In a Reflection (Explicit!)

I still want to add one more scene before I am satisfied with this, but...

She’s sprawled out on my bed, chest heaving, legs spread in that most undignified manner that is the most animalistic characteristic of all female humans.  Sweat glistens on her skin –how did I not notice how hot it had gotten until now? - and the collar around her neck is still a little tight.  I loosen that as I crawl up to her level, but I don’t undo the handcuffs around her wrists, or the leash connecting the collar to the bed frame.  Instead I lay down on top of her, skin to skin, our sweat mingling in an uncomfortable layer of moisture between us.  She wraps her legs, the only unbound part of her, around mine, stroking her foot down my calf reassuringly as she rides out the aftermath.  She shivers a bit, and after a few moments shifts uncomfortably; this is when I unlock the handcuffs and take off the collar, letting them hang from the metal frame like decorations.  Her arms follow the example of her legs, fingers running over my shoulders and back gently.

I want to turn my head to see if she’s looking at me, but I know her eyes are closed, so instead I bury my head in her shoulder.  The heat, the sweat, it’s all becoming a little too much, but I love the smell of her after these sessions.  Her brown curls become wet silk against the pillow, spreading out all around us and wrapped up in the blankets – how did she get it down to her waist when the longest I could ever get mine was to my shoulders?- and the sweat pushes the smell of her vanilla lotion off of her skin and into the air.  She smells like sex and sugar cookies, everything forbidden mixed with everything comforting.  I sink into her smell for only a moment longer before rolling off of her.  She continues to lay there, breasts bare to the air and nipples hardening against the cold but chest no longer moving so rapidly.

“You okay?” I ask.  She smiles indulgently at me, and then rolls over long enough to kiss me on the cheek.  Her lips feel sticky against my face, and our hands glue together as one of hers intertwines with mine.  “Everything’s green,” she whispers in her sing-song voice, the common code for BDSM participants, but also our secret code that would mean she was content and fulfilled from the encounter.  Usually green meant everything was fine, yellow that things were getting too intense, red meaning that the ‘bottom’ wanted the encounter to stop immediately.  Sometimes, though, she’d make up her own colors.  “Emerald green,” her sparkling voice whistles in my ear, the sound of glass wind chimes dancing.  “Greener than all the Queen’s jewels.”

I grin, pleased, and kiss her on top of her head.  Her green eyes look up at me, corners wrinkled as she smiles, but then she closes them.  Her fun for the night is over, but mine is just beginning.  As she drifts off to sleep, I gather her close to me, holding her tiny body against mine.  Even with the wetness from sweat and sex between us, I don’t let her go until I too fall asleep.  In the night we rest like this, coming together for a while and then drawing apart, two waves unable to make up their minds whether to travel together or rush away.  I’ll wake up in the morning with her curled up against my side, head tucked against my ribcage, her spine curled almost in a perfect C.  And I might curl into her, gather her up again; but then again, I may have gotten too hot by then, and seek refuge on my side of the bed.

*                                  *                                  *                                  *                                  *

We met as I imagine all lesbian dominants and submissives met; at a Starbucks in the middle of spring.

My ex and I had split the summer before after six years together.  The sex then had been pretty vanilla, too vanilla for her it appeared; how a twenty two year old became more experienced than a twenty six year old was beyond me.  She decided she needed something different, mostly in the form of two or three different affairs with men named things like “Ace” and “Benji”, whose facebook pages showed pictures of them holding their iPhones up to bathroom mirrors with their shirts off.  Not that I looked; I just imagined that’s what those kind of guys were like.  When I found out, I calmly asked her to pack up her things and go home to her mother’s, telling her she didn’t need to bother paying the rent –I would figure out something- and just go.  I cried an hour after she closed the door, just to make sure she didn’t come back.

Sal, short for Sally, which was an unfortunately name in this day and age, had left her dominant when the sex had gotten stale.  There hadn’t been much between them, she said while sipping her chai latte, just a mutual understanding that it was hard to find people open to kink so at least they had each other.  She asked me how long I had been involved with BDSM, and I felt tempted to lie and tell her a few years, I knew all the ropes- bad pun- and all that jazz.  But her green eyes disarmed me, and I admitted that the closest I had ever gotten was the Leather and Lace night at a local club.  She smiled, and said we’d take it slow.

