Sexual Astrology – Chapter 1 – Aries

I should explain about my mother first, because she is the context for everything.

My mother is beautiful and chaotic and genuinely, infuriatingly wise in the specific way of people who have arrived at correct conclusions through methodology that any reasonable person would reject. She reads charts. She pulls tarot. She believes in karma with the specific, practical faith of someone who has found it useful. She has moved approximately fourteen times in my childhood across seven cities, and in each city she has had a man – always a good man, always kind, always someone I was just beginning to like by the time she decided their karmic chapter was finished.

That was her phrase. Karmic chapter completed.

It meant she was bored.

She is not a cruel woman. She is a woman who has a philosophy, and the philosophy is that love is not permanent, it is purposeful, and when the purpose is fulfilled you thank the universe and keep moving. The men were always fine. I was the one who was not fine, because I was eleven or twelve or fifteen and we were leaving again and I had just made a friend.

So my love life went the other direction.

I held on.

I held on to men who were not good the way you hold onto a railing on a ship that is going the wrong direction – not because you don’t know the direction is wrong, but because letting go means the water, and the water is worse.

I am thirty. My most recent relationship was twenty-two months of a man who was unkind in the specific, deniable way of people who are never technically wrong and somehow always at fault, and I held onto it for nineteen months longer than was medically advisable.

After it ended I went to my mother’s new place – she had moved again, a city I did not know, an apartment with good light and plants and the specific orderly chaos of her particular brand of living. I sat at her kitchen table. I asked her the question I had never asked her before, which was: how have you always had such good men?

She looked at me with the warm, patient expression of a woman who has been waiting for this question for approximately fifteen years.

“Astrology, honey,” she said. “Want me to help?”

I said no thank you, I would figure it out.

This was not my finest moment of self-awareness.

I drove home from my mother’s house and I went to work the next morning because I am a nurse and nurses work regardless of personal circumstances, and on that shift there was paperwork confusion and I opened the wrong folder – looking for a patient file, finding instead the employment documents for the new part-time paramedic who had started the previous week.

Jared.

Date of birth: March 24th.

I looked at the date. I thought about the calendar. March 24th.

Aries.

I wrote it down on the inside of my wrist with the pen I use for patient notes, like a person who is absolutely not about to do something questionable.

I looked at the note for the rest of the shift.

Jared was twenty-five, which I knew from the document, and which was five years younger than me, which I noted without deciding it mattered. He was dark-haired and clean-cut in the specific way of people who work in emergency medicine – the practical haircut, the economy of movement, the easy physical confidence of someone trained to act quickly in small spaces.

We had talked twice before I looked at his file. Nothing significant – shift handovers, the brief, functional communication of people whose work overlaps at the margins. He had a quality I associated with people who move fast for a living: he was fully present when he was present and completely absent when he wasn’t.

“I owe you a coffee,” he said, two days after I had written his birthday on my wrist. “You covered my handover last Tuesday.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “It was a handover.”

“I take handovers seriously,” he said. He looked at me with the specific, uncomplicated directness of someone who has identified what they want and is not interested in the scenic route.

I thought: Aries. Fire sign. Direct. Impulsive. Goes after what they want without a lot of preliminary strategy.

I thought: this is a completely insane thing to be thinking.

I said: “Coffee would be fine.”

We had coffee on a Thursday. He was funny – the quick, observational humor of someone who thinks fast. He talked about the job with genuine enthusiasm, the specific passion of a person who is doing the right thing and knows it. He asked questions and listened to the answers with the focused attention of someone for whom attention is a limited resource deployed selectively.

He also, I noted, had no apparent interest in small talk that didn’t lead anywhere.

By Friday we had moved from coffee to dinner without a great deal of intermediate conversation about whether that was what we were doing. One moment we were at a table in the hospital cafeteria and then we were at a restaurant two streets away and I had not been precisely consulted about the transition.

“You move fast,” I said.

“I work in emergency medicine,” he said. “Waiting has consequences.”

I laughed. He grinned. The check arrived and he paid before I had registered it was there.

This is the thing about Aries, I would learn -and I want to be clear that at this point I was not consulting anything, I was simply observing a person and separately recalling a sign’s characteristics in the private, embarrassing way of someone who absorbed information and has not yet admitted what it’s for. But the characteristics were accurate. The speed. The directness. The specific, uncalculating way of a person who sees and goes.

He was at my apartment by Friday night.

He kissed me in the elevator. Not tentatively – the full, decided kiss of a man who has been wanting to do this for twenty minutes and has been waiting for a moment where it was logistically possible. His hands were in my hair immediately, the direct grip of someone who knew what he wanted, and I felt the hair-pull with the specific, sharp awareness of a nerve ending that had not been properly addressed in some time.

Aries, I thought, with the distant, clinical part of my brain. Erogenous zone: the head. They love it when you grab their face and mess up their hair.

The rest of my brain was somewhat less academic.

In the bedroom he undressed quickly, without the self-conscious performance of a man managing his own reveal – just the efficient removal of clothing by someone who had somewhere to be. His body was good. The lean, functional build of physical work rather than gym vanity.

He looked at me with the specific, hungry attention of a man who is very sincerely interested in the woman in front of him and is not hiding it.

“I’ve been thinking about this since Tuesday,” he said.

“The handover Tuesday?”

“The one where you walked past me in the hallway,” he said. “Twice.”

This was either very charming or very alarming and I decided, for the purposes of the evening, to find it charming.

He moved quickly. I want to be accurate about this because the accuracy is the data: Jared did not linger. The foreplay was brief and functional in the specific way of a man who finds extended preliminaries inefficient rather than unsexy – his hands were warm and sure and covered territory with an economy of motion that left nothing unaddressed but spent no more than the necessary time on any single location.

When he pushed inside me it was with the decisive, unhurried-in-outcome-but-rapid-in-execution quality of everything else about him, and I felt the fullness of it and the immediate, forward-moving rhythm that followed – not slow, not teasing, but the direct, honest, purposeful movement of a man who knew what he was there for and was doing it without apology.

He grabbed my face.

Both hands. The specific grip of thumbs along my jaw and fingers in my hair, tilting me to look at him, his eyes dark and entirely focused.

I registered this with the dual awareness that had apparently become my mode – genuinely turned on, and somewhere in the background, a small, incredulous part of me thinking: the head. I read that. The head is the erogenous zone.

He moved with a rhythm that was urgent and sincere, the specific quality of a man who is fully in this without any of the self-conscious distance of performance. He was not trying to impress me. He was genuinely, directly, enthusiastically in the business of what we were doing, and the enthusiasm was more appealing than technique would have been.

I came with his hands in my hair and my face in his grip and the sensation of his thumb on my clit applied with the same decisive efficiency he brought to everything else.

He followed quickly – not prematurely, but quickly, in the specific way of a man who is powerful in his desire and not in the business of denying it.

Afterward he was warm. He held me with the easy, uncomplicated warmth of a man who was genuinely fond and not uncomfortable with the afterward. We talked for an hour about nothing in particular and then he had an early shift and he kissed me at the door and left.

He texted twice the following week and then three times and then the texts spaced out and by the second week they had become occasional and friendly rather than pursuing, and I understood – without requiring it to be explained – that Jared had moved on to the next thing that was interesting to him. He was not unkind about it. He simply, as the description would have it, fell in and out of crush easily, and the falling-out had occurred sometime around day nine.

I made a note.

Not literally. I was not literally keeping notes.

I had, however, started reading more carefully about certain topics.