After I got home from Paris, every time I ate Pizza I got a boner.
I’d think about when Céleste ordered pizzas on my phone because we were too exhausted from all the sex and weed to go anywhere. When they got delivered, Céleste went out into the lobby of her apartment building to get them and then put them in the oven to warm them up, and came back into her room into bed with me to wait for the pies to get hot. We laid in the large bed in the small bedroom and watched ‘Nathan for You’ under a massive wrinkled Jacques Brel poster which stared across the room to a smaller poster of Johnny Depp in ‘Cry-Baby’ and a matching one of Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antionette’. Next to the black marble mantle which held among its many scattered jewelry boxes and makeup items and hairbrushes and spiked necklaces the little pink bowl I brought back for her from Morocco. We laid in the bed, and it wasn’t long before we started kissing. We couldn’t stop kissing the whole time I was with her. I broke away. “What about the pizza?”
She rubbed my dick over my pants, straddled me, said “if you had to choose between me and your pizza, which would you choose?” and lifted my hands to her breasts under her sweatshirt.
“I’d choose you over the best pizza in the world,” I whispered, pulled her body down to me. Fuck it.
But when I was fumbling to take her pants off a few moments later she broke free, her eyes wide, “ah, NO, the pizza.” And ran from the room. Then I heard her exclaim some French noise charged with a sense of panic. I leapt up out of back and ran after her.
She was in the kitchen, which was full of smoke, a scorched black pizza box on the counter in front of her. “What happened??”
“We were sooo close, like SO close to starting a fire. This was glowing when I came in.” She pointed to the ashen lid of the pizza box. “What if we had decided to fuck? We would for sure have died if we had fucked.”
“Eh, it would have been worth it,” I said. And I started laughing so hard I grabbed out for her and put my arms over her shoulders and swung her around against me. “Why did you put pizzas in the oven inside their boxes?? Is that how you always do it?”
She widened her eyes and twinkled meekly, “well yes but usually it’s just with one pizza and I don’t have somebody trying to fuck with me and make me forget.” Two pizza boxes in a little toaster oven smashed right up against the heating element.
Back in bed, she said “I can’t stop thinking about if we had been fucking earlier. We would be dead. Oh my god, I feel SO dumb.”
“It would have been beautiful. I can’t imagine a cooler way to die. Wouldn’t it have been a great dramatic movie scene? Like we’re fucking, you can see neon lights through your balcony window, so everything would be like indigo and shadow, Miami Vice night kinda look, and that song from ‘Drive’, you know….?”
“Ahh, Kavinsky?”
“Yes thank you….that Kavinsky song from ‘Drive’ is playing and when the robot voice comes in the fire breaks through your bedroom door, but we dont stop fucking or even notice the room is on fire because it’s the greatest sex in the world.”
She was giggling “ouiiii, this is perfect. I would have to be on the top, right?
“Yes, exactly, with your head tilted back and your hair all falling down behind you.”
“And we don’t even care that we’re burning because the sex is soooo good.”
“Exactly.”
“This is SO funny. And so dumb.”
“Kavinsky death fucking,” I said.
We laughed, we pressed our heads together and kissed, we laughed and rubbed our lips against each other while we laughed until our faces were wet with our mingling tears.
We had been minutes away from burning.
We got back into bed and held each other and sighed and got comfortable and kissed deeply and took our clothes off and fucked like we were a pair of sleeping otters. We forgot about the pizzas. We fucked and then we smoked weed and cigarettes after and then we ate the pizzas cold in bed and watched the Office in French with English subtitles.
Cold goat cheese and honey pizzas and the greatest girl in the whole world and I could never have been happier. She put her pizza aside and laid across me with her head on my chest and her hand on my belly. We fell asleep like that in bed with pizza boxes and her laptop on our legs.
I dreamed of house fires that night. Of house fires and skin melting and burning hair and the smell of carmelized cheese. In my dream it smelled like burning cheese even though it was all about burning people. The ashen cheese-smokey odor of a pizza oven was the same as a flaming scalp. Céleste and I were fucking and loving and the world around us was on fire and people were burning and screaming and their skin melted off and their hair was on fire and the air was thick with cheese smoke and I was so fucking happy.