much the night before is if I wake up with red-wine teeth and enough eyeliner smeared underneath my eyes that I resemble a tight end for the New England Patriots. The point is, on this particular morning, I looked heinous and smelled like curry, and if someone had put a dollar in my coffee cup, thinking I was homeless, I would have thought, Yep.
I got to airport security and there he was: a six-foot-two-inch strapping strawberry blond of about thirty-five years. My first kiss was with a redhead so I’ve always had a weakness for them. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and I was immediately turned on just looking at him. Quick side note: THAT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS. Every day, men look at women walk by in skirts and tight jeans and get tiny erections, or at the very least some sort of arousal. But for women it’s a rare occurrence to see a dude and think, Dayummmmm! I was looking him up and down, trying to find one inch of him that wasn’t Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, and there was nothing. All he was missing was the ponytail and the bow on said ponytail.
I audibly sighed, and before he walked through the metal detector, he looked at me. All the blood rushed to my vagina, and I smiled at him before immediately remembering I looked like Bruce Vilanch. (For those of you who don’t know who he is and are too lazy to Google it, just picture a barn owl wearing a blond wig.) I got through security and walked to my gate – and boom! There he was again – looking even hotter than before. He was wearing a crew-neck long-sleeve shirt that was just tight enough around the chest so you knew what was up. It was abundantly clear that underneath his shirt was a place where you would want to rest your cheek and breathe in all his pheromones until he took you like Marlon Brando in Streetcar or Ryan Gosling in annnnnyyyyythiiiiinnnnnngggg.
I ran to the bathroom to try to find makeup in my purse, which is an actual bottomless pit when I need something (and at all other times). I’m not lying when I say my purse has all the contents of an actual ostrich’s nest. I’ll never do a celebrity magazine “What’s in your purse?” story because people would see the array of fun, gross surprises in there and probably think I needed to be hospitalized. I found some blush and ChapStick, and thought, Perfect. That’s all I need to take me from a two to a four. I looked in the mirror and saw the rosacea I’d created, and laughed at myself. Fuck it. I rolled my sweatpants up to half-calf height, thinking, Let’s highlight my strongest zone. I brushed my teeth with my finger and splashed water all over myself. I walked out like I was on a runway and floated right past him. He at no time, for even one second, looked at me in the terminal.
I bought some gum and a magazine with Jennifer Aniston on the cover and boarded the plane, defeated. I got to my tiny window seat and started reading about how Jennifer was going to die alone and it wasn’t fair, and there he was again, boarding the plane. He walked down the aisle and I watched him, his arms bulging and his huge hands gripping his bag as he navigated his way between the seats. I was thinking, Maybe when he walks by, I can pretend to sneeze … and fall on the floor in front of him … and he will trip and fall inside of me. Then I saw him look right at the seat next to me.
No, I thought. There is no way he is in the seat next to me. No, no, no. But YES! Game, set, fucking match, I thought, IT IS ON.
I never ever talk to people on airplanes. It’s a huge gamble that has resulted in such things as James Toback (Google him) telling me, “You don’t really know a woman until you’ve eaten her ass,” before we even took off, and a woman showing me pictures of her dead bird for three hours. But on this flight, I turned right to him.
“Hi, I’m Amy.”
He smiled, revealing a tiny gap between his front teeth. I love a gap more than anything on a man. “Hi, I’m Sam,” he said, in an English accent.
I soon found out that he was in the British version of the marines and was in town for just a few days. I couldn’t fucking handle it. It was all too much. I felt possessed and lost all control of my voice, like Sigourney Weaver at the end of Ghostbusters. I was in heat, as they say. Who says this? I don’t know. Shut up and keep reading about my getting pummeled by this British superhero. We took off and I pretended to be really scared of flying. There was zero turbulence, yet I still found reasons to grab his arm and bury my face in his shoulder, inhaling his scent. I was blatantly throwing myself at him and we both laughed at how aggressive I was being. My clitoris was thumping like the Tell-Tale Heart and I kept thinking of the 98 Degrees song “Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche).” Even though I was slightly famous at the time, he’d never heard of me, which was another major plus. I told him I had a show that night and that maybe I would see him after. We exchanged emails and I prayed to every god that it would happen.
I’ve been in this kind of situation a couple other times where I could have had a one-night stand and I just couldn’t go through with it. Once or twice, my instincts told me no. It didn’t feel safe. But mostly I have decided against it just out of pure laziness. I will think of the practical things, like, When can I leave so I can eat pasta? We are not dating, so I can’t do domestic things like brush my teeth and wash my face and put on my eye mask and earplugs. It’s supposed to be hot and sexy, but I look like a blond Shrek in the a.m. What will the morning be like? What will we say? Will I order him an Uber? What if he says something hurtful or he tries to have sex with me in the morning when we both know my vagina will smell like a bowl of ramen? I’m just too pragmatic and lazy for one-night stands. I consider consequences and I don’t drink like I did in college.
All that being said, the Sam situation felt different. He was such a turn-on and a fantasy. Even the accent made him seem unreal. It didn’t hurt that he’d be returning to his foreign home shortly after the sun rose the next day. After we parted ways in the airport, I went to do my show, and the whole time I couldn’t help but hold my breath hoping that I would hear from him. Sure enough, when the show was over, I had an email from him asking me how it had gone. I joked that I had gotten discovered and was going to make it in this business.
He wrote back: “Who discovered you?”
I wrote: “A magician. I’m going to be his assistant.” Which I thought was pretty funny.
He wrote: “Is he gonna saw you in half?”
I answered: “I was hoping you would.”
BAM! That is the most sexually aggressive yet true thing I’ve ever written. And it worked.
We made plans to meet up at the dance club in the lobby of my hotel. We had half a beer, we danced to Ice Cube telling us we could do it if we put our back into it, and we left. Walking through the bright lobby and into the low lighting of the elevator was a lot of reality for this sexy affair we were both trying to have. The things that were going through my mind on the elevator were as follows: Fuck me fuck me fuck me fuck me fuck me.
I really needed a boost of sexual confidence during that time of my life. I’d recently learned that a guy I’d been in love with and had dated in the past was gay. Even though it had been a while since we had dated, it still broke my heart when he came out to me. And it made me begin to question myself. This person who made me feel beautiful and sexy for so long was attracted to men. I thought, Am I like a man? When you get older and wiser, you get your confidence from within, not from the person you are having sex with. But finding out someone I’d dated was gay at that moment in my life was giving me a hard time. I was having trouble feeling like a sexual being and was wondering about my own worth.
Enter Sam – this beautiful, masculine fantasy man who wanted to help Stella get her groove back. The elevator to my room could not travel fast enough.
We got to my very corporate-looking room and wasted no time.
I dropped my bag and we stripped down to our underwear and got into bed. There was no question of what we were doing there. We both had the same goal in mind: to devour each other. Ewwwwww, I know, sorry. But it’s true. Everything felt right. Kissing him felt right. His body felt right. We went for it. I can’t Fifty Shades out right now and write a sensual paragraph, so I’ll just tell you some facts. We were both very giving (head). We both couldn’t believe it was happening (we both came a lot). He was so appreciative and excited (we high-fived at