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Sarah mentioned him the week before the wedding – told her he was single, did a little eyebrow waggle, but didn’t press the issue or shove any photos of him in her face when Anne stayed quiet. Sarah was sweet like that. When she approached the two of them on the dance floor, Anne could sense the eyebrow waggle wanted to return, but Sarah held it at bay and just smiled at them with her kind eyes.
Music played and Matt and Anne must’ve laughed into each other’s shoulders for more than an hour. Talking and talking. Twirling and twirling. An upward spiral, like thermal ascension.
Bit too much spinning, turns out. The scorch of vomit up her throat. Cold tile on her knees. A silly excuse. A kind hand. Still there? Still there.
Then bouncing, skipping, cavorting is what he’d called it, bare feet on concrete, scuffed high heels in her hand or his, she couldn’t remember. But in her drunken haze she could remember all the things that had been against her cheek tonight, an index of textures and temperatures: The squeaky latex of the balloons. The cool night air in the street outside. Matt’s suit jacket, Matt’s soft cheek, Matt’s sunshiney hair. Carpet. Wall. (That part seemed to last forever, scary and voidlike, the blackness broken only by the beepbeep of a keycard.) Then: whump! bone-white hotel bed top sheet.
“Okay. Here’s the plan.”
Anne crawls up and laughs facedown into the pillow until her spine shakes. The room keeps on tilting.
“You. Are in the bed. Okay? I… am going to my bed. Elsewhere. You stay there. You good?”
A fear-flavored feeling strikes her heart. He’s leaving already? Leaving her all alone? She thrusts an accusatory finger in the approximate direction of his voice but can’t gather enough focus to lift her head up just yet.
“Abandoning!” It’s still muffled by the pillow. She kicks a leg against the mattress for emphasis. “Uh-BAND-dinning!”
“What?” Matt asks. He still sounds out of breath from carrying her all the way here. Anne raises her head to stare at him with blue-bleary eyes. In her periphery, every piece of furniture jitters with a dozen ghostly overlays of itself.
“You said you wouldn’t abandon me. You just saiddit. Promised.”
“I– Anne, I meant in the hall. I meant I wasn’t leaving you out there in the hall.”
“Welllllll I’d sure hope not!”
“Aha. Okay. Well, I’m go–”
“No!” Soon as it leaves her mouth, she realizes she sounds oddly similar to a kid being told it’s naptime.
“I’ll– Look, I’ll write my number and leave it right here, okay?”
His number? Shit. Shit shit shit. Right. She totally forgot that was a thing she was supposed to have obtained earlier. That’s what you do, isn’t it, when you’re having a great time talking to someone, when the words flow so easily and you feel the great big lonely glacier of You melt, and the great big lonely glacier of Them melts too and you turn into one cool glass of water instead. Something manageable, quenching and satisfying and served up to others every day like it’s normal.
Warmth screams from her mottled cheeks and she wants to hit herself in the head for forgetting, but then she sees there’s no need to: He’s already written his number on the scratchpad by the hotel room’s phone and he’s saying something else now.
“See? Number’s there. We can talk later. Tomorrow, even. I just think you should get some rest, yeah?” It sounds sort of far away, an echo in a din of nothing. He adjusts the knot of his necktie. Her whole body, head included, feels like it’s on a merry-go-round in motion. She doesn’t want to play alone.
“No. No thank youuu. I’m ’wake. C’mere.” Drunk and insistent. Matt blinks and his mouth hangs slightly open, all confused and speechless. Anne dodges his gaze. A snippet of shame finally starts screaming at her from several towns over. She rolls onto her back and picks at her nails.
“Party’s not over.” Her voice is small, a mumble behind an almost-pout.
“It isn’t? It might be. Isn’t it?” Matt’s nervous half-laughed words come from above, closer, because he’s sitting on the side of the bed now. Anne shakes her head from side to side but immediately regrets it, feeling as if her brain has come unmoored from its seat and slapped up against the slick inside of her skull.
