I wriggle closer to his chest, and drag his muscular arm around my waist, but I’m still not getting the little spoon feeling. I want to melt. But he keeps his shoulders tipped toward the ceiling, the one arm trapped beneath me awkwardly splayed on the mattress. His hand empty. I try again, press my lips to his forearm, reach back to stroke his head. He doesn’t react. An anxious buzz crawls beneath my skin and down my throat. Constricts my chest.
I do not feel good right now.
I allow the unhappy thought to imprint, visualize the words, a wool-itchy sensation in my body. Another thought lands deep in my gut.
He wants me to leave.
The words radiate, a rough-hewn pebble flung into the water, each ripple a sting. His body is glass, a shiny smooth barricade, nothing porous or penetrable, just a slick blank surface where I skated for a moment, the ice too thick to offer a look below.
I liked it when he fucked me up against the huge plate-glass window of his condo, the city lights a jewelry box glittering across the water, the bridge curving away past my palms, pressed hard into the glass. But when I turned to face him, he was looking away, miles down some road in a town where I was not invited.
I didn’t come. And either he didn’t notice, or he didn’t care. If he had wrapped his arms around me afterwards, or murmured Goddamn woman, you’re so sexy, I might have thrown out a touch of need. Gonna hook me up next time? But his solid form is cloaked in clay. Unresponsive.
So I leave.
I wander around his bedroom, find my panties, button my jeans, slide my tank back over my tangled hair. He steps around me and into the bathroom while I buckle the straps of my platform sandals and tug on my jean jacket.
Okay, I say. I’m gonna go.
He emerges from the bathroom and offers a loose hug.
Until next time, he says.
I walk down the corridor to the elevator, unsteady, limbs untethered from my joints, like a doll taken apart for examination and put back together with a careless, absentminded hand.
I do not feel good right now.
The words settle and sink, silty and rough, chafing my skin.
Gliding onto the freeway, and over the graceful expanse of the bridge, I extend myself the right to cry, let the discomfort swirl through my tender pussy, my empty belly, my heavy heart. But no tears come.
Good, I think. Good.
