What I Learned From a Hot Fighter Pilot

When Sexual Chemistry Thrusts You Apart

We were on each other as soon as I opened the door. Within minutes, the fighter pilot whom I’ll call “Goose” was making my body come alive in a way that I’d never experienced.

The sex was fast and furious, replete with unselfconsious exclamations of desire in the giving and the taking. Goose was a strong wingman. He came from behind, yelling “Fu*k!” loudly and enthusiastically like a frat boy scoring. The only thing as loud were my own ecstatic cries.

After, when we lay in one another’s arms, sated, we might have been mistaken for lovers. Talking and not talking. The feel of his skin on mine. Our bodies interwoven in the soft light of an early fall day.

Then he was ready for it again. When he climaxed, he brought me with him, despite the forewarning that it probably couldn’t happen this first time.

Within less than a week, I’d discover that Goose wasn’t just my top gun in bed, (albeit from among a smallish number of cadets who had landed there)—he was also the first person to ghost me. That brief, insightful journey is paved with some painful but humorous lessons about the power of sexual chemistry to scare a man away, the lies we can tell when we try to be someone else’s short-term fun, and the transcendent…