“Where… were… we…” She walks her fingertips along the quilt-lines in the duvet as she musters up the courage to say her next words. Flirting. Flirting back. She’s got this. “Ah, we were falling in love, ‘member?”
“Pardon?”
“We were falling in love. You said. In th’bathroom.”
Right. So he had. It had been spoken aloud and so it must be true, eh?
Her hand reaches out for his where it rests on the duvet.
~ ~ ~
Matt’s first drink had been to fit in. His second drink had been to collect the courage to talk to the prettiest girl in the room. After that, any extra alcohol had only gone into his mouth because he was trying to keep it out of hers.
Now here she is pawing at him, horizontal on a hotel mattress, and the devil on his shoulder is in the midst of dropkicking its angel counterpart clear into next week.
He tried. No one can say he didn't put up a good fight, didn't give it the ol' college try. He tried to leave, he did. She wouldn't allow it!
It’s totally irrelevant that it’s been months since he’s last gotten laid. Close to half a year. Him and Anne, they have a connection, clearly. They’d talked all night long. Her signals literally could not have been any louder, both then and now. Don’t think about the whole “drunk” thing. Drunker than anyone you’ve ever seen before. Don’t think about it. Don’t think. Don’t.
They’re holding hands. He’s stroking her knuckles with his thumb.
“Do you want to brush your teeth?” he asks gently. The puke from the reception hall bathroom is a bit of a concern. But then again, it hadn’t stopped him from tongue-kissing her on the street. Or in the elevator.
“Nope.” She pops her lips on the plosive. She grabs for his tie and Matt can’t help but laugh. He can feel himself giving up on the challenge at hand, the challenge of talking his body out of its natural responses. When he kicks off his grey sneakers, it feels like something major and meaningful, some point of no return. Still sitting on the edge of the bed, he turns closer toward Anne and moves his hand to her right leg. Their lips meet for the third time tonight, and of the three, this is the most eager she’s been, sliding her tongue over his immediately.
An ocean roars in Matt’s ears and his heart hopscotches up his throat. The hotel room’s walls close in until they press up against the bedframe and crush and crumble, leaving Matt exposed, zapping him and Anne back onto the middle of the hardwood dancefloor at the reception, all the other guests standing there staring, frozen, appalled. Everyone anticipating. A bad horror movie telegraphing its jumpscare too much. He can’t stand it, so he crawls into the waiting refuge of the bed and lays down beside her, still kissing, curling up around her small frame as if it could ever hide his.
Her fingers run through his hair at first, but then they fall limp at her sides. Eventually her lips stop moving, stop kissing. When Matt pulls back and looks at her face, her eyes are closed and her breaths are shallow. She’s out like a light.
He could leave. He should leave. A better version of him would leave.
But not this one.
His hand is back on her leg. A light touch turns into a firm one turns into a squeeze turns into what can only be called a grope. Then another, and another. He’s grabbing at her ass. He’s tenting his trousers. It’s entirely out of his hands now, unstoppable. It’s gotta be the alcohol in him talking, piloting, puppeteering, yeah?
Both hands slide further up the insides of her warm thighs. The hem of her dress, bridesmaid blue, gets pushed up to reveal tight navy boyshorts with a lace trim. Something she picked so the lines wouldn’t show under the dress. He can’t pull them to the side, so, holding his breath with the poise of a jewel thief limbo-ing under a laser beam, he carefully slides them down down down all the way until they slip past her ankles and land softly on the floor at the foot of the bed.
His heart skips a beat when faced with this, this new piece of this new person. He reaches one hand out with a trembling sort of reverence and rests it on her pale patch of pubic hair. His thumb slides down to her slit. His intrusive thoughts are a phantasmagoria of all the shit he watches online, all the things he wishes he could try. He wants nothing more than to split her apart.
The wallpaper sweats. He’s achingly hard now. And he’s not fucked in the head, see, because he doesn’t want her to stay unconscious, au contraire, he wants her to wake up. If she did wake up, she’d probably pull him in closer anyway, yeah? The novel thrill of this moment is perfectly normal, all simple psychology. Like how the cookies you sneak from the cookie jar as a kid always taste better than the ones you’re handed.
