We had developed a routine. The arrangement would generally begin with Frankie and I fooling around. We would kiss, and then she would touch me, either with a toy or her hands, and then she would kiss Matt. Sometimes she would tie me up, and then Matt would penetrate me first while Frankie watched. She would hold my hand or keep her hand on my thigh. I was usually on my back, facing away from him.
The first time he choked me, it was unexpected. His hand cupped my neck, and as he enclosed his grip at the highest point of my throat I could feel the pressure of him harden within me. This excited me more than the choking itself, so I didn’t protest. He thrusted more vigorously, and as pressure built inside of my head, I imagined my face growing beet-colored and froggy as he finally came. He seemed satisfied with himself, and I wondered if he mistook my open mouth as a sign of pleasure rather than a need for air. I know that humans are animals, but in those moments it seemed that the animal inside him was closer to the surface. I wondered if the animal inside of him was more carnivorous than most. Inside of his eyes, there was a wild pale blue like a wolf on a hill at dawn. His gaze was unnerving, and if I caught it in the right moments, I felt like a kind of prey.
His sex with Frankie was gentler. He regarded her with a tenderness normally reserved for injured animals or children.
At times, sex between us would be so vigorous that I would bleed and something in Matt’s face would change. One time his eyes went mannequin blank, glossy and dark, as if the very spirit of his life had escaped him. It was either at the moment of his orgasm or just before. His eyes rolled into the back of his head in the same way that mine did when he choked me, like he was making an attempt to look in on himself and see what was contained within. Matt had just shaved his head again, a soft sort of Velcro blond. My fingers pressed into the muscles of his shoulder and slid up through his hair and bent his face toward my chin. I felt the sharp strain of tendons in my neck against his teeth. He let go and looked at me. I was reminded of the way snorting painkillers feels. A warm bloom began in the center of my head, in the sinus cavity, before spreading like wet, warm fruit smashed under something heavy and hard.
There was the dissolving body feeling and the sharp pain of teeth and the thrust of Matt inside of me all at once. The force of hands holding me down. Something spilled from my middle as if I were splitting in two. Matt pulled out of me and said blood and grabbed me harder, grabbed the skin on my waist with his fingertips so hard it left small half-moon scars from his fingernails. Some small tug of my heart pushed words into my mouth, asking hit me or harder, only for the hope and trophy of a bruise that might form the next day.
I forgot Frankie was there, grabbing my thigh. She’d often place her hands over the wings of the owl tattoo until the presence of her touch dropped off my body like melted wax. That, or she masturbated next to us with her eyes closed. What did she think of herself or Matt in this moment? I remember watching pornos where the girl would close her eyes as she was being fucked and keep them closed during the whole process as if to say, “I’m not here in this strange room, and there aren’t cameras, this is just a person fucking me.” I sometimes forgot that the three of us were in this strange game together, that she was prey or she was not.
I closed my eyes as well, and forgot I was trying to be a part of some young nuclear family, a girlfriend to a couple with a kid, a girl who lived in her mom’s trailer and snorted her mom’s Vicodin. I forgot that I was just a girl working at RadioShack who had slept with her manager, that I was just a girl, that I was me, that I was anything except for the thing Frankie named me, that I was anything else but Lilith.
TRANSCENDENTAL LOVE
FRANKIE AND I WERE watching the baby while Matt was at work. Patrick and his girlfriend Maya, whom I hadn’t seen since we all went to the Satellite, came over with beer and ice cream. Patrick and Maya had a baby, too. We sat around and bullshitted on the couch and watched the two kids play with plastic toys sprawled out in the middle of the living room.
Patrick usually bought us liquor when he came over. He was twenty-one, and it seemed like he had a lot more connections than I did when it came to finding weed or harder recreational drugs. At the hotel, he had asked for my phone number when Maya wasn’t looking. I gave it to him, hoping he would hook me up. I also hoped he would be a good source of information on Matt and Frankie’s relationship, as if he might inadvertently show me cracks to exploit in order to get closer to one
