What My Couch Smells Like

When I go to someone’s house for the first time, I can’t help but wonder how many times someone has fucked on the couch where I’m about to sit and how many times it was good. I can’t count how many times I have fucked on my own couch, which isn’t really mine but my 82 year-old landlady’s. Once my ex-boyfriend went down on me while I watched The Dog Whisperer. It was good. I came twice. I think about it sometimes when I have people over—the intimacy that all of the inanimate objects in my house have witnessed. I used to think about it, too, when I would hand back piles of student papers—papers that I had inevitably fucked in front of or sometimes on. How much those papers had seen of me, how little the students. I have twice in my life told male friends with twin-sized beds that they would never get laid in something that small, which is a lie. I would fuck a guy in a bed that small. But better yet is the couch, which is more absorbent. I am afraid to take off the cases of my couch cushions. What they must look like underneath. I used to turn them over afterwards, leaving the wet spots to dry in the dark. It reminded me of a guy I knew in college who would, after doing his laundry, promptly remove it from the washer and stuff it dripping into a duffle bag that he would throw in the back of the closet. He smelled bad, but my couch doesn’t. It doesn’t smell like anything.