His thumb presses lightly at the very top, not dipping in, just feeling for the little bead of her clit. Smaller than a marble, he thinks. A pearl. He’s never been granted this level of access, this leisurely pace. Sex has always been a frantic fumbling dumb-luck mess for him, every time, for an entire embarrassing decade. Maybe now he’ll learn something. Maybe now he’ll get better at it. Maybe now he’ll bring something to the table besides useless trivia and bad jokes and the three spelling bee trophies his mom stopped showing off ages ago.
He’s on his knees, fingers still exploring. He’s lowering his head for a closer look. This is the universe gifting him a study session. An open book presenting itself.
Some half-rotted part of him wants to pull his phone out and immortalize this moment, this beautiful thing he doesn’t deserve. Wants to take a video, but oh, then he’d have to take care to silence his heavy mouth-breathing for the duration, wouldn’t he? Some part of his mind tries to rocket him into an out-of-body experience, some mortification ceremony, some holding up of a mirror, a LOOK at yourself, man.
It doesn’t work.
He’s going to burn for this.
~ ~ ~
Anne didn’t talk much to anyone, but when she did, she always felt like it was too much. It’s because people would never tell you that you were talking too much. There was no heads-up. They just silently decided they were annoyed with you and boom, next thing you knew, they’d already written you off and labeled you “weird.” Odd. Eccentric. Quirky. Different. Other.
It’s because most people weren’t honest. Matt was honest. Anne knew this immediately. He was expressive and engaging, coming across as virtually incapable of holding a poker face. And he was so unguarded, so raw, oversharing like a wounded animal leaving a trail of blood through the forest of the crowd. She was the only one who’d cared to keep trailing him, tracking him once he put himself in her path, never letting him out of her gunsight. Pew pew.
She wanted so badly to understand him, but more importantly, she believed she could make him understand her.
Anne stirs. Murmurs. It’s tough to emerge from where the thick dark weighted blanket of a near-blackout has her swaddled, but she scoots her hips further down the mattress, letting them chase after some source of heat below. She reaches down blindly and runs her hand through the messy skater boy haircut Matt should’ve aged out of by now. Feeling the strands between her fingers, the context comes flooding back to her. The circumstances, the who-what-when-where-how-why of this room.
She tips her head forward and opens her eyes, meeting his. He’s motionless. He blinks slow, like a big cat. She wants to tell him this, but her mind’s not fully back yet, so she pushes his face down between her legs, hoping he gets at least one message loud and clear.
She was unsteady in her heels long before he showed up. She hadn’t been this drunk since… last Christmas? When the questions from adults got too loud and all the fun fled from the room and she wanted to scream. A lecture from her mother had followed, of course. Luckily there was no one around to rain on any part of tonight’s parade.
She lost count of the champagne refills at the wedding reception. “Bubbly,” that old man had called it, same old man who asked her:
“What does it feel like to be young and beautiful?”
“It feels powerful.”
Turns out she was right – she feels powerful in this moment, letting Matt through the gate of her legs, pressing his face against her cunt, having him bowing at the altar of her.
He moves his hand out of the way and licks his lips quick. He starts out all lips and no tongue, teasing, just mouthing at her and exhaling hot breath. She knew those lips would be fun to kiss the moment she saw them, but to be perfectly honest, kissing wasn’t the only activity that had entered her imagination. Now her second prediction is confirmed, as Matt’s mouth seals around her clit, already sensitive and firmed up from the preliminary work of the pad of his thumb.
When his tongue finally slides across her softest skin, she gasps. There’s a muffled little “mm?” from below and even though it’s barely a syllable, she can tell it’s not a real solicitation of feedback; she can hear the gloating tone, the self-satisfaction in it, and it charms her all over again.
The room is still spinning, no matter where she looks. Words simply won’t form – but she knows by now that sex is not something that needs words. (Most fun things don’t, in fact.)
