Fiction (III)

We fucked something like three times before I realized that I wanted him too much. I could tell because I started craving his stories, too, not just the rest of him.

I tried to be diplomatic, socially acceptable, to coax the stories out on their own. I asked questions, played games, but they wouldn't come. So one day (because it was the only way, really), hair in my eyes, I looked up and told him: I wanted his narrative, god, his anecdotes, oh, fuck, his memory-molded past, god, yes, yes. He knew I'd give him anything in exchange. I would've given him money, but money was easy. You could pick it up on a street corner, rumpled and gutter-stained and covered in other people's fingerprints. He didn't want my money. He wanted something tender, something soft to sink his teeth into. He wanted me.

So now, sometimes, he calls me over. And after a few hours, I rub the carpet marks out of my knees, sit at the foot of his bed and listen attentively to things I do not understand. Absentees and stand-ins and fights and scars and love and guns and girls who lie. But I know enough about his anger to follow along.

"He talks to you?" my roommate asks when I come home bruised and sore, because that's what I told her in a moment of weakness. Tell her you're having maniacal sex; tell her he's beating you up. Not that you're whoring yourself for his stories. But I was tired. "That's it?"

"He talks to me," I say again, twisting my head from side to side, examining the damage done to my neck.

"I mean...well, shit, is it good?"

Catching my eyes in the mirror, I hesitate. I do not understand how so much can live inside one person. I don't have the space. I stop eating, breathe less, just to give him more room to fill me up, a better canvas upon which to transpose. And I want more, more, all of it, while he wants only my real pieces. If he were to ask me why (he never does), I would tell him about my life, my unchanging life, my tiny life in a nightmare box. I would tell him how I feel, sad, missing, like the gap left behind on a coat when a button has fallen off. But he never asks, so I never speak. I suck the stories out of him, and it hurts, because words don't just disappear. Real words, true words, his words, they hit your ears and stick. They burrow into your chest. He is inside me, and I want him there. It hurts, but I am hungry for his pain.

So, "yes," I tell her. "Yes, it's good."