal. Get too wrapped up in the danger of the tool, the heat and shivery noise of burning gas, and nothing comes out right. Smooth lines come with control. I thought of holding a knife to someone’s cheek, of sliding needles into skin with a smile, the same kind of casual confidence.
Stitch had pushed a helmet with a face guard over his head, zipped his coverall up to the neck, and was working with his back to me, shielding the torch flame from view. He had two of his flat steel sheets pressed together in a right angle. A pretty welt of metal grew along the seam.
I detailed the edges of his clothing with my eyes, the brace of his feet pressed against the concrete, the impossibly broad shoulders, the impossibly thick arms. Stitch has never had an ass worth noticing, but the blend of his spine into his thighs, lean with crew muscles, is undeniably eye catching.
I caught myself undressing him, sketching in the flanks and shadows.
Stitch seems easy to mentally undress. Sometimes when we would go into the city on Saturday romps I would see women (and men) doing it, their eyes calculating, his clothes vanishing one by one in puffs of fantasy smoke.
But then, I had seen him stripped before that night in the studio, come back from late nights at the gym in sweaty spandex, peeling back the cling of the soaked fabric. I knew the color of his skin (faded tan, olive undertones), the pockmarks in his back, the lines of his hips. The web of personal history laid over the fantasy frame.
Stitch has a body of secrets. Scars, dips, invisible fingerprints. Tight bulges where he’s strained muscles most of us never use.
This night in the studio was the first time I wanted to know his secrets. Wholly, utterly. Biblically.
The entire room was humming, through the muscles of his legs to the floor and up the legs of the table I was sitting on, buzzing delicately on those sensitive lines of skin where my labia meet my thighs. His sculpture was growing, slowly.
I could see it happening, how the wires of artistic tension and sexual tension were crossing in my mind. You’re being dumb, my logical brain thought quietly. He’s your best friend, he has a girlfriend, and you don’t actually want to fuck him on a welding table. My body begged to differ, the steel under me turning warm. The seam of denim pressed to my crotch was damp.
This is how I am with art and artists. I get strung out in the tight-wire of craft and form. I chronically sensualize process and creation, when we exist in a bubble of time shaped by the things we make with our hands, and pressed together by the understanding of how the things are made.
Eventually he turned the torch off, stepped away, undid his coverall and let it fall to his waist. He tied it off in a narrow band. His smell hit me as I crept up on him: boy, Old Spice, bitterness, steel, sweat, skin.
“Oh, fuck me,” he said quietly.
“What?” I jumped a little.
He turned, gave me a wry look and a sigh. “I fucked up. See? There.” He pointed.
“Oh.”
“What did you think I said?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
He wiped a dirty forearm over his brow. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Come on, I’ll buy you a donut for coming out here with me for no reason.”
It was just you being horny, and the metal, I thought as I watched him walk home ahead of me, his long familiar stride. You’ll get over it. A soothing lie.
It took me a year to get over him.