Matt burrows in slow and close, digs in until his nose flattens against her, licks deeper into her, slicker with new spit, and all together it makes her spine feel like a string of fairy lights being plugged in. A good kind of overwhelm. Soon she can’t stop giggling, forearms over her face, heels of her palms pressing against her forehead. She finally decides on keeping her arms above her head, with her hands tucked beneath the pillow as she smiles down at him.
It’s far from the first time she’s had this done to her, but his mouth feels insane, and he knows how to use it. He’s moaning through each lap of his tongue and her stomach does somersaults every time he dares to make eye contact with her. When she tries to lift her hips off the mattress and fuck against his face, his hands return to push against her inner thighs and hold her down, more forceful than expected.
Two minutes later and he finally surfaces for a breath, all pink and panting and shiny and smiling back at her and five hundred times cuter than he was before. Far too tempting. She bunches a fist in his hair and drags him up up up, colliding in some sloppy makeout of twin gratitude. He keeps his right hand still cupped firmly around her cunt, maintaining the pressure it craves. Smart boy. When she grabs his other hand to put it on her breast, there’s nothing left to support his weight, and he crushes closer on top of her.
~ ~ ~
The new kisses are peppered with far more moans than the old ones. Matt’s trying his best to murder that frantic-fumbling tendency of his, trying so hard not to rush through this. Anne smells like vomit and sweat – did all the deodorant and perfume wear off over the course of this long day, or did she never have any on to begin with? – but truth be told, it’s doing something for him. To him. It’s the incongruity of it all, this little girl who looks like she should be all baby powder and lemon zest and magnolia blossoms and linen, shoving her clumsy champagne-aftertaste tongue down his throat with a wild enthusiasm.
There’s a knock at the door and Matt freezes, immediately swallowed up by a fresh wave of guilt, his hope gone sodden. Someone else knows he’s in here. Someone else knows what he’s doing to her. Who? The wedding guests were all scattered across the three nearest hotels and he didn't know who was staying in this one. At least it’s not Sarah, can’t be Sarah, because Ryan texted him when they reached their ritzy honeymoon suite downtown, far from here. An employee, then? A room service guy? Are they mandated reporters? Fuck–
“DO NOT DISTURB!” Anne tips her head back and crows. When Matt shushes her frantically, she starts playing with the syllables in her mouth for fun, quieter and quieter and over and over until they’re more “donut dizzurb.”
Whoever it was, they walk away voiceless. They will never be anything but footsteps fading down the hall. Still, Matt’s rattled by the whole thing, back in his head. A terrible place to be. Anne’s tried to pick up right where they left off, but apparently whatever kissing skills he possessed are deteriorating from the weight of the distraction, because he thinks she seems annoyed when she’s the one to break away this time.
His ears are ringing and his heart is pounding and it takes him a moment to register that she’s fidgeting with the zipper of his pants now, biting at her own lower lip.
“Your turn.” Her voice is half whisper half singsong.
“Huh?”
“Your turn. Fair’s fair. Lemme see it.” Speech so slurred. Anne’s wobbling, kneeling up in the bed now, trying to roll him off of it. Matt stumbles and stands where she directs him to, at the bedside. He is too aware of the cold clammy panic-sweat coating his skin. He’s not keen on being seen, even when he’s sure the viewer won’t remember any of him in the morning, so he tries to reach over to turn off the bedside lamp. She stops him by swatting his arm hard, though she misses on the first try.
Together they free his cock from his pants and it bobs “hello” so eagerly, you’d think it deserved fanfare. Anne wears a crooked smile. One sleeve of her dress has fallen off her shoulder. She tucks her hair behind her ears and she looks so small, so innocent, this has got to be a new level of obscenity. Matt brushes a hand against her soft cheek. When his thumb runs over her thin lips, they open and she suckles, holding eye contact. It’s only for two brief seconds, and it isn’t fake or put-on in that spoof-of-sexy way; it is something else entirely, something that makes his breath snag in his lungs and his pupils dilate wider than before.
