Pillow Princess
She loathes when the curtains touch her skin. It’s disgusting and irritating. Here as she wakes into the early afternoon, the bellowing breeze pushes its dusty, mossy, paint stained, and mould covered fabric gently across her lightly flushed face; stirring her into something not quite awake enough to be annoyed, and yet she is. If it were chiffon maybe she’d like it, light and gauze-ish, tickling her into something pleasant, but the stodgy fabric screams against her skin. Two years of avoiding ever having to touch it, two years too lazy to take them down to replace them, two years of never washing them. Just keep clear.
Her face is swollen, puffy and lacking sleep, she has sore eyes and cracking skin around the corners of her nose, and thinks: fuck off, though, she is still so effortlessly beautiful. Her hair is bundled in huge curls, delicate and tender. Supple is her body's skin, as they all say. Does she moisturise every inch for each fatal touch? No. It’s something deeper, below the dermis, that radiates outward. She buzzes something exuberant, never nasty. A sureness, a selfhood so secure, even if she sometimes forgets it.
The bed she moved beside the windowpane for the summer is splashed with sunlight leaking through the window opened last night. The sounds of neighbours chatting too loudly in the courtyard interrupt her slumbering — what time is it? Confused and irritated, her bedspread is a stark white except for the smear of turmeric orange from miso mushrooms a few nights earlier. She wipes the drool from her mouth, her head still resting against her right forearm. She’s never really needed a pillow to be able to sleep somewhere, and finally she cracks her congealed eyes open.
An upright green yoga mat holds an open splayed journal she didn’t remember leaving so visible for someone to peek into, facing the world, and so she reaches to shut it. On the bedside table further, a dark mahogany 70’s vintage – that doesn’t match any of the other furnishings – is stacked with books that look like they’re about to topple; a little cactus in a tulip vase, incense, a charger cord for a device she lost three months ago, a five pound note and her phone. A deep labour pulls her to reach for her phone and gracefully she snatches it with long fingertips. Graceful because she’s long and thin, hollowed out, kind of gaunt but still plump in the areas she should be. Her breasts swell as the screen vibrates alive, a blue shines into her eyes, and the dopamine of messages and email threads she won’t look at until this-evening corrodes her third eye into a feeling of misery. It’s 12pm, fuck.
Snoring beside her, with both pillows below his crooked neck, some freckled face boy sleeps gently. She met him last night and thought there was something endearing about him. Maybe the tone of his voice, the trepidation he took when he asked to kiss her, something tentative in the way he wanted to devour her but physically was exuding nervousness. Each question she would volley his way would draw him back to her, tickling some flirtatiousness to assure him it was okay to make a move, that he wasn’t going to totally combust if he decided to kiss her. The way he wobbled his head was as if it was too heavy on his shoulders. A dawdling brain, a relentless verbal sputtering, a little unsure of himself in the way he contradicted what he would confirm as fact. She thinks about how men often aren’t ascribed “endearing”, and if he knew she thought this, would that emasculate him? Women who are endearing – if told they are, as she has been before – are made to feel meek. As if a collection of bundled phrases like “nice enough” or being “respectable” hasn’t quite been achieved, so it’s not said, but you’re near enough to have made a man endeared to you. For your charisma maybe, for your gracile elegance that sometimes falters. Like you’re bite size, digestible. Easy to understand or simply that, just easy. She’s anything but easy, a tarantula that eats her lover after they fuck. And now it’s time for him to go, get up. Out with you.
She gently puts her phone back, it vibrates and falls to the floor, shit, but it doesn’t wake him. Dude, it’s time for you to go. He invited himself to stay, falling asleep when she used the bathroom around 5am, which was fine, she supposes, if it was looking promising, but she had it in her mind to sleep alone. She was talking about feminism and he coiled up, made some sick joke about being a real man, how his version of masculinity isn’t threatened by strong women “doing what they need to do”, grabbed her waist, whispered “me too” in her ear, and then laid kisses into her neck. Intoxicated by the feeling, watching his face light up as his moustache made her skin blush, she fell into the power of something lustful. Grabbing at his face on either side. Pressing her thumb and index fingers into his cheeks, puckering his lips. “Open your mouth,” she demanded. He tried to snicker something pathetic. “Open.” He widened his jaw, first tongue and teeth visible. “More — now.” When she could see the back of his throat, she drooled her tongue into his mouth, released his face, and felt him suck her. That’s when she knew she had him, when she knew she wouldn’t have to say what she wanted.