With that and with the blessing of our mutual friends who had set us up on this blind date in the first place, we submerged ourselves in the subculture the rest of the world ignored as hard as it could.  I never knew a sex movement that could be so much about free expression could also be so rigidly ruled, with protocols and commandments just as unbreakable as the shackles being used.  Words and phrases like total power exchange and St. Andrew’s cross and blood play flew through my head like little butterflies; sometimes I could catch them and studying them and understand them, but other concepts were so new and foreign I couldn’t wrap my mental hand around them.  Sal stood like a reassuring stone at my side, merely grinning at my ignorance but not in a cruel way as she held my hand in sections of the bookstore I never knew even existed.  It looked like there was more to being a dominant than merely tying a good knot; anatomy, physiology, where the whip should hit and were it shouldn’t, where it was safe to cut and where it wasn’t and how deep was okay…it was like learning to be a doctor, finding a balance between creating the desired result and not letting too much blood get on the floor.

But I read the books, and we kept it light, moving through the sex in little baby steps as my knowledge grew.  The first time we didn’t do anything extreme; it was plain vanilla lesbian sex in every way, the usual awkward fondling and hormone laden kisses I knew since high school.  Then we moved to light restraints, me holding her or pinning her, then ropes, then maybe my arm around her neck and lightly blocking her airway as my other arm did equally sacrilegious things to her body.  We met once a week, sometimes twice if we could both get away from real life long enough, and she tutored me in things I would blush at if I talked about them in the light of day.  But with a tutor so beautiful, with her full little pink lips stuck in a permanent pout and her fair skin and that little cut above her top lip, how could I have minded the embarrassing lessons?

One day she showed up at my apartment with a gift box, about the size of a book, with a blood red ribbon wrapped around the black box.  I laughed at the dramatics of it, especially the little silver handcuffs attached to the ribbon, their little shackles no bigger in diameter than one of my fingers.  I expected, from the size, another book, but was surprised when I opened it up and pulled out a thin leather collar, the leather nice and soft but the buckle made of new, shining silver.

“Aren’t  I supposed to give this to you?” I heard myself say smoothly, even though inside I was shaken.  Collars were presented by dominants to their submissive as a sign of ownership and control; they could also have the same significance as a ring might in an everyday relationship.  And like rings they came in stages; the first ring started a formal relationship, the second an engagement of sorts, and the third a lifelong commitment, complete with contracts and a demonstration in front of open minded friends.  Those demonstrations could take “fear of commitment” to a whole new level sometimes, as it was quite standard for an EMT crew to be standing nearby when they went on.

But then she smiled that little smile of hers, and was holding up her hair and turning her back to me.  I slipped the collar around her little neck and slid the little prong into a hole that left the collar loose but firm across her unblemished skin.

*                                  *                                  *                                  *                                  *

Dinner with my mother.  Oh the horror.

Maria sat across from me, her blond hair cut short by her cheek bones but fluffed up by hairspray in a way that reminded me of senators’ wives and women twice her age who were trying to look younger.   Forty five, though, looked better on my mother than twenty six looked on me, and like everything she did she carried it with a dignified grace.  Dignified grace complete with a periwinkle blue power suit and a strand a little pearls given to her by her ex-husband- not my father- around her neck.  She would cut her food with her little finger up, cup her wine glass in just the right way, and stare at me from the top of her eyeglasses with just the right amount of loving contempt.  I tried not to fidget in my jeans and blouse, somehow aware than even if these jeans were the nice ones without holes and the blouse was bought at full price instead of clearance, they were still not good enough for Maria.

“How is your job going, honey?” She asked sweetly in her voice, graveled from smoking, which she had renounced when I was a teenager because it was such a dirty habit.  She never called it ‘work’, always my ‘job’, because for Maria job implied temporary and at some point I would come to my senses and get a real career like her, spitting out insurance quotes and telling other people that their money wasn’t good enough.  I never told her that I had made project manager at the little non-profit charity I had worked at since starting college, people’s generous donations now paying a real salary for me as I helped families find housing after theirs burned to the ground or were overrun with toxic molds.  After disasters befell good, honest people, my mother told them all about the money they wouldn’t be eligible for because of all the loopholes they had fallen through when their roofs came down, while I scrambled to find them anything at all they could grab onto.  I made manager about a year ago.

