“I want to meet up,” he said. His breath was hard. “I want to see you.”
I was quiet for a second. A part of me felt angry. I had gone from thinking of him hourly to thinking of him only every other day or so, or when I felt particularly lonely, when it was quiet at night. Another part of me, the romantic in me, knew an opportunity like this would not come along again.
“When?” I asked.
“Right now.”
I swallowed so hard I worried he could hear it.
“Frankie?”
“No,” he said. “Just come over as soon as you can.”
At home, I showered quickly, shaved my legs, ate a snack, and shit from my nerves. I paced in my bathroom, paced in the bedroom, back and across my full-length body mirror, staring at my skin in the sun. I grabbed a few pills from my mother’s stash and set them on my nightstand. I put clothes on and took them off again, making a pile on my bed. I put on perfume. I applied makeup, took it off, frantically reapplied it, and then stood up, examining the foxglove tattoo on my thigh, seeing how it had healed, lotioned my legs, and put on a skirt. I tousled my hair so that curls came down either side of my neck.
When I got to the parking lot of his apartment, I checked my makeup again and got out of my car. He was already standing outside waiting for me, leaning against a wall. I was not prepared to see him, the way that he would look, and my nerves got to me. I realized I forgot my pills on my nightstand.
Matt smiled, all his teeth showing, cheeks pink from the wind. I hoped my holographic lip gloss sparkled in the sun as I walked. His freshly shaved head was like a goddamn peach. I wanted to devour him. I had forgotten how badly I wanted this, how much it hurt to look at him.
When I got closer, I noticed a cut on his left cheek.
“What happened to your face?”
“Frankie is doing an overnight,” he said. “DV. She’s in the tank.”
I wondered if this was why he had spent so long ignoring me. He told me their fighting had gotten worse. She started getting physical, he said, and scared to retaliate, he just took it. If he tried to leave, she would block the door.
“Last night I couldn’t anymore,” he said. “She came at me with a broken glass. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, just to make her stop.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I just remember clenching my teeth and going don’t ever fucking touch me again, and that must have scared the shit out of her, because she called the fucking cops on me. They showed up and I was the only one with physical evidence of abuse, so they took her. She was screaming a lot, and I kept telling her to stop resisting. The baby was crying. It was fucking chaos.”
I stood for a moment looking at his eyes for any omission of truth. As gentle as he was with her, I had wondered this about men who held the monopoly on violence, what the response would be to a woman who was violent. It wasn’t hard to envision Frankie there, in the hallway of their apartment, barking at him, flailing a broken piece of a glass she’d most likely thrown at a wall.
I was never taught that women were inherently weaker than men. I had learned it through sex, through Matt’s fist at my neck. Men are taught to manipulate the world around them. Women are taught to manipulate men. I loved the violence of Matt, the pulse of it beneath the surface of his tranquil skin. It looked better on him. Frankie’s violence was unrestrained. It was ugly. I knew this, and as a result I used it to my advantage.
“So she’s just, like, in jail?” I asked. “Where’s the baby?”
“Jett is at my mom’s house. But yeah, they took her for a twenty-four-hour hold, I guess.”
I leaned against him, could still feel the shower humid on his skin. His body tensed at first and then relaxed.
“Can you just come ride with me for a bit? Maybe spend the night?” he asked.
I feigned sympathy. I wasn’t sure why I was there—did I like him anymore? After three months of torture without him? I looked at the slate-colored Malibu reflecting the old apartment buildings behind us, the abandoned church, the 7-Eleven across the empty parking lot. I felt more nervous than I had in a long time, which at least was something.
“Sure,” I said.
When we walked to the car, I had this image of myself, separated from my experience. He got into the car first, and I tilted my hips as I went to sit down, the tattoo on the back of my thigh flashing hopeless before it made contact with the leather seat.
He pulled out of the parking lot and it hit me that this was the first time we were truly alone. An awkwardness rose in me, as if things had somehow changed and we were two new people on our way to some grand adventure, not the same ones that had been fucking in front of Frankie. I counted each breath down, reveling in the newness, placing my hand on his thigh and thinking, “This is the first time I am placing my hand on his thigh.” The corners of my mouth pulled back and I thought, “This is the first smile I have shown him.” We stopped at a red light and he glanced over, leaning in as if expecting a kiss. I leaned toward him and thought, “Perhaps I am the first
