I sat back and pulled him onto the floor, onto me, turning him on my dick so that he lay full on top of me, unsnapped his arms into a new position and snapped them back again so they were over his head, arms straight. He lay naked and wet, me underneath him in my T-shirt and jeans still, my fly open, and I thrust up into him. He was groaning now, his hard dick bobbing on his stomach as I shook him. I bent my knees, forcing him into place so his legs fell out to the side in a V. His head tipped back beside mine and he reached for me to kiss him and I spat again, this time not caring if I hit his mouth, and it ran wet down our faces so he could slide his mouth over to mine as I ground into him and he ground back.
I made him cum with me inside him, which he hated after he’d cum. And so I pulled out and put him over my knee, his cum spreading down my jeans leg. I spanked him, and when I started to get bored I pushed him over onto the bed and stared down at him. He stared back, waiting for more. I shucked off the rubber and beat off over him like that, letting it splash down his leg when I came again.
I wondered if he’d ever let me do this again. When I had sex with people I didn’t know, I became someone I only met when I had sex with strangers. I found that the people I met like this often loved it but hated me for doing it, for knowing it about them afterward, and it wasn’t always true there’d be a next time. Even if it had been amazing, maybe especially so. There was the rich shame and the defiant pleasure, and it wasn’t ever clear which would win.
The spell was off. I bent down, gave him one last short kiss, but I could tell we both were done. By then it was just a little more than boys done wrestling. I didn’t want to cuddle him, and I felt the need to sleep alone. It had to be a little ugly like this, as what we’d done was more intimate than if we’d held each other all night. I felt exposed, more naked than naked. I was about to ask if he’d mind sleeping in the office when he said, “Do you mind if I sleep in here?”
“I was just going to ask you to,” I said. We smiled at each other in recognition.
Whatever we were to each other, it was mutual from start to finish. We’d been at this for four hours. I said good night and went across the apartment to my bed.
* * *
The next morning I went in to find him awake. I sat down on the bed. He seemed gently friendly. He’d been reading something.
We went to Starbucks, had coffee, talked a bit. He was meeting friends to continue drinking, asked me to maybe come along. “No,” I said.
“I get so crazy,” he said. “The first time I did that, I went home with some guy who had me in a sling.”
“Do you like it?” I said. I wondered if I should get a sling.
“I do,” he said. “But I don’t let myself, most of the time. None of my friends know me like this. I freak out. I can’t admit it or something. I run away.”
It was my second time tying someone up, I admitted, and I want to do it again.
The Starbucks we were at was in a corporate center in Koreatown. We sat outside, the traffic on Wilshire on our right, the corporate park in front of us. It was like we’d wandered onto the set of Office Space or something and made what he was saying more surreal, like the sunlight hitting his blue eyes.
I knew we would probably try to have sex again, as it had been that good, and that we also probably wouldn’t. When someone says, I freak out and run away, what they are saying is, I am freaking out and about to run away. Life is easier when you take people at their word.
Also, it’s good to be wary of people who are afraid of what they desire.
“See you later,” I said.
* * *
I went in to do the sheets. He had left his pot pipe and an empty cigarette box. As I took the sheets off the futon, I noticed the stains from the lube and cum. I saw broken wood strings hanging down from under the couch’s front edge.
We’d broken the two-by-four that ran the length of the frame.
It became part of my legend with my roommates. The Bed Breaker. I would laugh when they mentioned it, but images of that night strobed through my head. For weeks after, I’d be somewhere and see the blue silk silhouette of him, bound and heaving, hard, sobbing with pleasure.
I sent him an email, he sent one back, we even ran into each other at the gym. It was hard to speak. Speaking was maybe the problem. We were like prisoners who’d used each other to break out, and now that we were in the wide world, there wasn’t anything more to say to each other. I knew who I was now, or what I was. I suspected he did, too.
And when I replaced the futon, I got a stronger one, just in case.
Trust
by Larissa Pham
It wasn’t that he left, she says when recounting the story, long after he did leave the city. It was that she didn’t think he would come back. When she tells it, she laughs, putting her hand in her hair. It just happened! It is funny now.
* * *
Bristol, Vermont. Summer—the flies biting. Vermont is named for its green mountains, the man tells her. To her, they look like sleeping animals with soft pelts. With the windows of the rental car down, it smells like cows, so they roll them up. The light has a weight to it. She squints against the sun. They have come to the mountains to get away from the city, where life feels unbearable. She has just dyed her hair blond and it is parched and fine, like straw. Too yellow, also like straw. In the photographs he will develop later, her profile is like a smear of gold on the print, in front of the green mountains, in front of the hazy blue sky. After she dyes it this one time, she won’t do it again. But that is far from now.
And the space in the mountains, at first, is dazzling. All this new ground. They love driving. They love feeling reborn. They love speeding on the country roads, passing cars by crossing the yellow meridian and zooming back into place. They love listening to the radio and even the static between the stations. They love especially knowing that they are not in New York. Now everyone is unhappy except for them. While the man drives, she reads him the names of wildflowers: baneberry, columbine, spikenard, jack-in-the-pulpit, milkweed, two kinds of asters, marsh marigold, harebell, blue cohoosh, all flowers she would not know if she has seen. His hand rests loosely on her thigh.