“It’s going well,” I said pleasantly, sliding a piece of roast- how typical- into my mouth so I didn’t have to say more.  At least Maria was a regular drill sergeant about manners, so I could use a full mouth as an excuse not to speak to her.  But after a while, the silence became too oppressive even for me.  “And, I’m seeing someone.”

“Oh?” The little sound from her mouth, the way she set down her folk with a sudden sharpness, the way her icy eyes finally looked up at me and took in the feminine blouse and the little bit of eyeliner I had struggled to put on in the mirror this morning, all of it was telling.  Telling her surprise, her hopeful thought process- please, please let it be a man this time, you’re twenty six for Christ sake, when I was your age you were already born and I was struggling to find a husband rich enough to take care of the two of us, stop this silly ‘lifestyle’ nonsense and settle down-, telling her disdain for my ex and every girlfriend I had brought home since the first one my junior year of high school.  It was the most attention I had gotten from her all night.

“Her name is Sally,” I tried not to choke on my lover’s name as I watched my mother’s shoulders deflate just that little bit.  I was hoping that ‘Sally’ would be better than ‘Sal’, that maybe a womanly girlfriend with long hair who wore make-up and heels and could cook and clean might be more acceptable than some motorcycle riding bull dyke with a buzz cut and who refused to wear a bra- I had only ever brought home one of those, but she had never forgiven me for it.  No such luck though; the lack of a penis was always a deal-breaker for Maria.  “She’s in school to be a teacher, elementary school children,” I said, my words rushed as I tried to gain some ground with my mother but knowing I was losing quickly.  When her eyes went back to her plate, I knew I was defeated.  “She’s really bright,” I added weakly.

“She sounds delightful.”  The fork was picked up again, scooping up a little portion of mashed potatoes.

“Yeah, she is.”  I was surprised how sad my voice sounded, but my mother never noticed.  I slumped a little in my chair, looking across the dining room table at her- long, but not so long as to lose that family feel, she had said when she picked it out of the catalogue- to see if she noticed my dejected look.  She never did.

‘Oh yeah, and I regularly beat her when we have sex.’ The words boiled on my tongue, bouncing around in my throat like little goblins causing mischief.  ‘We use whips and chains, and sometimes I tie her up on my apartment wall and fuck her, and if you could only hear the noises she makes and the way she begs and the way she bites her lip until it bleeds.  And sometimes it’s me who can’t walk when we’re done, because even though she’s the one being fucked, those sweet little noises she makes undo me so much…’

I pick up my own fork again, none of this said.  Sometimes, simply because you love them, you keep things from your parents.  They are content in their own little world, the world where your prince charming will come along someday and you’ll grow out your hair and end up slaving over a stove top, pregnant and bare-footed.  And the hairy-assed plumber that might beat you when he gets too drunk- and not in the pleasurable way of beating someone- will always be better for their little princess than the sweat little school teacher who happens to have a pair of amazing tits.  Sometimes you have to protect your parents, because they gave birth to you and you love them for it, if for that reason alone.

*                                  *                                  *                                  *                                  *

There’s blood on the sheets.  I stare at the little stream of blood running down her thigh and onto the fabric, going from a sharp, smooth line into a blot of messy red.  ‘Where did that come from?’ my mind asks, and I stare dumbly at the pocket knife in my hand.  She’s on her back again, arms chained to the bed frame again, legs spread open unashamed again as her chest heaves, over and over, breaths forced through her wide open mouth as she pants.  My fingers are wrapped tightly around the knife’s handle, the pull out for the corkscrew digging into my palm, as I stare blindly at the blade and the blood and her, and it registers that I am turned on and it’s oh so wrong that I should be- she’s bleeding, for Christ sake- but I have never felt so confused and horny since puberty hit…

I drop the knife onto the blankets, and scramble up, grabbing the key to the handcuffs with shaking hands and unlocking her.  I catch sight of her confused expression right before I scoot over to the side of the bed, staring at my trembling hands as I feel my body begin to shake.  There’s the tiniest brush stroke of red on the inside of my pointer finger, probably from dropping the knife, and I run my hands frantically over my bare legs in an attempt to wipe it off.  I’m not sure if I do though; I am too afraid to look at my hands and see if they’re stained.