To better position herself over him, he motioned her thighs to straddle, tight underwear caressing his crotch in a crop top where half her breasts were falling out. Her hair, long and dark, falling beside his face, he would brush out of his eyes to see her. Looking into one another, a resolute feeling of earnest trust being performed. This man writhed under her gaze, it’s like he wasn’t trying to hide anything from her once he finally thought he had her. How simple it is, she thought, that a man could act so mysterious, so frivolous and cavalier right up until he is simpering for you to grab his cock. Earnestly, she knew he knew nothing of her internal dialogue. She could read it on his brow, eyes beady and pleading, his furrow itself a clear message: I’m yours.
When their mouths were separate he told her to roll over. Lay on your stomach. She lifted her pelvis off his and got on all fours. He wanted her to be flat on the bed, but instead of giving him what he desired immediately, she slowly brought her knees together, interlocked her legs, and used the pressure of her body weight to glide her down into laying on the bed. As if having wrapped her arse in a little leg bow, securely sliding it across a table as a surprise gift to a lover. For you, open wide.
“Like that?” She looked over her shoulder, brushing her long locks to the side of her face, behind her ear with a flick of some fingers. “Yeah baby, just like that.” Great, she thinks. Recoiling her features from his, returning her gaze out the window as he excavated her thighs, he digs into her with his tongue, making her wet and slippery. Her thighs sodden, and where they meet, tight and juicy. When he plunges in, she doesn't moan, instead she props her frame up, lifting to open the window. She snatches at a vape in the sheets and blows plumes outside into the night. He caresses her arse, clawing at her waist, and occasionally she looks back to scowl a glance from him, raising her eyebrows gently as if to say, really feminist boy, that’s all you got for me? Swallowing hard and fast, drinking her eternally, he laughs and pulls her to the side of the bed, away from the window so he can better spread her legs to either side. This doesn’t change her response to pleasure, she’s enjoying it, it feels fucking amazing, this boy is trying his hardest and it’s cute, so she thinks. It’s sweet of him to assert something dominant even when he knows, I am in control.
Looking above her, into the night toward smog that fills the sky, where stars sporadically leak through passing clouds, she remembers the men before him. How some, farsighted of the plight they take themselves to make her squeak, have called her a pillow princess. A girl that rests her pretty face against a pillow and unenthusiastically gyrates when necessary. How they stutter and stammer, calling her “useless” if they can’t make her cum, feeling rage when they themselves cum too soon. She can’t remember how many men have felt embarrassed or had their ego bruised by the simple flick of a phrase that comes at the end of each of these sexual encounters, something tried and tested that is sure to make every man crazy. She gently bites her bottom lip, blushes a bit, and says: “It’s just, it’s not that it wasn’t good, it was. I’m not mad at you, no… not at all. I’m just losing interest.”
Twisted around the slight of a smile, bathing her men in a gust of wind blown from her eyelashes, what they happen upon, what they don’t yet know themselves, is that the power of a woman in control, doing what she needs to do, isn’t so visibly brutish and tactile. All the work, until morning when she becomes restless and outspoken, is in her power to remain docile, bashful, unflinching to his serrated, roughening, touch. To get a man to work, to pull him from his lazy struggles – as she is, spinning her web so he lasts and sustains a sense of eager devotion – is undoubtedly rigorous work. She exhibits something he doesn’t yet understand, endurance.
It’s time for him to go. She yawns, crawling out from the side of the bed. Stretches and catches her figure in the mirror, smiling at the curvature of her waist and tight ass. Putting underwear on, his jumper, and taking a bottle from the floor for water. She gulps down the liquid, pulls her hair back into a butterfly clip and grabs his foot. Shaking it, waking him, he looks around, up and at her. “Mornin’ baby, come back ‘ere.”
With consolidated emphasis, looking at him for a moment, stretching time without sentimentality leaking in, staring down at his attempt to butter her up when she is already so sweet, she says, “It’s the afternoon and it’s time for you to go, princess.”
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
(Pillow Princess was originally published in Tummy Ache)
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