She curls her fingers around the base of him. Matt gawks down at her, afraid that any words he could say will send them both careening off this ride. She takes him in her warm mouth and flattens her tongue along the underside. When she starts sucking, a shockingly deep “ohh-h-h-h” stammers out of him. His hand lands on the crown of her head and as he starts to buck, she stills, becoming more of a place or a thing than a person. No resistance. No tears beneath her fluttering lids.
He was right: when she woke up, she only pulled him in closer.
This is fine.
This is good.
He wants to see if he can hit the back of her throat.
She’s taking it so deep and not even frowning, but he wants to see her struggling, floundering. If she threw up again, gagging on his cock, would anything even come out? He wants to know. Has to know. It becomes an itch he needs to scratch, a nagging curiosity that propels every harsher and harsher thrust of his hips.
Suddenly the ring of her throat constricts and something hot makes her ribs light up like a high striker mallet game at a carnival, every rung, all the way, enough to ding-ding the bell. She tenses up and shoves at his stomach until his dick is out of her mouth. She leans off to the side, her head swaying over the foot of the bed, and pukes onto the floor. Matt watches it pour out with a neutral expression on his face. It’s not clear but it's not chunky either. It looks like makgeolli, the rice wine he tried at that one disastrous karaoke bar date in 2017. Cloudy.
Anne’s back hunches and her little pink tongue pokes out and her body heaves until it is certain there’s nothing more to expel. She straightens up to kneel in front of him again and drags the back of her hand across her mouth, gulping in a couple much-needed breaths of air. That same hand wraps around his erection, which has not waned. She makes it disappear back into her mouth – which feels warmer than it did a minute ago. Wetter, too.
This is disgusting. He’s not into this. Are you kidding? No one else would do this girl the favor of even kissing her after the first puke incident, or of overlooking the broad bevy of humiliating ways in which she has behaved tonight. This is what patience and kindness look like, and it is a great sacrifice to give her these gifts. He’s highly uncomfortable, trust. (His dick just didn’t get the memo.)
If he crosses enough of his own lines while he’s crossing hers, it all evens out in the end, eh?
In the next thirty seconds, she’s going at it sloppier than ever – and Matt’s harder than ever, trying to keep his desperate sounds acceptably low in pitch, trying not to outright whimper and hiss. She’s drooling, dribbling all down her chin, and as much as he wants to add to the fluids coating her face, he’s also enough of a gentleman to give a little warning, and it feels so fucking good, he has to stop her right now or else–
“I’m, I’m gonna– whoa now.” Anne stops and leans back.
“Really?” The word sounds peculiar in her voice, like it’s half giddy with validation and half poking fun at him.
“Yeah. Yes. Let’s, let’s slow dow–”
“Nuh-uh.” She grabs his hips and pulls him roughly back onto the bed, back on top of her, and he grunts at the suddenness of it.
“Uh, ah, okay, are you– Really?” Checking in. Checking in. He certainly doesn’t need it to go this far, he was perfectly satisfied with–
“Yus.”
“Yes?”
“Mmhmm.” She yanks his unbuckled belt through its loops and flings it across the room. How’s that for enthusiastic consent?
“Should we, uh. I don’t have a condom.” That’ll probably ruin–
“S’okay.”
“Really?”
“Yeah I’m good.” Anne didn’t want to go into detail. There was that thing in her arm, the one an ex-boyfriend talked her into getting and her mom had agreed with. It stopped babies. It didn’t stop diseases, but she didn’t need to worry about that, did she? Matt was safe. He wouldn’t be Sarah’s husband’s best friend if he wasn’t. He wouldn’t have been invited to Sarah’s wedding at all if he wasn’t.
Apparently Matt didn’t need any additional explanation on the matter, because he was slipping his slacks off his ass now. Anne crosses her arms to reach for the hem of her dress and peels it off over her head easily, as the zipper had fallen down quite a while ago. She’s quick to rid herself of her simple beige bra, clawing it off before Matt ever gets a chance to.
They do away with the rest of their clothes in a flurry and she’s back to smiling wide, appraising him, drinking him in, eyes flitting across his unorganized militia of moles like she’s speedreading them. He presses her down into the mattress, on her back.
“We have th’same boobs.”
