Sunny days. A short story.

It's almost as if the average American's idea of a gorgeous day, and a gorgeous woman and a gorgeous plate of food has never been the same for Regina. She's the type of outcast who chooses to live among us walking through busy city streets and whose hair whisks past the back of your head when she sits in an adjacent restaurant booth. She is quite different from the boisterous types who parade through the city in fashions outside of their budgets. Regina knows many things, and of those, her favorite thing to know is that those girls attract the wrong people. Since the wrong people most often carry with them the wrong type of attention, then she decided as a young girl to pass on all of it.

Yes, there were long counts of bickering and pleading from her mother. There were endless setups and blind dates that involved more theatric prowess than she imagined went on at Julliard. She could never pretend to like certain men, just as she could never pretend to really want to perfectly place makeup and short skirts so that a doctor or lawyer would stumble upon this new, hidden gem of the city. She argued to her mother that cynical people rarely do pointless things. Regina felt that although men never stood in the way, that wait to be rescued from the harsh world by a man with the right sparkle in his smile and an even better perception of what will make tomorrow's money was probably the average woman's only pointless hope.

When she was twenty-four and college was a blur of boys with the same hairstyles and girls who dressed as if every mall in America had one store, she was brought back to New York with the idea that nothing someone else did would make her life. After hearing for years that she was a pretty girl who might get more boys if she pushed her hair back and smiled more, she imagined college to be a place where those things not only didn't register with people, but were quite dwarfed in the imposing shadow of the real reason everyone was there.

After four years of accepting being consistently wrong about the world, which, in her estimation upon graduation was the true purpose of college, she swapped flip-flops and ponytails and hooded sweatshirts for the tedious labor of looking good even when there was never any feeling good. Regina wondered at times if men wanted to have sex with her, only because her mother complained every night on the phone that 'men never really like the career types,' and that 'If you want to intimidate them all your life Gina, then they're never coming around. And the good ones are already scarce. You can't hunt an endangered species and let your footsteps be so loud that whatever you're hunting runs away.'
She wanted to tell her and everyone else that was so concerned that a man would magically appear in her bed, then on her arm, and eventually in her life that she's never hunted. When Ricky Lopez got her to let him put it in her in the back staircase in eleventh grade, she wasn't hunting anything. Possibly because of this fact, she couldn't enjoy it. She remembered him hunched over her with his pants down fiddling with a condom. She'd never seen a man naked before and didn't know if she was supposed to feel intense tingles or lie still and prepare herself for something she thought seemed like rape any way it happened.

She never saw another naked man again. Regina at times would sit at her cubical and remember how it felt. She would sit daydreaming, gripping a stapler or a tape dispenser that felt just as powerfully hard as what Ricky was so eager to deliver to her from his zipper that day. Even then she understood the moment and grabbed at it while they kissed and even cynics have their curiosities. As she gew to be a woman, she came to understand that what she held in her hand that day was that was simply for her. She slowly understood, many years after the first and only time she had been with a man that the once soft and timid thing between his legs would eventually grow and throb only because her eyes looked at it in a wanting way and she touched it as if it were a hairbrush she used to brush a dolls hair. It took her years to feel that sexy, but when she thought about that, she was one of those women that every man wanted.

Regina's only problem was that she had already conditioned herself to not be a victim to the pursuit, especially when she felt that there were no men worth that pursuit. In fact, she believed that there may have been no actual men around at all. She wasn't very attracted to femininity. The men she knew had become more like women than the women she knew. And no woman, slave to cynicism or not, likes a man who is easily disrespected or who behaves like a gossiping, lovestruck woman who was raised on soap operas. The men who continuously made pleas to Regina behaved these ways and she went from thinking that it was every man's agenda that stood in the way, to truly believing that they had no agenda, to thinking that everyone should just state their agendas on the first date to avoid someone's embarrassment.

Slowly, she began to let go of those ideas of the world that held her back from succumbing to the average man. She wasn't necessarily listening to all of the advice she'd been getting, but alone, she felt very different about herself and her body. All of those days at work daydreaming about sex and being sexy swayed her thinking far more than the advice. She didn't want to marry anyone the way her mother insisted she should. She simply wanted an attractive man who thought she was sexy to sleep in her bed every night. She'd never felt lonely before and every morning in the mirror when she washed her face she thought about the uncanny way she could long for something she's never really known. She was wearing makeup and wearing skirts by then. Regina was under the impression that men were attracted to ladies, and with her stark cynicism of American relationships still prevalent, she decided that summer she would find a man on her own.


Regina had never admired a man's back before. She was her own personal authority on the rules of hedonism and whorishness and examining a man for sexiness was surely a capital offense in her interpretations of her own rules. Her mother would point out good-looking men all the time: men with strong jaws, men with sturdy-looking shoulders, men with wide chests, men with flat stomachs. Regina never paid attention to these things in general, so she never had the opportunity to be told what to admire but by that summer she had unequivocally become a fan of wide, defined, strong backs.

