It was mostly a sad thing whenever they had sex. Not at the time, always, but after, definitely. She resented him and how he made her feel, and he tried not to think about how she made him feel. He mostly tried not to feel, at all. He figured if he could keep a healthy distance from her in every way except with his body, he’d be fine, and so would she. She knew this was what he did, and was mostly okay with it, except for on the days she missed him, which thankfully, wasn’t every day. He wasn’t everyday. And that was the very reason why she resented how he made her feel, which was loved.

The first time they had sex, he’d told her over and over again that he loved her and she hadn’t been able to say it back. He came inside her and she didn’t say anything at all, but she cried when she had to leave. The last time they had sex was almost exactly the same as the first. In fact it was identical except they were both many years older and significantly more cynical, and twice as scared, and certainly both of them were very, very stupid.

On some days she lays her hands on her body and wishes he was hers and hers alone. Other days she looks at her heart and wishes she had never known him at all. He can’t decide what he wishes for, so thinks it best to stick to how things are and the reality of the situation is that she will never be his. He doesn’t think so anyway, he’s never asked about it but can’t bear to hear whatever answer she has because it will either complicate things or complicate things more.

They are both rather confident that no one has loved them the way they love one another. They aren’t sure what it means, but they’re afraid to make it stop and so it might be very true that neither of them will ever be loved by anyone else the same way again.

It’s a hurtful, aching, terrible love so that’s probably for the best.

In the back of a car, I gave head for the first time to a boy named Jermaine.

He was 6’2 and dark and smooth. He reminded me of a basketball player, all muscle and swagger. We had just danced too close, for too long, his ambitious fingers finding their way up under my dress and past whatever I was wearing underneath. He pushed me up against the wall and whispered, “Damn girl, you’re so dirty, you don’t give a fuck who sees, do you?”

Later that summer, I had sex with his best friend Chris, on the hood of the same car. And driving him home, he ducked down in the passenger seat as we passed Jermaine smoking around the back of their building. So Jermaine wouldn’t know we’d been together. Because they’d both called me that night.

But I dated Steve. He was smaller, but just as smooth, and I’m not talking only about his skin.

“Baby, stand up in the moonlight. Spin around for me baby, let me see you. Yeah, that’s it. Let me see you.”

He bought me daisies to show my mother that he listened to me. He taught me how to drink beer. His smell was intoxicating. It’s what made me kiss him in the first place. He had two of the cutest goddamn kids I’d ever seen. He’d take his braids out and I’d run my fingers through his hair. I wrote him poetry and he’d hold my naked body against his and say, “Baby, I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do.”

And in the morning we took a cab through the city; the morning before I left and never saw him again. And he held my hand like he meant it on the cracked leather seat.

“Oh, I’ve missed this cock.”

Right after she said it, she looked up at him sheepishly, “But I’ve missed you, too. It’s not like your cock is the greatest thing about you. I remember once really appreciating your superior intellect, loyalty, great sense of humor, and mad dancing skillz.”

The way she pronounced ‘skills’, curling her lip up into a slight snarl, pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth, he knew there was a ‘z’ on the end, maybe two. Plus, it’s how he remembered her: changing the mood at the most inappropriate of times. And then bringing it back.

“But this,” she took his cock and displayed it to him on the platter of her open palms, “this is a thing of beauty.”

He had always tended to think that about his own dick. Maybe he didn’t necessarily refer to it as a thing of beauty, but he thought it was pretty okay. It was of a sizable length, an acceptable thickness; he kept the hair in the vicinity trimmed, and his balls smooth. Hearing her agreeing with his long-held beliefs for the first time out loud made him feel pretty good. So did looking down at her kneeling in front of him marveling at his dick as if it were the best thing she’d ever seen. And the sounds she made when her lips slid down around it made him think his dick may have been the best thing she’d ever tasted, too.

He watched her sucking him off, felt a hand on his balls, another hand snaking around to grab his ass, pulling him deeper into her mouth, as she closed her eyes and moaned. He moaned too; he’d remembered enough to forget to miss this. He closed his eyes wondering how he ever managed to forget this.

“Fuck, I love you,” she murmured without taking her mouth away from him; her lips tightening with the ‘f’ in ‘fuck,’ the tip of her tongue pressing against his dick on the ‘l’ in ‘love,’ and rolling along it as she pronounced ‘you.’