“Babe?” comes her sing-song voice, and I feel the bed move as she comes up behind me, one leg to each side as her hands settle on my shoulder.  This makes it worse, because out of the corner of my eye I can see the mark on her leg, like a line drawn in the sand and then lined with plastics that never came from nature and had no right to be there.  I screw my eyes shut, pushing my palms into them as if to push the image back into my head and out the other side, but it only leave little white bubbles on the insides of my eyelids.  I feel her fingers stroking my hair, her voice whispering ‘it’s okay, everything’s green, what’s the matter?’ in a voice half way between reassuring and panicked.  And then I’m crying, and turning around and holding her desperately, sobbing into her breast as she continued to pet my head and pull the blankets around us.  There’s a heavy ‘thunk’ as the pocket knife falls off the edge of the bed and hits the wood floors.

The next morning, we sit at my kitchen counter, a coffee cup each as we sip our daily caffeine and try to figure out where to start.  She’s brushed out her long hair and pulled on the old sweats she kept in my closet, her little cherub face bunched up in an expression of contemplation.  She asks me the usual awkward questions- are you okay, did I do something wrong, what happened last night- but I don’t have any answers for her, so I stay quiet.  I feel like a petulant child, sitting there sulking into my coffee and refusing to provide anything beyond a confirming grunt or denying huff.  After a while her shoulders slump, and for the first time I feel a little annoyance leak over from her side of the counter to mine.  I just try to sink further into the wood stool I’m balanced upon, wishing I had a hood to pull over my head.

“Look, stuff like this can’t happen.”  It’s the worst thing she can say, and she realizes it the moment she says it, but the words can’t be grabbed out of the air and forced back down her throat.  Still, I know what she means.  We can’t afford for me to freak out in the middle of sex, for me to be unstable.  What we have is too different, too bizarre, too freakish and dangerous and deranged.  I have to be in control, I have to be comfortable with myself; in other words, I can’t be in love with her and suffer the normal human self-consciousness, at least not while there’s a blade in my hand and she can’t defend herself.

“We both have to be comfortable with this,” she says, her voice a little less sharp and more soothing.  She may not be able to pull the earlier words out of the air, but she can try to paint over them with other ones.  “I don’t want you to do anything you can’t handle.  We can always leave the other stuff-” she says other stuff with an unneeded amount of emphasis- “for when you feel up to it.”

I still don’t say anything.  The steam has stopped rising from my coffee and I absent-mindedly wonder how much long I have to drink it until it gets cold.  I can still feel the tenseness in her shoulders, the annoyance and the anger and the sadness and the helplessly rolling off of her in waves.  I wonder what I send to her, what little motions in my fidgeting fingers or tenseness of my legs braced against the chair say.  I wonder if she’ll leave, if she’ll pack up her books and her old PJs and the little strainer she brought over since I didn’t have one, and she’ll disappear while I’m at work.  I wonder if she go back to her apartment down by the university, she’ll plop her bag down on the couch and tell her roommate she’s home FOR GOOD this time, and she’ll dive into her school work so she can ignore her phone vibrating as I desperately call.  I wonder what I’ll feel when she doesn’t pick up, if I’ll cry, or if I will wait again like I did before until I was sure she wasn’t going to show up at the door or return my call.

But then she surprises me.  Even with the frustration and the hurt, her hand leaves her coffee cup and reaches over to mine, pulling my fingers away from the cooling porcelain and into hers.  And she holds my hand, intertwining her fingers in mind as our sweaty palms rub together, and sips her drink while staring at the microwave.  I stare with her, seeing our reflection in the black plastic, and try not to cry again.

Feeling the pain,

Eve

And You May Die

Half fiction, half not...