When Andrew approached her on that summer Saturday afternoon in Bryant Park, inquiring about the empty seat next to her on which her bag sat, she immediately took notice of the width of his shoulders and back through his tank top. The weather was so warm that the sun drew sweat from his forehead. He smiled a smile that shouted an even larger 'hello' than he could say with words. Regina, the never-wavering New York woman, did not smile back. She did however, hope that he would stay and speak to her. Although her seemingly sour attitude was a product of conditioning and filtering those annoying men in the city, the new woman in her believed that rude behavior is the path to loneliness. She wanted nothing more than for him to find ways to rip her away from her Saturday edition of the Times.

He sat, but began conversation only when the chatter and city sounds muted momentarily in the park. He told her that he admired a woman who reads the paper every day. She told him that it was good to know the current events. It wasn't love. He used words like 'ain't' and he called his friends 'my niggas,' but he wanted her, and for the first time in a very long time Regina understood this wholly. After an hour he was squirming in his seat with the look of a caged male zoo monkey eager to be placed in the female cage. He was a combination of black skin, strong hands, and high energy that made him seem to her to be more rapist than lover.

He asked about her nationality, and she told him that her mother is Cuban and her father is Jewish. He told her that there's no way she'd like a black guy then. She told him to not be so sure. They finally both smiled realizing that the first flirtatious statement that's answered by another flirtatious statement is usually cause for an awkward silence and an uncomfortable smile. She flattened the front of her summer dress four times in her nervousness. Her hair was pinned up high and he told her that it was sexy. She repeated the adjective once in her head and wrinkled her brow. He told her that it was more sexy than pretty and that only one word suited it in description.

The sun began to glow with an orange tint on his black face and the prolonged summer sunset began. He told her that he'd rather not leave her, and that only a formidable excuse would drive him away. He hadn't yet asked if she had a boyfriend. She moved her chair closer to his and considered that night's plans. She noted how tired she was of going home from her reading on Saturday evening and seeing people whose days and nights were just beginning. Andrew seemed to want to stay, and the suppressed whore in her wanted nothing more than to allow him that privilege.
As they spoke, clouds rushed through the sky at a faster pace than people rushed along the sidewalks. They were still flirting. He asked her, excusing his forwardness, if she was attracted to him, because the truth was that his eyes, hands, and body were somehow drawn directly to her and would be on her if not for the force field of unfamiliarity. It was completely obvious in Andrew's mannerisms that he wanted nothing more than to be alone with her and to rip off the short, loose, flower-printed dress she was wearing and the idea that he felt he couldn't or shouldn't do it brought out some bravery in her.

She leaned over to him and told him that he looked as if he had somewhere to be and he quickly told her that he felt he had somewhere to be with her. For the first time in her knowledge of men, a man had said something to her that triggered a busy feeling between her legs and soon after, she felt a thick slickness between her thighs. She told him that it was a terrible thing to get a woman so wet with no way of addressing the problem. Andrew told her that he did not believe her. The rain was beginning to fall by then and umbrellas were up all around them and cool raindrops splashed on their shoulders. He asked her if a spot in the shelter near the east end of the park suited her and she nodded yes.
Legs opened and elbows relaxed at the back of their new park bench, Andrew watched her gather her things and greet him with another nervous smile. He pointed out the fact that it was raining heavily by then, and the even more important fact that everyone was too preoccupied with the rain to see them. She asked him why that mattered and he told her that it was because he could then find out how wet she really was. With a smile one only gets when they stumble upon a marvelous idea, she reached down with both hands, ducking her head under a tree limb and pulled off her panties and gave them to him. His hands grasped hers when he took them and slowly rubbed the crotch with his middle finger, examining its stickiness. Regina looked at him still not knowing if she had done the right thing.

The leaves of the trees poured down rainwater all around them and she stood looking at him curious about the next step. He called her over and turned her around. He lifted the back of her dress and examined her. He searched for words to tell her that would place him inside of her, but his hands worked in place of his mouth. Andrew reached into his pants quickly and by the time his left hand guided her body into his lap, she was already sitting on something that made her squeal in a slippery but startling pain.
He slid her up and down slowly until she threw her head full of soaking wet curly hair back into his face and began to lose tension. Soon, she was guiding the motion, coming down lower onto it every time and each time moaning louder in surprise at how much she would take in. When she was finally fully relaxed, he grasped her throat with his open right hand, pulled her body closely and told her that she did everything 'just perfect' and that it all felt 'amazing' and no one could really see them through the rain whether they cared to look or not.

When he pulled her close to speak to her though, she could only feel the rushing of the rainwater and the rubbing and scraping of every vein and ridge Andrew drove into her and she shook and gasped in silence. Her eyes squinted and then tensed hard when she was rapidly filled up with the with the intense and blanketing warmth that shot from under her, and they both gasped out what air they had left.

The rain was its strongest then. He had stood her up and kissed her as if he wanted it to continue raining and do it all again. She reached down for her panties, examining the ground and bench for a pink spot in all of the darkness and water. Regina reached up for him, extended her hand, closed it and realized that she had lost him. She reached through water, realizing that the rain had slowed to a sprinkle. She ran to the street, looking each way down Sixth Avenue for a dark man in a white tank top, saw that there were many, but none with exceptionally wide backs, dropped her shoulders, and walked to the newsstand in the middle of the block to buy another newspaper.