I think the fucking eventually got boring for Sam, so we took a walk around my apartment complex one night. For a moment it felt good to be physical in the world with a man without being in a bedroom. We flirted. Sam got sentimental and I told him to stop. We got back to the trailer, and he sat on the edge of my bed after my mom was well asleep. He told me to sit. I sat naked on his lap, moved my anchored legs until they burned. I didn’t scratch the itch.
There were other men. One night I invited a high school ex over, the person I lost my virginity to. Another, Sam’s roommate, hit me up when Sam was out of town.
I wondered if the same men were always coming back because even though I couldn’t remember a single time they made me come, I still wanted them to come see me. Boy-I-lost-my-virginity-to moved back to the Springs and was dating a girl we both knew. I did the thing I always did, which was make a chaotic mess of his life. I played a game with myself, which was to see how sad I could make myself without his attention. It worked. His girlfriend worked on Thursday nights, and every Thursday night he’d come over, but we didn’t speak on any other days.
My obsession with Matt began to lessen from an hourly occurrence to only daily. I got bored of being sexual when I felt like a dead package of skin waiting to be unwrapped. In my boredom I became impatient, so I started telling boy-I-lost-my-virginity-to what to do. I told him to put his mouth there so he puts his mouth there, because I was older than I was the day we first fucked, and in that moment I thought I knew what I wanted. His mouth stayed there and I grabbed his thick black hair and pushed his face into me. I felt the dark of my single room close in around us and questioned whether or not god was real, which I knew it wasn’t, because I’d tried that trick before and I came up empty-handed.
The first time he fucked me wasn’t the actual first time, but I’d since forgotten what he felt like, since I was only fourteen at the time. The other new thing was his interest in putting his thin fingers around my neck and pressing down, and I let him do it until the skin in my face burned hotter than my crotch. When he did this, I closed my eyes and thought of Matt again and only Matt, and waited for him to come.
Two months had passed since Matt left my life, and I slept through half the day, dreaming. In my dreams, Matt’s hair was longer than it used to be, he was sweaty, heavy, his body ripe with fresh muscle. It was hard in that moment to imagine a world in which he could exist without me, but he laid me in a bed with dirty sheets and we fucked with most of our clothes on. The way he felt was safe and electric because it was that newness again that I was continuously chasing. He placed his thumb on the center of me; it was so easy for him to know where I needed to go. He didn’t put his hand on my neck. He put his hand on my head and directed me to kiss him. Our lips together created neon smears on my cheek, spit stuck to my neck, the crumpled clothes around my waist. His body like the Baphomet in Jenny’s cards was a cage over me. This was how I liked for it to be.
Sam and I lay in the bed together, arms soothing each other’s sides. He was a bottle of whiskey heavier on this night because his girlfriend had just left him. I was sober, surprisingly, because I worked early. I figured he called me because he was sad, or at least needed some validation. I was lonely and happy to oblige. On his back, he made the same snoring sounds my mother made, so I pushed his body hard until he rolled over, stuck in the drink and the sweat hot. I had never spent the night before but I didn’t want to go home. The grey glow of a silent TV flickered at the foot of the bed. I played a game with myself.
“Stay still,” I said, and I lay still.
I put headphones in, one ear open and one listening to a voice-mail on my phone. An old one left by Matt.
I counted the heartbeats in my head as I slowed my breathing down, sure not to twitch or move the mattress too hard. The game was that Sam couldn’t find out, most likely wouldn’t, his body exhaling whiskey dreams and heavyweight snores. He stirred, and I slowed down my circular motions until I was not moving at all. I tried to see how slow I could go until the rise came and I couldn’t take it anymore, quiet and holding every muscle tight until it was gone, eyes tight shut with all the red of my body holding together. I let go, breathed, grey cold light still there.
THE SATANIC BIBLE SAYS MAN IS THE MOST VICIOUS ANIMAL OF ALL
I SPENT THE BETTER part of spring fucking Jenny, getting lost in her body, and getting drunk. I felt bad that she would let me do this, especially after the tarot reading and the Tower card. I thought about the villain’s fall from grace, how the card told me I needed to stop obsessing over Matt. After the reading, I became even more consumed by him. The smell of his skin was salt on the road. The color of