I walk out of her back door into the snow. Sometime during the night the heavens let lose their wails in the form of frozen water, raining down thick clumps of white onto the street. It wasn’t the first snow of the season, in fact it was one of many, but it covered over the parts that had gone gray from car exhaust. When I walk outside, it’s like being hit in the face and my hat does little to protect me. It goes from warm to bone chilling, dark to bright white, in a matter of seconds. Everything is pristine, clean, new, unlike the dirty linoleum floors and dust bunny sanctuary I just came from. It’s like dying, opening your eyes not too reality but to some cold, white wonderland.
I wait on the back porch as she follows me out and locks the door. I don’t look at her, but at this point we are so in sync I can feel her moving. She lifts the edge of her long leather coat, pulling on the chain at her waist that leads to her keys, and then flips through the countless number to find the right one. She’s a medieval dungeon master, locking away her house and all the secrets of the things we did in it. Locking away last night’s date, the food, the smells, the sex. Soon as I start down the street we’ll be out of sync again, and everything will be locked away for only her to see until the next time I come.
If I come again.
I shift my backpack from one shoulder to another as I watch an adventurous squirrel dart around in the snow. The backpack is not perceivably light, weighted down by books and notebooks and my old beat-up laptop, but I imagine that it is lighter. It is one book short, after all; a skinny little play written between yellow covers, but a book all the same. Its absence makes my heart ache in a way it has no right to.
It was our second date when she gave me the first book. We hadn’t been sleeping together yet, but the tension was thick in the air like the heat was turned up too high. It was mid-October; we had stopped for Indian food that was too spicy for me but too mild for her, followed by drinks at the bar next door. She had a beer and water; I had two glasses of wine. I drove her back to her place because at the time I had a car, and she came out with a tiny white book with frayed edges. Her nickname was on a piece of green tape on the back cover, and the names of the plays on the front were just as foreign to me. But I read the little book that night, and then again, and then again.
And our dates continued. We would still maintain the illusion of getting dinner at a restaurant, or ordering pizza, or going to see a movie. But eventually we ended back at her little two bedroom house, avoiding her roommate (or he avoided us, I am not quite sure which), and into her bedroom. She wanted to see my tattoo, so I had to take my shirt off. I wanted to see the scars from her injured shoulder, so she took hers off. She wore no bra because her nipples were pierced, and while I had always loved women, her body was as different to me as the books she gave me. Unshaved, strong, muscular, like a man’s, but not a man’s at the same time. With the first layer of clothes off, the rest were soon to follow, and we became lovers. By then my car was gone, so there was no excuse for me not to spend the night
The mornings after I would inevitably have to leave, either for school or work, and she had to pack up for work. We didn’t speak of the fact she had a girlfriend already, or what I was to her, although sometimes I would politely ask after the other girl and try not to choke on the jealousy as my lover smiled so sweetly at the thought of her. Some mornings we would wake up early enough to explore each other in the sunlight, or at least I would pretend I had the luxury to catch a later bus so I could touch her. But we always ended up at the back porch, her locking the door and then turning to give me a kiss somewhere between indifferent and passionate, and I would walk toward campus while she drove away, a new book in my backpack.
But not this time. She hadn’t given me a new book this time.
I fought the bitterness that began to surface, the sorrow and anger that were battling it out to see who could climb up my throat the fastest. Instead I focused on the snow, perfect white until it reached the street where cars had already turned it black. The words lesbian, poly-amourous, girlfriend, lover, mistress, and casual sex all boiled on my tongue like food that was too hot, burning my mouth with their exotic flavors. What happened to the simple words, like love, commitment, marriage, kids, family, trust? But those words belonged to straight couples, where things were clear-cut, where you had one lover for your whole life until a second lover tore everything to shreds, a world I no longer could claim membership to. And I cursed the heavens, because at some point to be lesbian meant to be the lover of a girl with a girlfriend, and having to clamp down on your jealousy like it was a bad thing and pretended you were fine with the girl you were in love with sleeping with someone else. Somewhere, the sexual revolution and keeping an open mind took a wrong turn.
“Oh shit,” I heard her mumble in her deep voice, and I took a moment to listen to the keys jingle as I turned to her and froze my face in the mask of pleasant confusion. The expectation between us, the unwritten rule, did not allow for me to burn, so I pretended I was ice and snow as I looked up at her. Already her cheeks were glowing red from the cold, her purple hair sticking up from the wind. “I forgot something, stay here.”
