A friend is someone with whom you share common interests and feel safe, someone whom makes you feel right and better; a good person with a good soul with whom you’ve chosen to spend your time.  There is trust, love, camaraderie.

And, simply put, a benefit is a perk.  In this case, a sexy perk.

So, a friend with benefits is an amazing person you feel connected with that comes with a tasty topping.  It’s special.  It’s also a colossal pain in the motherfucking ass.

I make friends easily.  I’m jovial, warm, open, and forgiving. I don’t make everyone my friend, but I have a knack for finding something in someone else that I can plug into and I can make it work.  Once a friend, always “just a friend.”  And my lovers, well, they either stay “just my lover” or become a boyfriend.  Until The Neighbor.  He blurred the lines of both like he was a giant eraser and my rules faded pencil.

He waltzed into my life under drunken starlight, fucked my lying, irresponsible girlfriend in my bed within two hours of my invitation into my life and was in my bed with only me — and firmly out of her life for good — within 7 days of our paths crossing.

Cigarette in hand and laughter on my lips I’d looked out over my balcony that November night and saw a pale, dark-haired man leaning over his banister.  “Hi!” I’d called to him.  “Your name is TN, right??  We met briefly a few months ago.”

“Yeah.  And you’re Hy, right??”

“Yep!  Wanna come over and hang out?”

And the rest is, as they say, history.

I resisted sex with him for several days repeating, “I don’t shit where I eat, I don’t shit where I eat,” but obviously to no avail.  He was sweet and charming, utterly disarming.  I found him to be wickedly funny and loved his dry Mid-Western sense of humor.  And he was fun to play with.

Those first few nights together are a blur of red wine and Scrabble tiles, blind excursions down jeans and hands up shirts.  He brought me DuraFlame logs like it was his job and took out my trash with a sweet sense of duty.

He blew my mind in bed, his giant cock stroked me from the inside out like he was made for me.  I drenched everything we laid on and we reveled in our compatibility.  My expert mouth drew from him his sweet seed for the first time in his life, his expert hands and hips drew from me mountain-like climaxes and gut-wrenching sobs.

I kept Peyton far away from the both of us as a couple, but couldn’t help but introduce him as our neighbor; soon I was introducing him to my friends, too.

We gingerly discussed boundaries and expectations.  I insisted I could handle it, he reiterated it would all end when he looked for “the one.”

Jason and Phillip were decent distractions, but neither of them could stand up to the searing spotlight of TN.  They soon faded into the shadows and I was left with only one man on my center stage.  And then I was fucked.

It was at that moment that I realized I was in love with my young “friend with benefits”.

The friendship, so tender, natural and easy coupled with the electric, intensely satisfying sex overrode every good intention I’d had for us.  I simply didn’t care what I’d promised to him.  I was in love.

Book and movie endings filed through my brain on a reel, friends came forward with real life anecdotes about friends with benefits having happy endings, and my heart pattered with hope and frivolity all the while my relationship with him unraveled in a glory of fire and lights.  He ripped out my heart, stomped on it repeatedly, yet came back again and again with tender, healing touches.   I stumbled and gasped.

I felt like an animal in a trap: in pain, confused.  I didn’t know what was happening to me or where the pain was coming from.  It took me weeks to realize it was wrapped up in the silken plundering of my cunt and convivial chats we continued to share.  My bad boundaries and pulverized heart didn’t know any other way of coping with the pain he’d left me in.  I needed him to get over him.

And  I am now a thousand miles away living next door.  To the outside eye, you’d never guess the distance between us.

We are once again back to his firewood delivery and trash removal days.  He curls around me during movies and rests his head on my hip, he vacuums for me in pale peach lace panties and reaches around my breasts to stroke the cleft between my legs.  He shoves his giant erection down my throat and films me as I cum and squirm and whimper.  We nap together.  I make him dinner.  He is my chauffeur.  I am his stylist, his confidante, his buddy, his release.  He sucks on my nipples and insists I take pictures.  He texts me just to say Hi and immediately answers mine.

Vacuum breaks include sucking on my nipples through my shirt.

I am his girlfriend.  I am his non-girlfriend.  And I realize this cannot go on forever.  It is a clusterfuck, but I see the path out.  It seems strangely clear to me.

