The Space Between
Short fiction by yours truly
He takes the back of my neck with a wide, hot palm. I’m acutely aware of the rigidity of my body, the childish modesty of my hemline. He is electric, burning. I sit, silent.
If he is cocaine, I am catholicism. He speaks fast, somewhere between anxiety and suave charm, and I listen, lips thin, eyes wide. He touches me, over and over, wolf like for a reaction. If you run, animalism takes over. So I just listen to the ramblings of a fast man in this fast world.
He wants to fuck me. In his mind, I am against the wall, staring at him, a quick fantasy against the middle aged quotidian. But I resist, silent. Listening. Listening to university anecdotes, funeral tales, tall stories of famous ghosts. I might as well be a doll, propped up in public for his heaving ego, something to resist the slow humiliation of money spent alone.
How odd it is, for all my brittle ways, to love him. I love him in my listening, I overflow with words I am not bold enough to say, I ache with the hard sharpness of longing and worship.
But, for all that, I am the girl who didn’t fuck him.
He got bored of me, sterile of sexuality and ripe with desperation, the mystery seeping into disinterest. I am the saint, whore, mother and nobody all in one. I search for the man in the famous cocoon, the boy in the grown up suit and wide wallet. But he wants the mystery, as I want the truth.
And I still feel the wide heat of his hand and the electric of his eyes.