“Yup,” I heard myself reply, cheerfully. As she darted back inside, I let my eyes wander again. She’s used to my lack of attention though, and is graceful enough not to acknowledge it when I am trying to hide my feelings from her. She knew when I got distracted it was when I’m trying not to think of her, trying not to love her, but at least she didn’t point it out. It almost made it worse. I jumped when I heard her come out again, and turned back to watch the muscles in her shoulders move as she locked the door.
But then she turns around, and shoves a little black book with red letters on the front into my hands. We have our kiss that is somewhere between indifferent and passionate, and she drives off as I walk to school, crying.
* * * * *
We met on an online dating site. Welcome to the 21st century.
My ex and I had split six months before, after nearly five years together. Perhaps split, though, was not the right word; I wish I could say the night I found out she was cheating stood out to me as a defining point in my life, but quite honestly between the tears and the emotions and the hurt, it became a black spot in my memory. I spent a few months being dragged from gay bar to gay bar by my closest friends, who hadn’t yet realized that I wasn’t going to jump in the sack with some stranger in order to feel better. After a while the martinis became too sweet, the bass too loud; I started burying myself in work and school so I would have an excuse not to tag along. But that didn’t make life any less lonely; I turned to dating sites because at least then I could emphasize my loneliness from the comfort of my own home.
I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I read her profile. Her picture was her holding a gun pointed at the screen, her glasses and purple hair just out of focus in the background. I had always had a weakness for glasses, and she was no exception. As I read on I became more and more intrigued. 17 piercings in one ear alone. Makes chain mail. Works as a software designer, but does theater lighting as a side project. Loves metal music, but used to lead a swing band. Gay. Five feet seven, plays soccer competitively. Did I mention the glasses? The dating site offered stupid little tests, and under her tab were a bunch that pointed to geeky sci-fi shows and obscure books.
Only one flaw. Listed not as “single” but “available”.
I knew in my head what that meant. I knew all about poly lifestyle, could justify it in my head but spoke venomously against it whenever asked. Dating two or more people, or having a “primary” partner but sleeping with strangers. Why not just stay single and be friends with benefits with your intended partner? And how could you not call someone your girlfriend and then get ridiculously jealous as she gave herself to someone else? Ridiculous, I would say. Casual sex happens, it’s fine, a movement between two consenting adults; I was not such a prude as to argue that. But poly-amorous love? Bah, impossible. My ex had seen to it that I found the idea of sharing my partner with another woman more detestable than any other weird or disturbing fetish. I could never date poly, as it was termed.
But I sent her a message, a bull-shit conversation starter about onions and mushrooms on pizza and asking about soccer. A week later she wrote me back.
* * * * *
She never wrote back as often as I did, so it was a game for me to decide when it was appropriate to reply to her. Was the day I saw the little red mail icon too soon; how about the day after, or the day after that? How much interest did I show in her life, how many questions did I ask and how personal could they be? How was I supposed to respond when she gave that little smile of hers while talking about her girlfriend, or when her voice got tight in her throat about mentioning her deceased father? What topics were okay? Where did I have to draw the line so as to keep my place as the casual sex partner, the maybe-a-friend if I was lucky, and not overstep my boundaries?
The books made it more difficult. The books meant that our encounters couldn’t just end. I couldn’t just get a girlfriend, slip into a monogamous relationship and cut off contact with her. I couldn’t decide to move on, to start looking again for someone to share my life with exclusively, and simply type up some pathetic reason for not meeting with her anymore. No, I had to keep seeing her, if only to give her books back. After all, these were plays with lighting notes scribbled on the margins, or novels with random lines highlighted in classic yellow; these were books from precious college years, these weren’t books she could just replace. These had meaning, power beyond the already overwhelming strength of written word. These were precious, sacred in a way; I had to fight the urge to cleanse my hands just to touch them, so keeping them was pure blasphemy.
