She closed her eyes, released a breath, but was still frozen beneath me.
I’d been with virgins before. But—virgin or not—this was the first time that I’d cared so much about whether the girl enjoyed it. I made myself stop while still buried inside her and bit her neck. I tasted the skin beneath her jaw then dipped my tongue in her earlobe. I slid my hand from her leg, along her side, and pinched the puckered skin of her breast.
Please.
I needed her to relax. She moaned. I moved.
Please.
I needed her to enjoy this. Her breath hitched.
Please.
I needed her to let me touch her again when this was over.
Part 2: Meet thirty-two year-old Nico
When I walk on a stage or in front of a camera it’s easy to become The Face. People make it easy. They want arrogance and dirty jokes and I love acting conceited and telling dirty jokes.
Win-win.
In fact, when I fly first class, when I walk down the street, when I stop by a drug store to buy detergent and gum—it’s effortless. I am who people expect me to be. I know so many punch lines, I don’t even bother with the jokes anymore.
When I’m interviewed about the show—or, more recently, my movies—it’s usually by some spray tan female with fake tits. She always asks about objectification. It makes me laugh. Now there is a joke.
Some bimbo, three chromosomes away from a blowup doll, is asking me about objectifying women. Meanwhile she’s slipping me her number, her hand is rubbing do me circles on my thigh, and she’s shoving her silicon sweater puppets in my face.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m not complaining, not even a little. I love my job most of the time. I love what I do. Making people laugh gets me high every time. Every. Single. Time. My life is filled with moments of pure ecstasy; moments when I can get a crowd laughing so hard, every individual audience member has their eyes closed and they’re fighting to breathe.
Nothing matters; everything that came before and all worries about the future cease to have relevance. They fade away.
A perfect moment. . . and then it’s over.
It’s a feeling almost impossible to duplicate or eclipse.
I’ve only felt something that surpassed it three times in my life. All three times were with the same girl and, during all three of those times, the moment crested over days and weeks, if not months. Obviously, I’m in love with her. But, she’s not just the girl I love. She’s the girl I’ve hungered for, the girl I’ve worshipped for the majority of my life.
This is the girl.
The first time was almost exactly sixteen years ago, after our best friend died. I climbed in her window, found her staring at the ceiling. She’d just showered and her hair was so wet it soaked through the feathers of her pillow.
She looked at me as I approached; I saw that she wasn’t crying, not anymore, but she had been crying recently. She was devastated, near despair; sorrow that’s impossible to escape. She was drowning in it.
And I remember thinking that she was beautiful. Even in her grief she was beyond lovely to me.
I didn’t pause to consider my actions; I just lay next to her, gathered her small body in my arms, and held her to my chest. That’s how I discovered her hair and pillow were wet.
I don’t know how long we lay like that, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour. I shifted because my arm was asleep and she reached out for me.
She grabbed my shirt in both of her fists, like a person does when they’re startled or afraid.
She said, “Stay with me.” When I didn’t immediately respond she added, “I need you to stay with me.”
It knocked the wind from my lungs. It was like I was flying and falling at the same time. I’m sure she had no idea. But, for me, it was a perfect moment. I felt ten feet tall.
For years afterward I would think about it and the days that followed; about how, during those weeks, she needed me. For a long time it was the best and the worst period of my life. I used it as fuel for my early standup routines and learned quickly that bitterness in comedy is rarely funny—and funny only if it’s also sincerely self-deprecating.
The second time occurred just before we got married. She surprised me while I was taping my show in front of a studio audience of hundreds in New York City. I was undressing—as I always do—at the end, preparing to Jell-O wrestle with two closet lesbians who got a huge kick out of elbowing me in the face and other essential body parts.
I heard her. Of course, at first, I thought it was feedback from my earpiece or my mind playing tricks on me. But it wasn’t. It was her.
I didn’t comprehend everything she said, but I did comprehend that she was in a black bra and underwear. Well, at least everything below my waist comprehended her lack of clothing because it immediately reacted to her, to her body. I loved her body. Thoughts of it kept me up at night; what I wanted to do to it, how I wanted to touch and taste it.