didn’t consider at the time was that the sadness could have been coming from him. Later he apologized for what he called a dark energy that he had brought with him—a depressive state that he couldn’t shake that night. But I thought it was my own. Maybe it was both of ours, and maybe it was what bonded us to each other underneath all of the sexting. I think we were both looking for light, maybe a fake light, maybe a real one.
I said, You have experienced a lot of pain in your life. You are so intuitive. I didn’t tell him that I felt like he could intuit my own historic pain in that moment.
He told me he was getting tired. Would I mind if he slept some? I told him, Of course not, but felt rejected. I realized I hadn’t eaten in many hours. I told him I was going to go out for food and asked if he wanted anything. He said no. I wondered if he was hesitant to eat at sleepover situations because of his digestive issues.
I went to 7-Eleven and bought a thousand calories worth of food: a Golden Grahams bar, a pack of M&M’s, some weird Japanese-looking peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Back at the hotel room, I sat on the bed feeling really cute and pretty. I ate, mindful of him, like I was putting on a show. I told him that he should sleep and that I was going to take the second big bed (there were two).
love (noun)—a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition)
I don’t remember drifting off but I remember waking up at dawn the next morning and brushing my teeth, then getting back into bed, pretending to be asleep. I heard him get up to brush his teeth. I heard him piss. I opened my eyes and watched his gazelle body languidly milling around the room. He had a hard-on in his gray boxer briefs. He asked if he could get in bed with me. I said yes, and then we kissed softly—so much more natural than the night before. Then he kissed down my body. Then he ate my pussy for infinity.
I went to space. I came on his tongue. I said, Want to fuck a little? and we fucked. I said, Kill me with your arrow cock. Then I gave him a very long, slow blow job until he got harder than he had been. He came in my mouth. I swallowed his cum.
We had until noon. We kissed, rubbed against each other. He talked to my pussy. He made out with it. We talked about concerts. That was disappointing. I didn’t want to talk about anything cultural, anything tethered to society. I only wanted to talk about feelings, life in its most primal and essential form. There is something about the blankness of a hotel room that makes you feel like you can do that—that such a thing as primal, essential life exists. There is something about occupying that neutral space with someone you really know nothing about—except the very essential, or the essential as they have painted it, or the essential as you have chosen to perceive it—that makes this seem possible.
When we said goodbye in the hotel lobby, I was aloof behind my sunglasses and under my fur hood (later he would text me a picture of himself in a jacket with a fur hood and sunglasses and say look). From behind my sunglasses and fur hood, I said, We did good. I said it like a pro, like a champ. I was very boys club, very not attached. I guess he liked that, because later he told me that he had to look at a Google map to figure out where he was going next, but he’d hid in a deli next door to the hotel to do it, because he didn’t want to mess up the good ending.
lust (noun)—intense eagerness or enthusiasm (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition)
The second time was at the empty house of a friend in Brooklyn, two months later. I texted him all afternoon from the bathtub, soaking in oils. I said that it felt like a holiday. We texted back and forth screenshots of our favorite sexts from the past seven months, celebrating ourselves.