One night I was sitting on her bed, absent-mindedly tracing the patterns on her comforter, as she wandered around her living room with her cell phone glued to one ear. She was talking to her still living grandmother about plans for the New Year, me only half listening and missing the other half thanks to her closed door. Her comforter was soft, stitched together from all the different production shirts from her university theater, and I curled up into a ball on the top of it, letting the tee-shirt material stroke the side of my face. Across from me was her beat-up dresser, the top of it covered in an indiscernible mass of papers, toys, and other small objects. Nailed to her wall was the only decoration in the entire room, and it simply a single sheet of paper, yellowed to look old. “The World Could End Tomorrow and You May Die” was typed up on it, made to look like a newspaper headline.
Her room was like the books she gave me, and together they told me more about her than my questions would ever get me or she would ever grant me. At first glance the bedroom was a mess, the whole room having this feeling like it was beaten into submission by the piles of dust, and books, and clothes and who-the-hell-knows-what-else. Then you noticed the obvious; the four book shelves crammed into a small space they had no business fitting themselves into, the giant metal framed bed, the beat-up dresser, the aged cardboard box that sat away from all the mess like it was too good for everything else in the room. Then more detail; there were D-rings welded onto one of the bookshelves, another was caving under the weight of the books on it, the comforter with the strange names on it and the hand-drawn designs, the closet door that was always half open because it was always too full to close. And then the details had details; the sign proclaiming the end of the world was too small to have come from an actual newspaper, there was a section on the book shelves that was only children’s books, the scratch marks on the floor from the bed shifting.
And like the books, I understood some of the finer points but not all of them. The cardboard box held either legos or her father’s broken pottery, and she was too scared to open it to see which. The too big furniture was from when she moved from the larger bedroom in the house to the smaller one, not because of the roommate but because of her charming ex-girlfriend, who ended up moving out only a month after. The dust because she only came home to sleep, and once in a while to see me, but was otherwise out in the world working or playing soccer or in the bed of another woman who wasn’t her girlfriend either. These things I could piece together, and I wondered what other reader knew what other details.
After a while though, my hand had stopped moving and I was just curled up. This was how she found me, when I was so busy studying the details with half-open eyes that I didn’t realize her voice had gone quiet. She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, and I must have heard that, but I think I was too distracted and didn’t understand what it meant. But I did feel the bed dip under her weight, and I jumped a little and looked up at her.
“You should have told me if you were feeling sick again.” I hated how her voice could sound so accusatory sometimes, especially when she was doing something so sweet as to push my bangs away from my face. Her eyes behind her glasses were a murky brown, somewhere between amber and green, but I thought they were stunning even if they sort of looked like dirty water. She looked concerned. I took a moment, feeling out my body; I did feel dizzy, slightly feverish. I wondered how much of that was her.
“You were talking with grandma,” I heard myself say. Her grandmother, not mine. Although sometimes I called my lover “grandma”, because it was easy to tease her about the difference in our ages, and I often couldn’t think of anything wittier to tease her about. “Grandma comes first.”
She made a sound in the back of her throat, and physically lifted me up. She was about eight inches taller than me, and a great deal more muscle from all that soccer practice, whereas I lived the student life and it was only stress keeping me thin instead of an active lifestyle. A few seconds later, and I was lying against her chest as she rested against the headboard, bracing her neck against the wider metal pole that ran across it. One of my ears was pressing on the collar of her shirt, half of it sticking to her skin; I could hear her heart beat, a steady and deep bass line from beneath her rib cage.
“I’m sorry.” She hated it when I apologized, but I always did it anyway. For a moment I wondered if her girlfriend got to lie like this, wrapped up in the tee-shirt comforter and strong arms, listening to a heart-beat song that was older than time but still only twenty-nine years old. But I guess I knew the girlfriend did; the girlfriend got everything I got plus more, more than I could imagine because I already felt like what I got was beyond what I was entitled to. “I’m fine, really.”
“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t expect her to be. “When was the last time you had dialysis?”
I pressed my lips together tightly and went silent, trying to think. When was the last time I had gone to my doctors? I was supposed to go weekly, but there was school, work, seeing her…more than a month ago, at least. “Uh…maybe last week?”
She made a little snorting noise through her nose, and her arms tightened. My ear was now completely against her skin, sticking to it, and I hoped my earring wasn’t cutting her. But I didn’t move, I stayed still in her arm, listening to the thump-thump-thump that pushed life through her body. After a while she shifted us so that she was lying down as well, but my ear remained pressed to her chest, glued there. I struggled against sleep, not wanting to waste our alone time, but I could only pout when I felt the little spasms go through her body that meant she was sinking into sleep herself. So I listened to her heart slow, my own battle quickly being lost as I felt my eyes droop closed.
