He swallowed, his Adam’s apple sliding up his throat. “They want to see you, but you can’t stomach seeing them. You know you love them on some level but you can’t feel that love. You can’t answer the girl from seminar’s calls and she stops calling. Everyone stops calling. You have no history, no future. Your life is no longer a story, but a series of empty actions that don’t add up to anything. You’re only this moment and it’s the most painful moment of your life.”
His voice fell off a ledge. I recalled Nia saying he’d left school and wondered if this was why. Like a coward, I failed to meet his eyes.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he said. “That was too much.”
“No, no. I asked you to tell me and you did. Thank you.”
After a long pause, he said, “Jay didn’t stop calling. That’s why this feels so bad.”
I nodded. “I can leave.”
I felt bad too. Wretched. But stirred into this wretchedness was a want I had no command over. A want that split me in two: One of me was running home to call Jay. The other stayed, crawling into Tristan’s lap.
“I don’t want you to leave,” Tristan said finally. “I want you to come here.”
My stomach clenched, anxious with expectation. I moved clumsily toward him. He straightened against the sofa to welcome my weight as I straddled him. From this angle, his face was funny. He looked like a hungry, hormonal teenager. All the intimidation of his hoop earring, fuck-you tattoos, antidepressants faded into this counterimage: him as nervous, needy, thrusting up at me through his jeans with adolescent impatience.
Holding the back of my neck, he drew my mouth to his. He was sucking on my bottom lip, letting it pop wetly back into place, while I wrestled with his belt with irrational anger, fantasizing about taking the faux leather into the teeth of a pair of scissors. He laughed, easily unlatching the buckle with his free hand, sending it flying across the room, metal snapping against the wall.
He fought my jeans down to my ankles and propped my bare ass in the air before proceeding to run his tongue over me like an animal. I was facing the window but: What the hell was even out there? There was only his tongue fucking me in here, only his dick springing up to greet me when I bent over to peek between my legs (Hi!). My head went limp on the sofa arm the way it did on a roller coaster the moment I surrendered to the insane fall. “Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” I said, robbed of my $50,000-a-year vocabulary because of a man. What was feminism when you were getting fucked?
He flipped me over, not letting me up for air, flattening his tongue against my clit. A strangled sound clawed its way out of my throat, andmy hips chased his mouth. Two of his fingers found their way inside me, digging out more ruined sounds. Possessed, I rose from my cunnilingus grave to mount him like a motorcycle I was ready to drive off a cliff.
“My condoms are in my room,” he said.
We both looked at his bedroom door. It was so far away. How were we going to make it to his bedroom without fucking first?
He lifted me over his shoulder with dramatic resolve and carried me to his bedroom like a whore-bride.
We collapsed, kissing on his mattress. Impatient, I took his pink head and ran it over my slit. He groaned, “Jesus, not yet, not yet,” reaching for a gold metallic square on his nightstand, tearing it with his teeth like every sex education video instructed you not to.
Once it was on him, gleaming, plastic, he sidled beside me. “Are you ready for me, baby?”
“What? Hurry the hell up!”
He laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. My body was one big heartbeat about to fail. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a stroke (“twenty-four-year-old Catherine Elise St. Clair, a DC native, died on New Year’s Eve over some dick she wasn’t even supposed to be getting”).
He entered me, clamping his eyes shut. I wrapped my legs around him like I was going to fall off him if I didn’t. Now he was the one saying, “Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” and feminism was back in business. He twisted his fingers into my waist, raising me to meet him. He was louder than I thought he’d be. It occurred to me that people could hear us, which sent a thrill down my spine.
I was making threats now: I was going to suck him, and take him, and finish him, and milk him. He fed words into my mouth you could say only from inside someone (“Clench around me, squeeze it all out of me, fuck, like that, like that”). I briefly saw our bodies from across the room, rabid, drunk-looking. I reached up and ripped the cross from his neck with my teeth. So much for never taking it off. I thought he was going to get upset. Instead, he grinned, bending down to tongue the slippery metal out of my mouth and spit it across the room like afucking forest pagan. This was what Jesus died on the cross for, so this man could slurp it out of my mouth.
“Fuck, I’m gonna come.” He kissed my collarbone. “Turn around.”
I thought he was going to finish on my back, but, with a firm hand, he pushed me flat against the mattress.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
I must’ve sounded panicked, because he paused. “You want to stop?”
My eyes closed. I thought of Jay’s chest pressed to my back. But Tristan’s knuckles kneading my waist reminded me what I wanted then. “Keep going.”
I felt him smiling against my cheek before he sucked his thumb and slipped it in my ass.
I knew it was over then.
In a sweet, patient voice he told me to let it out, that’s his girl, just like that, give it all to Daddy, good fucking girl.
I cried, exhausted, delighted, like I’d actually accomplished something.