“Ouch.” Matt makes a funny face that’s like a smile and a frown at the same time.
“No just like, only when I’m laying down, see?” She uses both hands to spread her breasts further apart, flatter.
“I dunno, I think yours get the gold medal.”
“Yeah?” He can see all her teeth when she says it.
“Yeah. Tip top.”
Matt’s done such a good job of biting his tongue about this all night, and this is the thanks he gets? He learned the hard way not to compliment women on their small breasts, not even if he sandwiched it between ardent announcements of how that was his preference, his “type.” It’s hard to stay irritated when faced with Anne’s bared chest, though. Her nipples are flat and light, almost a yellow, not the powder pink color he imagined for them. He draws one into his mouth and reaches down to part her legs.
She’s wet. He realizes nothing has actually been inside yet to prep her, but he’s far too impatient to crook fingers up in there at the moment, so it’s the head of his cock that presses against her entrance next. He doesn’t pause to look in her eyes or sync their breathing or count her down or any of that shit; he just buries his fat flushed face in her tits and pushes his way in. It’s the right move, he supposes, because she instantly coos and twists her legs up to cross her ankles behind his lower back.
When she drags him into another kiss, he doesn't falter at the taste. Takes it like a champ.
It seems the harder he drives into her, the bigger she smiles, until the smile graduates to a bubble of laughter – and while on a bad day he might find this to be mocking, or frustrating, he doesn’t tonight. It’s uniquely alluring, really, the way she’s laughing through the whole thing. She furrows her brow occasionally but never once does she pull one of those agonized pained porno faces most girls did. Matt starts to wonder if they were all faking, just mimicking what they’d seen on a screen. Anne is all gasps and giggles and euphoria.
…Until she isn’t anything at all. Her head lolls to the side and her arms fall from where they were once wreathed around his neck. Matt notices, staring at her sweat-shined eyelids while he jackhammers away. His broken dolly, his little unplugged Annedroid. His pace quickens. Panting like a fucking dog, he licks a hot stripe between her breasts, up her neck, across her cheek.
If a tree falls in the forest and doesn’t remember the swing of the axe, was it ever really standing?
~ ~ ~
The blackout that’s been nipping at Anne’s heels all night is walking calmly by her side now. It drapes its dark cloak around her shoulders like a friend in a storm, but she shrugs it away. A black veil has covered her face with neither notice nor permission, and she claws that off too.
The hotel room pieces itself back together around two naked bodies. Matt’s pinning each of her limbs down with his own. Belly to belly. They’re starfish-on-starfish, she thinks, like a bizarro version of her tandem skydiving instructor. He’s inside of her.
“More. Moremoremore.” Her words are working. Matt’s body jolts on top of her and he pulls back to look at her face, his eyes gone wide, white on all sides of the beady black.
“You can take more?” He tries to drop in, burying his shock just as quickly as it blossomed.
“Yeah.”
“You want me to give you more? You love being stuffed full of this cock, huh?”
“Yeah. Give it. Harder.” Still slurring, and yet she manages to sound more petulant than breathy. Whatever he’s doing is good; it’s giving her spine-tingles, but she wants them to spread down her arms and legs like goosebumps, like lots of dominoes toppling.
“Hold on. Flip. Flip over.” Matt slides out and Anne obliges, rolling onto her stomach and hugging a bunched-up pillow. He slips himself back in easy peasy, but everything feels different at this angle, hypersensitive. His fingertips dig into the pale flesh of her hips as he rocks into her needy cunt a dozen times, trying to find his rhythm.
When he leans down, curled as close as he can get while still fucking her, he whispers low in her ear: “You’re doin’ great. You’re doing so great. You’re incredible, Annie. You should be proud of yourself.”
Anne hums through a wide tight-lipped smile, her eyes only half-open. How sweet.
She can feel his hands roaming far and wide now, groping her ass cheeks, sliding along her abdomen. Matt starts ramming harder and harder until he can hear her squeak or squeal with each thrust. One strong hand snakes around the front of her throat, tipping her head up and back ‘til it almost hurts.
“Question.”