“The world may end tomorrow, and you may die…” my mind whispered. I was in that half-awake, half-asleep world where thoughts became messy and disconnected. “Which is all well and good, because you could be dead tomorrow anyway.”
* * * * *
Another morning. Spring has come, and the ground outside her back door is a mess of mud and grass that hasn’t made up its mind whether it wants to be brown or turn green. There are more squirrels now, darting around like lunatics, shaking water from the trees and power lines onto the unsuspecting people below. The neighborhood wakens around this time, students off to class, new families off to day cares, actual adults off to work. There’s a fence and a line of hedges protecting us from everyone’s view, but from the raised porch I can see them going. She’s locking the door behind us.
It’s one of those rare days where I don’t have work until late, and no classes beckon me toward the campus. But rather than take the time to spend more time with her, she has an actual, honest to goodness, nine-to-five job that cuts our date short. And it’s a Monday, meaning she actually has to be to work on time for the weekly meeting. I feel bad when our dates come up on Sunday, knowing she won’t get much sleep before that early meeting, but sometimes it’s the only night I can get. Monday and Thursday nights are Soccer, Tuesday is a night with friends, Wednesday goes to her girlfriend, Friday and Saturday spent in bars hunting for a warm bed. So I get Sundays, every other week. I secretly wonder what it means that I see her half as much as her girlfriend, but all the other girls only see her for a night, maybe two if they’re super cute.
It’s nice out, but I’m still wearing a coat and it causes my purse to keep sliding off my shoulder. In my coat pocket I can hear a piece of paper rustling, and I smile when I remember what it is. I walk toward the edge of the porch as she messes with the door, bracing my hands against the wooden railing and breathing in spring. Kidney function within normal range, liver performance optimal. Congratulations, the letter says. You are going to live. Keep exercising, maintain a good diet, remember to brush your teeth and listen to your mother, blah blah blah, and you will live, the letter says. As I watch the squirrels, I feel her come up behind me, bracing her hands on the railing beside mine as she kisses the top of my head and leans into me. I smile wider.
“So what are you going to do with your free time?” She asks, teasingly. She still has her leather coat on, and it makes a funny noise as she moves her hands and wraps her arms around her. I sink into the feeling, knowing her girlfriend’s birthday is next week so it might be a while before I see her again. Part of me is disappointed; another part is too happy. “Drink coffee where that cute barista works?”
“Ah, I think she might actually be straight. I’m totally heartbroken,” I say, mockingly. Contrary to popular belief, it could be hard to tell who was lesbian and who wasn’t; gay-dar was a myth. So was recruiting, although that never stopped us from trying. “However, there is this one at the book store on State…”
I feel her laugh before I even hear it, and release my hold on the railing so I can lean back against her, putting my hands on her arms. She’s warm, and I’m starting to sweat, but I don’t move. At this rate she’s going to be late to work, but I don’t want to let her go. “So…” she whispers into my ear, “if you don’t get anywhere with the book-keeper, would you maybe want to catch dinner with me and Gina on Wednesday?”
Gina. The girlfriend. I don’t think I go still, but I must have because her arms tighten. I can’t imagine she’s nervous, but I know I am. Images go racing through my head; the few pictures I had seen of Gina, scenarios playing out where she hates me or- even worse- where she doesn’t, kissing her, hitting her, her hitting me, yelling, fighting, and- oh please no- even sex. What if I ended up having a threesome with my lover and her girlfriend? How horrible would that be? But she’s waiting for my answer, and for once I can feel that she might be kind of nervous to see how I am going to respond.
“Sure, that would be great.” I turn in her arms, and kiss her lightly. All bubbles, all smiles; my eyes are slightly distracted, but I’m not ice this time. Nor am I burning. “But hey, I got something for you!”
She lets me go so I can dig around in my purse. It takes a moment- I am always so messy- until I pull out a small paperback. She takes it from me, looking over it in curiosity; the binding is white with big bold black letters, and there’s a piece of blue tape on the back with a name scribbled across it. I take her hand and we head toward the car, and I kiss her at the driver’s side in a way that’s somewhere between passionate and comfortable. We finalize our plans for Wednesday, she kisses me this time, and drives off. I walk toward campus, secretly pleased my purse is a little lighter because one of my favorite books is sitting on her passenger seat between her coat and her lunch bag.

Somewhere between ice and fire,
Eve