She opened her eyes without taking her mouth from around the tip of his cock, looked up at him, “Oh - not you. I meant…” Trailing off, she slowly pressed his dick into her mouth until her lips pressed against his skin.

He knew she meant she loved his cock, not him. Not anymore.

He tells her as he holds her, her head on his chest and his hands roughly tangled in her hair, “Baby, I’m going to write a poem about you, maybe even a novel. That’s how much you mean to me. You just…inspire me, you know?”

He’s actually been writing it already in his head. He has been for a while now. Every time she looks at him and smiles, he thinks in his third person narrative, “She’s amazing. She doesn’t believe it. She shakes her head no, whenever he tells her yes. He doesn’t understand how he gets to have her. He worries he doesn’t understand her at all.”

Every time she sighs, he thinks, “She gets lost too often in her own head, drifting away from him for too many too long moments.”

Every time they kiss, he thinks, “She pushes herself into him with an unnecessary urgency. Her lips smash into his teeth because she has this habit of kissing him every time he laughs.” 

Every time he comes inside her, he thinks, “She closes her eyes as he comes, her mouth open, holding her breath, holding him in. He stares down at her and wishes she’d let him see her.”

He turns her into fiction to better see her flaws. He turns her flaws into fiction to better see her. He sees her flaws and thinks she might be fiction.

And he loves her. He loves her. He loves her.

Once upon a time there was a boy. He was tall, with smooth skin, soft pink lips, and grey eyes that dropped off at the edges. He was in a band, had a pretty girlfriend, and had just switched high schools. He was also unhappy. Perpetually so.

One day a girl came along who believed she had been cursed not long before by a man she worked with. He had told her, “You will break hearts.” She heard it as a curse in her head, a challenge in her body, and a caution in her heart.

To appease her heart, she took the time to find sad boys who needed her, like the boy with the grey eyes. She saw him at school one day, and was instantly drawn to his sadness. She read him well, and became everything he needed. She was a soft body when he needed to cry, she was an answering voice when he asked questions, she was supportive of his emotionally guided mistakes; she was something he didn’t have.

So when the day came that the boy showed up at the girl’s classroom and asked to speak to her and then buried himself in her arms, and cried, and told her he needed her, she was not surprised; only grateful and a little satisfied.

She spent many days making him happy, quite a bit actually. But before she realized that he was perpetually sad, and could never really be happy, her body felt that challenge echo in her long legs, fair skin, and slender neck. So she answered by searching for more hearts to break, while still trying to make the boy with the grey eyes smile.

Until some other day, when he left her. He wanted to be sad alone, and later with someone new. And her heart felt betrayed, her mind confused, but her body was set free. Her heart and her mind resented her body that freedom, and conspired against it.

She became more beautiful, less empathetic, more beautiful, less caring, more beautiful. And she broke hearts. Men, women, it no longer mattered to her. Old, young, single, married, it still didn’t matter.

It wasn’t until it was too late, in true tragic fashion, that her body realized what the mind and heart had done. Her heart had locks her body couldn’t pick, her mind had  walls her body couldn’t climb. She could no longer enjoy anything. She didn’t feel anything. She didn’t feel happy or sad or angry. She only felt lonely, or so she assumed. She was alone, she must be lonely. Or she was never alone, she must be lonely.

She sometimes thought about the boy with the grey eyes, and wondered if he had broken her heart. Had he broken her heart and she was too busy with her body to notice? Was her heart still broken? Did the boy with the grey eyes ever think about her? Was he still sad? Did she ever make anyone happy? Was she sad?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell me. So I can’t tell you. So that’s the end of the story.

Can we be honest here, for just a minute? I asked him breathless, looking up from the floor, because I’d just fallen off the bed (which explained his worried look), after he’d just given me a really fantastic orgasm (which explained why I was out of breath).The falling off the bed was embarrassing but I thought I could save the moment with the sound of some other type of falling.

And he nodded but I could only answer him silence. I couldn’t say any of those truthful things that need to be said after falling out of a bed with a man who pronounces your name so softly; a man who holds you close and up and tightly; a man who gives you his air to breathe when you’ve forgotten you needed any.

And in that silence that waited for honesty—outside the window, away from the woman on the floor, and the man on the bed above it—streetcars passed filled with hot, sweaty people waiting for a similar sort of honesty, a similar sort of truth, a similar sort of sound.