Saturday morning after breakfast with my friend and a long night of togetherness, TN and I spent the day together.  At breakfast he’d sat next to me and whispered something in my ear.  I’d laughed and winked at my friend.  “You guys are such a great couple,” she said suddenly serious.  I froze and looked at her questioningly and a little uncomfortably.  “No, really.  Y’all are great together.  It makes me sick.”  And with that she continued looking at the menu and we all went on about our morning.

Back at his place I napped in my panties under the clouds of his comforter and he periodically came in to check on me.  Finally he crawled into bed with me and I lay with my hand on his erection and drifted off to sleep.  I awoke on my back, my breasts exposed, and his mouth hotly pulling on my nipple.  I gasped and arched and pulled him closer.

Our warmth puffed out from under the covers as I sat up and crawled between his legs and lavished my love on his rigid pole.  I struggled out of my panties and climbed up on top of him and slid down, the curve of his cock hitting my g-spot as I rocked back on his hips.  His headboard obnoxiously thumped our rhythm to the surrounding neighbors.

I climaxed quickly and shook my hands.  We laughed at my silly, unavoidable quirk.  With embarrassment, I noticed watery blood splatters on him and his sheets.  I insisted that I wash all his bedding for him — his pale blue sheets no match for the body of a woman — and gathered them up and went home.

That night I neatly folded his linens with the care my grandmother taught me.  I wondered what it’d be like to be able to always fold his linens for him, a small effort in love, then quickly pushed it out of my mind’s eye like pants that no longer fit. That was an old habit, thinking like that.  Only an old habit, not a new hope.

Later, he helped me make my bed with my own clean sheets after he surprised me with my first DuraFlame of the season.  “Close your eyes and put out your hands!” he’d said excitedly.  Then he asked to grab my breasts as payment for the bed-making and I let him as I walked him to the door.

Sunday I burned the log as he vacuumed with his resplendent erection straining against the delicate threads of my panties.  I wasted the rest of the log as we lay rooms away twisted in my bedroom naked and aroused.  “We should have done all that in front of the fire,” I said as I walked him back to the front door.

This would look better in firelight.

I went to sleep, sated and light, and awoke later to a text from him.  “There’s a present on your doorstep.”

I opened the door to a cold blast of air and looked down.  It was another fucking log.

I shook my head and picked it up, tossed it on the grate and went back to bed.  He is completely in love with me, was all I could think.

To the world, it’s just a stupid wood-shaving-pressed log saturated in chemicals, but to me — to us — it is love. It’s his heart in a crinkly, red wrapper.  I want to pick it up and hold it to me, but I can’t anymore.  Suddenly I realized my heart isn’t in this anymore.    I’m tired of it, of his limitations.  It’s not that he won’t go farther with me.  I’m beginning to think he can’t.

He is my best friend.  He is my lover.  He is my nemesis, my source of pain.  He is my lesson.  I either accept rejection as part of my journey or I strive to rewire how I view love and find someone who will turn to me with open arms.  It’s that simple.  Do or do not.  There is no try (Jesus Christ, I love Yoda).

I don’t know that I’m going to do much to change the way things are right now.  Our friendship has become more fortified than ever over the past several months.  The pain and heartache somehow forging a strange bond between us, a bearded-lady and her frog-faced lover under the big top.  For better or worse we share something extremely special.

How I simultaneously feel close to and far from him is as mysterious as birds flying south for the winter; I am simply following some invisible compass.

A friend with benefits, indeed.  I think we’ve proven it is possible, just possible and messy.

He leaves for a trip home this Thursday and the morning after he gets back he’s agreed to take me to the airport.  I’ll be in San Francisco for a week.   I texted him that I want to fuck his brains out before our trips, then sent him pictures I took recently of me on my back, shirt pulled up exposing my pink lace bra; one of me masturbating with the Hitachi, my skirt hiked up; and finally, one of my pink pussy, labia peaking out like a little ruffle.  “It looks pretty :)” he’d texted back. “Makes me want to stick something in it…”

Indeed.  I want him to.

I’ve come through this somehow.  With both a friend and a benefit.