What was she like? What do you mean? You don’t usually ask me questions like this. I don’t know where to start. What was she like? Well there’s this: She had a small kitchen, you know? It just had two chairs and a small table, and we’d sit there drinking tea—her father was English, you know, and this was something she had kind of inherited and then gently imposed on others. And our knees—sure, they’d be touching and I’d want it to be meaningful, like a prelude to something. And I think it might have been like that for her, but she still seemed so hesitant? Like she had never been with someone who had taken care of her so she didn’t know that she could let me, just like that, into her space. She was on edge even in the moments when we could have been slowly falling into each other. Does that make sense? I don’t know, maybe it was me who was on edge. But it became something of a challenge—how can I get her to let me take her like that? Take her off her guard?
Author: divildetsilke
Your boring one-piece, torn [M/F]
You tell me you’re going to the gym for a swim. I peak over the top of my laptop as you head for the door: you’re wearing a light jacket and shorts over your black one-piece. You call it your “boring” suit—you’ve had it for so long. It stretches in odd places and is enticingly threadbare in others. I shift in my seat as you leave, bite my lip as the door closes behind you.
Three minutes later you’re back. “Forgot my ID,” you say and I catch your eye. You stop in the doorway, as if unsure, wide-eyed. I close my computer and stand up, I’m not even sure why. I take one step toward you and look away for a beat. I hear you reach for something on the table.
And, as if compelled, I rush at you, my hands to your face, my mouth pressed against yours: tongues and lips and spit. I pull at you with my teeth. We’re hungry. I tear your jacket off of you, right there in the entryway and then my mouth is down your neck, inhaling you. I grab your hips, open your legs, and press myself into you and against the door. Your strong swimmer legs grip around me, your arms around my neck, enveloping me.
A night at the museum [M/F]
He couldn’t fully explain why he had gone to the party. He had done some consulting for this company, mostly writing bogus copy for a campaign about “team partnership simulation” and “improved assessment experience.” He once had writerly ambitions, but now somehow he had fallen into this professional niche: the thinness of corporate babble. For every gig he aimed for parody and satire and each time his clients ate it up, maybe precisely because none of it made any sense. All capitalists are nihilists, he would think to himself—and then deposit the checks. Maybe it was the emptiness of this whole process that led to his attending the party, as if to punish himself for his unearned success.
He didn’t even know what the party was celebrating. It was being held at a midsize art museum—there were cocktails and snacks in the lobby and the company had rented out the place so that its employees could enrich themselves by looking at some art. Weren’t they rich enough already though? Most stayed in the lobby, laughing and drinking heavily. He could barely stand talking to anyone; the volume of his regret kept drowning everything out. Why not some art, he thought to himself as he slipped into the gallery.
While her parents slept [M/F]
It was hard to talk to one another. I couldn’t speak her language and she couldn’t speak mine, so we muddled through a mixture of things. It made the most mundane acts feel like little triumphs—passing the salt, telling the time, turning out the light. But it also meant so many dead ends and miscommunications. We just didn’t have the words. Our only recourse was to make up for it through touch, through the body. There was a lot to make up for.
She lived with her family in one of the those European cities where the children didn’t move out until they got married. I had my own place but she feared somehow disappointing her parents by staying over. She felt this need to be home at a decent hour; and her parents always wanted to feed me dinner, knowing I was without my own family in a foreign country. Not that there weren’t ways around all this. Other couples would drive out into the countryside, find a quiet corner somewhere, cover their windows with newspaper (or not, depending on their proclivities), and fuck like teenagers. Neither of us had a car.
She was on the attack at the party [MF]
For years the apartment building had been marked for demolition but the owners had somehow found ways to delay the inevitable while renting the apartments to poor art students. The group living there developed a kind of coop-style living, sharing everything while knowing they could all be kicked out at any moment. Their parties were wild affairs—since each one could be the last.
When I went to these parties I liked the roof the best. It was only a three-story building, so the roof was mostly level with the tops of the trees, giving it this secluded forest-like feel, especially at night. There was a single floodlight hung up somewhere making everything shadows and half-faces, but somehow still bathed in a warm orange glow. And when you’re drunk, everything is shadows and half-faces and warm anyway, That night I arrived at the party already buzzed, so I didn’t even bother with whatever was going on inside. I went straight for that roof.