You remember Sonic the Hedgehog: that old-school 8-bit scrolling game where the hedgehog rushes forward, looping and soaring into the sky, snagging golden rings by the handful, every captured treasure announced by the narcotic casino ding of a fight bell in a boxing ring.  I’m a middle-aged man, and happily married, but on Christmas morning in 2022 when the kids downloaded Sonic on the Nintendo and I heard all those fucking bells again, I was transported back to 1993 Brooklyn. My cock grew unexpectedly hard and I had to leave the room until I calmed down, only to tell my wife all about it much later, and in great detail, that night.

Those bells. Music is a time machine and time travel is a song in your head, and the song those bells sang to me was the song of a girl slung over the comfy chair in my crappy Greenpoint apartment in crippling summer heat, presenting her ass, laughing, while the bells of the video game jingled and dinged in the background. She always led with her ass. That summer we fucked and smoke pot and played Sonic like it was the end of the world, out in the weeds of Brooklyn before Brooklyn was cool.

Christine was a marijuana and tofu girl in a cocaine and nicotine town. We met at work, some dumb paycheck-to-paycheck job that paid the rent. It was a weird little office with lots of nooks and corners and I’d pull her tiny, lush body into a corner and bite at her neck and fondle her billowing tits and tell her all the filthy things I’d do to her when we got back to my crummy little fifth-floor apartment. How I’d fuck her hard while she sucked a big rubber cock we’d bought together at the Pink Pussycat downtown, choking on its length just for me. How I’d cum all over her tits and watch her lick it off like a porn star, something I’d never watched a real live girl do before, let alone a girlfriend. She’d fall into me in those office hallways, laughing as I talked dirty. She loved to laugh, and I loved to listen. She’d laugh and close her eyes as her body folded into mine like bliss-drenched origami.  

And that afternoon, Sonic was on the TV, scrolling past us at ten thousand miles an hour, bells ablaze, and it was hot as fuck, crazy hot, just sweltering. Christine was wearing a tempting, little sundress, no underwear, long dark hair back in a loose knot. Sweat licked at our bodies. She leaned against the vast overstuffed comfort of a recliner, dress suggestively hiked.

“Tintinnabulation,” she purred slowly, her wet tongue and lips tripping over each syllable, deliberately, as if taking small licks of an ice cream cone. “It means the sound of little bells.”

“I know what it means.”

“It’s from a poem.”

“I know it’s from a poem,” I said. “It’s Poe.”

“Well, aren’t you the well-rounded college boy?” she said.  She pushed my hand away. “It’s too fucking hot for sex, college boy.” She brushed away an errant curl of her sweaty brown hair.

“It’s not bad outside,” I ventured, my fingers crawling back up her leg.  

“We’re not outside, though, are we?” She stuck out her slippery wet miracle of a tongue.

“We’ve got a window.” I nodded toward it. “And a fire escape.”

“All sooty and grimy. It’s so dirty out there,” she said.

‘Let’s make it dirtier,” I said, and she groaned at my ham-handed and horny suggestion, but her eyes flitted like butterflies toward the bright sunlight of the window, and I knew I had a shot. “C’mon,” I urged.

She never even stood. She crossed the hardwood of my tiny apartment on all fours, knees and hands, while I watched the hypnotic sway of her ample ass. She reached the window, leaned forward, and gave the bottom rail of the window a tug. It moved a few inches and stuck.  I admired the way her tits moved under her dress, the way her thighs flashed like lightning.

“You gonna help, college boy?”

I crossed the floor on all fours and took my place behind her, my cock rock hard in all that heat. I squirmed against the crease of her ass.

“That’s not helping.”

"It’s helping me,” I said, but I leaned forward, put my hands under hers, and we pulled together. The window moved another couple of inches.

“Again.” We pulled on the pane of the window as I pushed my length against her ass.  She pressed against my cock.

“Again.” As the pane gave way and slid upward on the counterbalance we tumbled forward onto a grate of sooty black metal, the fresh breeze hitting the hot slick of sweat on our skin like a cold drink of water. I watched the goosebumps form on her arms as I wrapped her in my own. Her nipples grew insistently hard.

“It’s filthy out here,” she said. “We’re rolling in filth,” and we were, but she was laughing again, as we tumbled and turned in decades of exhaust and factory smoke and urban decay.  The metal grate imprinted a grid of soot on her clothes like a passport stamp.

I mumbled something about taking a shower later, my interest in conversation quickly waning as my hands found my way successfully under her dress. As I slid my hands over her pert tits, she grabbed at the handrail and pulled herself up, again presenting her ass to me. As I said, she always led with her ass. She pulled herself up to a kneeling position as I slid into position behind her, my cock pressed urgently against her.

“Oh my God look at it all!” she gasped, but my eyes were closed as I focused on lifting the folds of her dress over her hips to gain access to her pussy.  Her eyes looked out on the neighborhood as her hand expertly fumbled with the fly of my shorts, loosing my cock. Her giggle intermixed with the bells of Sonic the Hedgehog grabbing at his golden rings, and the birds chirping on the telephone wires outside. The air filled with song. Though my eyes were closed, I felt the sun on my skin, her hot and expectantly wet pussy sliding against my hardness.                  

I grabbed onto her shoulders as she guided my cock into position and I thrust inside her, all the heat of the Brooklyn summer surging through my blood, marking this moment forever in nerve and memory. I pushed deeply inside her, feeling all of her pussy around me, my cock pulsing with each beat of our hearts. I took another thrust, and another. I knew I wouldn’t last long.

“Oh, my God, look!” she cried again.

I opened my eyes. As I fucked her, a glorious Brooklyn summer spread out before us. The Williamsburg Bank building towered over us from the left, the horses of Grand Army Plaza whinnied from the mouth of Prospect Park on the right, down the length of Flatbush. The smell of stale beer from O’Conner’s just up the block competed with the bright alien scent of curried lamb from Kofte Piyaz, and the greasy smell of Hungry Hamed’s selling cheeseburgers through a bulletproof plastic window. The drone of the traffic and the endless honking and screech of brakes and the tintinnabulation of birds and hedgehogs and fiercely beating hearts fought for what little attention of mine that wasn’t focused on her supple tits in my palms, her hot pussy gripping at my cock.

I knew I wouldn’t last long, and I didn’t. Feeling the wet clutch of her pussy at my cock, I was cumming as she was cumming, her body quivering and shaking in my arms. My cock jumped and pulsed and jumped again, filling her. Our spirits lifted free and soared high into the bright still air. We imprinted ourselves onto those streets, as those streets imprinted themselves into our memories.

In a few minutes, our pulses would settle. We’d strip off our filthy, sweaty clothes and leave them in a pile on the floor and take a shower in the middle of the steaming Brooklyn afternoon. We’d order a pizza, and fuck one more time in the languorous evening heat. In a year we’d break up, in five years I’d leave New York City, and in twenty years end up inexplicably in the safe and predictable suburbs of Denver, watching over a Christmas family landscape, Nintendo on the TV, Sonic once again reaching for his golden rings as I fondle my wife, telling her about a girl I once fucked on a fire escape, three decades ago, in the blazing forge of a perfect Brooklyn summer.