Sometimes having sex with Sam hurt, in the sense that I would not be quite ready but he would want to start anyway. I would face away from him and he would enter me, and I would feel myself force an acceptance of his presence in my body. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex; more like, I wanted his attention so badly that I didn’t think I could be picky about the type of attention I received. Since I wanted to be an object of his attention, I believed that I also had to be an object of his pleasure.
Often, during sex, it would take me a few minutes to figure out whether something felt good or if it was painful. Eventually, it seemed it was mostly hurting, or that it was fine but I was empty and detached. By then so much time had passed that to stop or readjust felt like breaking an unspoken rule.
I learned to restructure these feelings of pain or detachment into a type of pleasure, and I did this by performing what I thought sounded and looked like a woman enjoying sex so that I wasn’t just lying there, emotionless and unmoving. When I was sixteen, I’d heard a phrase at school: It’s like sticking your dick in a coffin. If I were going to live my life as a receptacle of bodies, I did not want to be a coffin.
Matt cleaned the new tattoo and bandaged me up. I wanted badly to touch it although it was an open wound. My leg felt wide and raw and the purple flowers with its thick green stems looked neon against the redness of my irritated thigh. Frankie moved me to the couch. She slipped my shirt off in the same delicate way she took off my shoes. Her fingers were gentle and cool against my skin as she lifted it up and over my head. My body tensed at the sudden way she moved me, as though I were an art doll or a mannequin. The action of removing my clothes and then placing me on the couch, first my shoulders, then the long line of my back, seemed to come so naturally to her that I thought she had done this before, or that she had done this with other women before without Matt there. Matt was on the other side of the coffee table, standing very still with his arms folded tight against his chest. It was dark outside and the light from the kitchen gave everything a dark desert tinge of yellow.
Frankie put my legs up on the couch. Her fingertips traced their way down my leg like she was studying me through touch. I watched her eyes curve up at the corners as she smiled, the gunsmoke and amber color of her eyes moving from spot to spot on my skin. When she was done, she stood next to Matt, and they both looked at me.
That was when she said it, what made me forget my name.
She said, “She’s just like Lilith.”
Matt wiped sweat from his forehead and I realized how hot it was. My skin against the velvet couch, the big body of it holding me up.
I lay there, waiting to see what they would do next, which I assumed would involve sex of some kind. I did not know who would start, or if we would start by kissing, or how I should feel. I wondered what they expected me to feel, what they expected from watching a naked girl on their couch, if the naked girl should do anything in particular.
I hoped that kissing Frankie or Matt would make me feel something. I liked the idea of new exceptions to mold myself into. I tensed my neck a bit and looked up in a very unnatural way, the way models pose, because I was worried my face might look strange at that angle. I looked at Matt’s third eye spot, and then Frankie’s, and moved back to Matt’s. He shifted from one foot to the other.
“Oh my god you are,” he said. “You are totally her.”
Me as Lilith. Me as a whole new thing.
I never knew Adam had a wife before Eve, and never questioned why Frankie and Matt might know who Lilith was. Maybe it didn’t matter then; maybe I wasn’t supposed to know. Years later, my late-night social media stalking would transition to a drawn-out search for information about Lilith. I learned that Lilith was made from the same dust as Adam, and not from his rib. I learned that Lilith was either banished or left the Garden because she refused to obey, and it seemed likely to me that was why Eve was punished the way that she was, as if any form that was not Adam was set up from the beginning to fail.
I wondered if knowing this would have changed the way I interacted with Matt and Frankie. When Frankie named me, I felt wild and free to her, like perhaps she respected