* * *
All kinds of colors are running through her head while he drives. Colors of plants and flowers. Colors she can name and not name. The weekend has the palette of a fantasy. She loves to daydream; she thinks she has the face for it—a small pointed chin, deep-set brown eyes above an ordinary nose and a sad mouth. Acne on her chin, thin eyebrows. It’s fun, like right now, to imagine herself as a character in a book, directed by some unseen narrative. Letting her agency fall away, her hands empty and limp. In the heat of the sun, she is thinking about how in love she is, about how its intensity seems to make all the colors of the world porous and bright, like tube watercolors. The mound of her pelvis, fat and tender, pulses from the sex they had the night prior. She wishes she had more words for color, more words to describe how everything feels. She tests them out, like picking crayons from a box: Russet. Salmon. Periwinkle. Oxblood.
It’s too bad that English doesn’t have very many words for color, she says.
Then you read Virginia Woolf and you realize just how many colors there are, he says.
But they’re mostly flowers, she argues. If they’re not flowers, they’re referents, all words that you can only believe in if you’ve seen them.
She considers: Violet. Rose. Forget-me-nots, which are also called bluets. Sally Seton’s cut blossoms floating in a bowl of water.
Where else would words for color come from? he asks reasonably. He has a long, handsome face, hazel eyes, closely cropped dark hair. She likes to look at him, but not for too long. Things you can’t see? he says.
Red is a word for a color that isn’t a word for anything else, she says.
He lifts his hand from her leg—this panics her, the loss. Then he places it back, squeezes the meat of her, slides his fingers along the inside of her thigh. That’s true, he says.
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* * *
He is twenty-nine. A writer. She’s twenty-two. Newly graduated from art school. Their birthdays are a week apart, which she dislikes because it means they have the same horoscope. She doesn’t like to think of them up against the same challenges posed by the movements of the planets, or that if she uses a loophole of logic to perform some kind of practical magic on her own future, she categorically has to use it on both of theirs. The idea of their fates being so close together, like two filmy pieces of trash rubbing against each other in a bin, makes her feel exposed. When he asks, she reads his fiction. But she doesn’t think he’s talented—she finds his prose hackneyed, his style overly masculine. His criticism is weak, too: where she would push forward, he simply gives up. Because she wants to love him, she doesn’t tell him.
Because to tell him the truth would be to endanger the possibility of being loved by him, and all she wants is to be loved totally, without reason or question or sacrifice. Love is her hands above her head. Love is a riding crop, a whip, a knotted red rope—all things that force her to relinquish the control with which she tightly grips the world. Because he is willing to dominate her, she is willing to try to love him.
* * *
They met just two months before this trip. They were at a poetry reading in her neighborhood. He saw her from across the room and walked up to her and said hello. Had she been familiar with who was reading tonight?
Then they were drinking whiskey in the dark. Then they were in her apartment.
Next to the window, through which she could see the tiny new buds dripping in the mimosa trees, he bent her over, her body folded in half, arm twisted over her back. It felt good. She liked the pressure of his hand on her wrist, his hard cock, which was just like any other hard cock. She didn’t have to think about anything. The second time they fucked, he came inside her and she thought, at least she had an IUD.
Did you know you came inside me? she asked, wiping off her leg.
I did. I’m sorry. I got so excited.
She wasn’t as mad at him as she expected to be. For a violation, it didn’t feel like much of a violation. Instead, they lay in bed and compared tattoos. He was covered in a menagerie: a whale skeleton on the back of his left arm, a rabbit on his bicep, a nautilus shell on his thigh, trailing tentacles. When she asked him what each tattoo meant, he didn’t have any explanation. Well. This one was from some Friday the thirteenth, years ago, a crow’s foot on his elbow. She touched it with thumb and forefinger, trying to feel the raised edges of the ink underneath the skin.
That one’s my favorite, he said. But to her, it still seemed so arbitrary.
Up ahead on the road is a sign for an organic fruit-and-vegetable farm. Do you want to stop in? he asks, slowing down. Yes, she says, let’s take a look. They pull into the parking lot. When she hops out of the car, a cloud of dust rises around her sandaled feet.
It’s cool and beautiful inside. Goose bumps prickle up her thighs and arms. She thinks, bounty. She thinks, plenty. Simple words, but being in the country makes her feel simple. She imagines brushing the dirt away from a clump of roots, recalls how fine the threads can get—greenish white, haloed with earth. The market has purple-and-white-striped runner beans, hand-folded ravioli filled with soft cheese from the goats bleating next door. Nubbly heads of dinosaur kale, the long leaves dark, with pale stems, and peaches, and cherries, and soft stone fruits arranged in neat rows. She thought they’d shop together, but he wanders alone through the store, and surreptitiously, she takes a picture of him with her phone. His tattooed forearms flexing over the bins. She always takes photographs of him looking away, or down. She’s worried she will see one expression in person, but another expression in the picture.
