My teeth no longer felt the need to devour, so I used my tongue instead to feel the parts of her that made her feel good. The parts that made her vulnerable. I kept my tongue on the fabric of her underwear and could feel her wet and my wet melt together through the lace. She grabbed my shoulders and pushed my face harder into her.
The way I ate her was like a meal, in little parts. Jenny gave small pieces of herself away each time my tongue pressed into her. A little less of her seemed to come back with me. The places where we became one thing together like this, our open membranes raw and bleeding. The cave of her colliding into my mouth, the place where words form. The way our darks connected. I didn’t know what to think about how this felt other than we were here, alive and breathing and fucking, and maybe this was how it was supposed to be.
I took her to bed, laid her on her twin mattress, and placed the blanket over her. I wiped my face with a towel from her floor and slept on the mattress next to her, but on top of the blanket instead of under it.
The cigarette burn on my arm was not healing. I had been feeling slow, tired from the constant drinking every other night. If I was working, I was sober, but as soon as I was off the clock I was either with Jenny and drinking Skol, or in my room, snorting Vicodin and drinking any liquor that was in the house. I had taken to raiding the dusty cabinet underneath the china hutch in the living room while my mom was asleep. A few red wine bottles had vinegared, but I drank them anyway. A green, half-drunk bottle of shochu was in the corner collecting dust. It must have been my father’s. A couple bottles of Johnny Walker Red. A bottle of Black Velvet. My mom must have forgotten these were here. The shochu was at least over twenty years old. I grabbed it and the Black Velvet and headed back to my room.
I turned the radio on my alarm clock to a classic rock station, which was currently on an AC/DC marathon, and lit a cigarette. I didn’t have to work the next couple days, but Jenny was not returning my texts, so I took a swig of the shochu and chased it with an open bottle of sour red wine. My feet hung from the bed, and I kicked the trash underneath me, the empty plastic bottles of Robitussin and McCormicks juggling around dirtied paper plates and napkins, empty glasses crusted with rings of old cola.
I should’ve taken a break from seeing Jenny. She hadn’t talked to me since our last drunk night, and I was getting paranoid. If she wouldn’t reach out to me, I wanted to forget her and leave the whole thing behind before she could hurt me, too. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she did hate me, if she wanted space. The more time I spent with myself, the more I found myself grotesquely annoying. My skin had been breaking out—from the constant drinking and my poor diet—and no makeup was covering it up. I wasn’t showering much. My nails were dirty underneath, my legs unshaven. I could feel the oil built up in my hair and on my skin. I was gross. It was not a surprise that Matt no longer wanted to see me. I felt that I had peaked at eighteen, and nineteen was now just the slow slope downward. Right after high school, I had everything: good skin, shiny hair, a good body that liked to fuck. Right after that birthday, I had just started sleeping with my manager at work, and could add “fucked a boss” to my list of life to-dos. Sam seemed less interested in me now that I was nineteen and he was single. He was even scheduling me less at work, scheduling me at times when I wouldn’t be around him. At nineteen, I did not feel Barely Legal anymore. Somehow, whatever power I thought I had with my body had already begun to fade. I knew women lost value as they aged, but didn’t think I’d feel it so soon. I seemed to have wrinkles already, my body collecting scars. The bags under my eyes were getting worse. I wondered when I might start looking like my mother, acting like her, letting weight amass on my frame. We were both hiding in the same house with the same vices, a hole as big as a husband or father inside our ulcered, burning guts.
I lit another cigarette and picked at the scab on my arm, flinging the broken skin onto the trash heap of my floor. I didn’t seem to feel the pain anymore. I took another drink of the shochu, bitter like rubbing alcohol, and wondered if I might go blind, before putting my cigarette out onto my forearm.
The pain was sharp and I breathed it in, like lightning illuminating a dark landscape. It was exciting to forget I hated myself so much. I rubbed the ashes off and watched as the broken skin bloomed from raw peach to dark red. Then everything was dull again.
THE MAN I COULDN’T MAKE INTO A GOD
I HADN’T HEARD FROM Matt or Frankie in about three months. One day after an early shift at work, my phone rang, a number I did not recognize. For a while after the breakup, I had obsessively checked my phone for missed calls from blocked numbers, as Matt would always call me without giving me a way to call
