I’m already somewhere else; mouth parted, hunger unspoken, drowning in a past that won't let go.
As I collect the paperback from my room, I slice my finger on a page. It falls to the floor. I press down on the blood with my tongue. I say, “ouch.” I begin to suck, so much so that the blood fills my mouth and I swallow myself hard. Every damn time, I think, girl, you taste so good.
A. moves into focus with the imprint of his body behind me. “Are you okay?” The symmetry of us is off tonight, I don’t want him to be polite. “I’m fine.” The dozen roses he bought for me are set in a vase before me, idle in the water, and as he kisses my neck, I simmer to his touch. If he is able to drop the pleasantries, to dismiss my pains and bury his own into me, I will be sated. If not, I’ll throw the roses on the street tomorrow.
When A. is above me I look deeply into his eyes, not longing to be seen but to be misunderstood. To be taken un-seriously. I want him to say he doesn't love me, to take advantage of me by ravaging me. To remind me I’m young with the uncomfortable thrashing of sex that is not intimate but insatiable. He’s painted perfectly to my skin, etched into the curvature of me: a fresco above the bed, a baroque palette, a bow and arrow through a skull, a small figure covered in the lupanar, a lie. I don’t want to be preserved in this tryst of affection. I push him off me, I straddle him. I place his thumb in my mouth, biting it as I guide it to his lips. A. purrs, we kiss. I get bored and drool my tongue into his neck, hearing him moan. It’s here I think about how I will slowly maneuver myself down. A.’s hands are behind his head, I think, smack my ass or I’ll die.
I don’t feel self conscious in the way I usually would. A. is a man I trust, a comfortable companion, though intellectually not as titillating as I’d usually devour. His masculinity is camp. The way he giggles when I tickle his ribs on occasion, walking down the street with his arms around me, always catches me by surprise. It reverberates around us, creating a bubble, our aura, of carefree appeal to those onlooking. He’s made me stronger, more resilient, yet not in a brutish way; which I’m thankful for. His repeated phrase to me is, “You could afford to be more of a diva.” I think I’m beginning to agree.
I bite A.’s nipple, which I know he hates, and I look up to his face, his mouth agape, eyes glaring at me. I know I’m blurred, and in the refuge of this camouflage, I smile wide. I take my time, I make myself comfortable by being less enthusiastic than usual, up until he is about to cum, then I stop. Pretending something is stuck in my mouth, delicately lifting my head from him and brushing my hair back. He launches up to me, whispering baby into the hollow of my throat, begging to make me fertile. But right now, I cannot.
A. has become a sanctum of love, fuelling me in creative ways beyond measure. I’ve often found myself walking down a busy street fantasising about how his moustache would ruffle in the breeze. How dreamy, sweet, tentative his responses are. How I adore his pauses, after I have spoken, where I can see admiration glaze over his face; the slightly raised expression his eyebrows make, showing me that the way I speak, hold myself, the way I wonder is loveable. Yet, I can’t fathom A. completely as my own, nor do I want to, when the many fragments of him I have been privy are so clearly yet to be unfolded. A. is progress. My whole life is a process of a mutating past, present, and future that blurs into an ungodly figure. The edges of me, my desires, drastically shift from feather to fang. I’ve unintentionally put him through hell, drawing A. into the many woes of womanhood, and he has remained.
Because A. deems me respectable, I want him to treat me otherwise. I’ve developed an unhealthy habit, this new feeling now, of longing for men that make me feel unsafe, terrified, breakable. I recognise that this can be deemed destructive behaviour, that I am not the saintly figure anyone so quickly assumes me to be, because the only feeling I have ever known, and have had to find sanctuary within, is terror itself. I want to be loved and when love is in my grasp, I find ways of dismissing it. Humiliation is my womb. A. refuses to offer that, even in moments like this, where I provoke and tease and try to pull from him reason, logic, to feel the misandry of my feminism; to which I can become stuck. I do not loathe him, or any man really, though their formidable tendencies, accepted socially, are a burden I lay openly victim to.
Once more, baby is breathily poured into my ear. “Breathe with me for a bit,” A. offers. I know the routine. I take my hand and put it to his exposed, bony, chest. I’m sat atop him, his legs stretched out across the bed, mine tucked around his chest, behind him. My complection is red; we’re covered in midnight. Hands wrapped around me, the palms of him against my spine. “I’m here, with you.” The way we have begun saying, in a convoluted spiral, that, I understand your tribulations.
“I’m sorry,” I retreat. Or, not me, an overcompensating me. The figure I once sought to be, was told to be, at the expense of a refined version of me that need not depreciate my own abjection. I feel him inhale against my hand that funnels the complexities of his compassion into my own body. He delicately, without a word, understands the humour and insidiousness of me all at once; fundamentally flawed, yet learning; performing desire that is so compressed and anxious in its pivoting between lust, temptation, risk, annihilation.
Sometimes I fantasise about A. degrading me, not violently, but thoughtlessly. Like I am an afterthought, a gesture. Not because I want to be disposable, but because there is a quiet power in choosing to be discarded. It’s the freedom of agency, inverted. I want A. to want me so badly he forgets who I am, who I’ve been, to shatter the illusion that I am singular. I want to feel like one of many, if only to prove to myself I can climb out of anonymity and into significance itself. Pleasure, then, a performance of loss. The comfort of the distance it creates from then to now.
A. never complies. He remains deliberate. His gaze is too careful, too drenched in reverence. He could exempt me, liberate me, from the kind of madness in craving wreckage. That’s what this is—all of it—right? An amassed collection of previous objects of identification burning into obsolescence. It’s in A.’s refusal, his mutability, his willingness to see my many variations, that makes me writhe with shame and then rise from it.
His touch is sacred even as I create acts towards sacrilege. A. says he’s here, but I’m already somewhere else; mouth parted, hunger unspoken, drowning in a past that won't let go. I nestle into him, not as surrender, but as strategy. A. is not the end of me, just one more rhythm in the ache I call mine. Now, I think, ours.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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