* * *
While booking the reservation for the car, a week before the trip, he had texted her and asked jokingly:
Will we hate each other by the end of this?
Of course not! she wrote back. Do you think so?
No, he typed.
Why would you say something like that?
He’d upset her. Sorry, he typed. I was just joking.
Well, now I’m nervous, she wrote back.
And he was nervous, too. He is still nervous. She’s too young to rent a car; that’s why he had to book it. He doesn’t like knowing this about her; it makes him feel uneasy, like a predator. But there’s no way that he could unknow it, her youth, her porousness—there’s no way to go back to the time before they met. Sometimes, when he is with her, he wonders what he’s doing, if there is somewhere else he should be.
We’ll be fine, he wrote. I’m looking forward to a weekend away with you.
The car is red, a little red Kia. When he picked it up, he laughed out loud; it was like a toy, and so improbably colored. But he took it for a joyride anyway, driving the length of Eastern Parkway with the windows down, all the way to the cemetery in Bushwick, where he’d never been. It was amazing how good it felt, the wind in his hair, the radio on. For a moment—for many moments—all he wanted to do was to keep going, to drive into Queens, into Long Island, to drive all the way until he reached the very tip of the land, where the map ended in the sound and there was no road, only horizon. In this vision, he is alone. He parked the car and walked among the gravestones, his fingers worrying at the key fob in his pocket. Then he got back in the little red sedan and turned around.
She was waiting for him outside when he pulled up to her apartment. He could sense it, her pure and searching need. Her hair shone in the sun. He leaned out the window.
You came! she said.
* * *
In the farmstand on the side of the road, he feels suddenly lost. It was his idea to leave town, to find a new place to be together in. He’s dreamt of this often, of starting over. He knows there’s control in making decisions.
Under his hands, the peaches are soft and ripe—some of them break skin at a touch, the flesh slippery underneath, wet and inside-looking. He wants to buy some, to bring them back to the girl, to slice them into wedges and place them on her stomach under the soft light of what he imagines will be their cabin, but the more he touches them, feeling for rot, the more they bruise under his hands. He picks up a brown paper bag of cherries instead, filling it to the brim. They’ll eat them in the car for the rest of the drive, spitting the pits out the windows.
But for now, he wants to try this. Here is a project, the project of becoming close to someone. At the register, he pulls her close to him, holding tight the firm swell of her body, feeling the elastic of her panties under his hand.
* * *
She takes pictures on her phone and she takes pictures with their plastic disposable camera. The ones on her phone are just for her—for her to scroll through later, in bed, when the man is asleep and dreaming. The ones on film are an attempt at a different kind of architecture. The two of them trying to forge some kind of relationship, making an album of moments together. Every frame, she thinks, fixes them in time.
As he’s paying, he slides one hand into her back pocket, possessively, and something leaps up inside her at his touch. She feels desired and chosen. Maybe she could follow him anywhere. Maybe it could be nice to do so. To say yes to everything, to fold her future into his future. Years from now, she’ll remember this moment, this weekend, how her world suddenly seemed to shrink and grow at the same time. It was as though she were trying on a new dress that didn’t fit but looked beautiful, and she wanted to be the kind of woman who wore beautiful dresses, so she kept it on.
They load the groceries into the car, and she climbs into the passenger seat. She lets the emotion pass over her in waves, like a drug she’s taken too much of. It’s too strong, all of it, and after a moment a second emotion bubbles up inside her—a stilted, phony feeling. She doesn’t know him at all, not really. They slept together once, then again, and then suddenly, they were holding up a frame to all this. She thinks suddenly, as though she had nothing to do with it. She is prone to this, to disappear
ing within her own life. Everything seems to happen to her.
Telling a story, any story, years later, she laughs, says, I don’t know, it just happened!
* * *
They are staying in a cabin a few miles outside of Bristol, Vermont. It sits on the property of a couple who rent it out to vacationers. When they pull up into the gravel driveway, they see two horses—a big, beautiful mare and a squat little pony—flicking their tails in a meadow next to the property. The youngish man who greets them isn’t the owner of the property, he explains, but he works for them. He introduces himself as Jeff. He’s a local who’s lived in Vermont his whole life. Jeff shakes their hands, the man’s first, then hers.
Wow, Jeff says. We don’t get a lot of Asians up here! He looks her up and down, like she might suddenly change shape.
She smiles a little, in a trying-to-be-friendly way. Yeah, we’re from New York.
The blond hair is nice, Jeff says. It’s cool. Don’t see much of that here, either.
Thanks, she says.
Well, the man says. Let’s go see the house.
* * *
When she pees, as she does immediately upon their arrival, the sound of it is audible in the tiny cabin.
You should turn on the water when you pee, he tells her as she steps out of the bathroom to wash her hands. It’s more considerate.
But it’s the same sound of water either way, she says, confused.
No, one is piss and one is water, he says.
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