“HM-mMM-mm?” The mid-fuck jostling shakes Anne’s mumble of acknowledgement loose.
“Still think I’m a huge nerd?” he asks while slamming into her from behind.
She forgot she said that, at the reception table. Clearly he hadn’t.
Stringing a word, let alone a sentence, together in the factory assembly line of her mind is impossible. It feels like pounding down the wrong puzzle piece, ocean where a corner of sky should be. She groans and goes limp and limber like one of those little wooden push-puppet novelty toys. He laughs at her and it sounds like a drive-by, three loud shots.
Something stirs inside her. It feels like brainfreeze from the wrong end. Every subsequent plunge into her is accompanied by the slap of skin-on-skin and a deep grunt from Matt. Cracks of lightning paired with their rumbles of thunder. The goosebumps spread and Anne can see them there on her arms, right in front of her. Matt’s hand is still gripping her throat, getting incrementally tighter until it’s enough to put a tunnel of white around her vision. Doesn’t matter, because in the next instant her eyes are rolling back in her head anyway.
Inside her guts, Matt’s hitting zones that have never been hit before. The room is tilting and spinning again and she’s dizzy dizzy diving diving, in accelerated freefall, reaching terminal velocity, then – FWOOMPH! – it's e v e r y t h i n g: the whiplash shock of the chute blooming open and yanking her skyward, the oscillation all through her bones, the drifting back down to the solid earth of Him.
When he notices her orgasm, his hand moves from her neck to between her shoulderblades and he pushes down, crushing her into a smaller shape, angling her hips up more, stuffing himself deeper and deeper until he shudders and spills and crashes and burns in his own way.
~ ~ ~
He’s just fucked her. She’s hanging halfway off the bed, tangled up in the sheets, naked and babbling to the carpet. Something. Whatever it is, it isn’t words. He doesn’t know what happens next. Hey man, it’s not like he does this every day. He expected her to nod off long ago, and stay nodded off, looking as serene as Princess Aurora as he finished in her. This was not the case.
He’s just fucked her. Raw, too. He doesn’t want to think about how many minutes (hours?) of his life he’s spent trying and failing to talk girls out of using condoms. This time he hadn’t failed. Actually, this time he’d barely needed to talk. It doesn’t feel like something to celebrate. It feels like more proof of his treachery. His skin is crawling.
~ ~ ~
You’d think such inebriation would welcome sleep with open arms, but no. Sex has reanimated parts of Anne and left them buzzing. She wants to use Matt’s broad chocolate chip cookie chest as a pillow and tell him about every childhood pet she ever had but there’s an air of awkwardness afoot as they sit side by side in bed. Time to make it worse.
“Did you ever try to kill yourself?”
“…what?”
“You said you took antidepressants. Did you ever try to kill yourself?”
Anne is looking at the lump of her feet under the blanket when she asks, both times, but she can feel Matt staring at her long and hard. He doesn’t answer until he’s turned away to look at his hands in his lap.
“No. Never tried.” Does he tell her that was a heavy question to ask? Does he dare label it “inappropriate?” Does he turn it around with a “how ‘bout you?” as if this is any other benign first date small talk subject? He thinks harder in the stretching silence. Does she want him to kill himself for what he’s just done to her? Is she going to kill herself because of it?
“Good. That’s good.” Does she tell him she thinks about it sometimes? Does she tell him she googled what methods hurt the most and the least, on the clock at her last job? Does she tell him how many inpatient stays she has under her belt?
All these options get swept under the rug in favor of finding the remote. They lean into each other ever so slightly. The TV zaps to life and they both find it easier to fall asleep with a home renovation show playing softly in the background of this unfamiliar domesticity.
~ ~ ~
When she wakes up in the morning, an hour past her checkout time, he’s gone. But the notepad with his phone number is still there.
She holds it to her chest with both hands and smiles.
So this is what being in love feels like.
~ ~ ~
He considered ripping the notepad to shreds on his way out and swallowing the evidence.
He also considered picking up the pen and adding the word “sorry” to the paper, next to his number.
He did neither.