I can turn on the faucet if you want, she says. But she doesn’t really mean it. She’s an environmentalist.
* * *
They have sex before they even begin to think about dinner. The light is warm and falls onto everything in golden planes. In bed, she puts her hands above her head and waits for him to do what she wants him to do. She doesn’t understand why he won’t just take her, why he doesn’t seem to understand what to do with her wrists. It seems to her that there’s only one thing to do when someone puts her hands over her head. He is sweating above her, his skin flushed. The blood blossoms in a dark, rosy V from the center of his chest, up into his neck, coloring his narrow face. She can imagine it flowing through his body, moving toward his cock and away from his brain.
Do what you want with me, she says.
He doesn’t say anything. She presses her wrists into the bed to give him an idea of what she wants. Though nothing he could do would ever be enough. What she wants is for him to understand her, to anticipate her every need. She wants to submit to him so thoroughly that he possesses even her desires, recognizing her so thoroughly that she never has to ask for a thing.
Please, she says.
* * *
There is this way she has of looking at him. Like something caught. She doesn’t talk enough, but when she does, she talks too much, like a nervous child. He wants to hate this, her jittery vulnerability, the way she darts around difficult conversations, but he can’t. He’s tantalized by the edge of what he suspects is there—a deep and lonely desire, a void that he could fill. Romantically, he thinks, he wants her to show it to him—to hold still long enough to be touched in the heart.
Now she is beneath him. On her back, her small breasts are flat, the areolae dark against her skin.
Please, she says again.
Suddenly, he wants to hurt her. Not in the way she wants him to. He has an idea of what she wants. She wants him to be brutal and present. She wants him to pin her down and choke her out. She wants him to slap her and shove his fingers in her mouth and say dirty, unforgivable things. She wants him to do what he wants, but she wants those wants to be her wants.
He wants her to tell him, Do these things to me. He wants her to describe exactly what she wants, exactly how she likes it. Then he would be happy to do them. He would do all of them, and more; he has a perverse imagination that belies his calm exterior. But he needs to hear it from her. There is something closed off about her, like a peony that was cut too soon, a tight green bud, balled up, truncated before the ecstatic frill of full flower. He knows she doesn’t like it when he is gentle with her; it makes her uncomfortable. He knows she is more in love with the idea of him than she is in love with the actual him, because she doesn’t know him at all.
He wants to hurt her, to test her. He wants to startle her out of her shyness and fully open herself to him, like forcing a peony to bloom by cutting the stem on the diagonal.
In one motion, he puts his hand over her wrists.
Yes, she sighs.
He is not inside her yet—he is hard, his cock flopped up on his stomach, and he sees how she arcs her hips up to meet him.
Tell me what you want, he says.
I want… she begins.
He presses his weight on her wrists, he knows he is hurting her, he’s pushing her, he thinks. He wants to hear her say it—wants her to voice the heady need she shakes off her body like rain.
What do you want? he asks her. With his free hand he strokes her, and she is already slick; she spreads her legs, she mewls, she is looking up at him without really looking at him. When he gazes into her face she can’t hold eye contact. Her eyelids flutter shut. It’s this he can’t stand, can’t understand—how she can pretend to offer one kind of vulnerability without offering it all.
I want… she says again.
Exasperated, he slides into her, too fast, a little sloppy—she yelps, and he can feel the tendons in her wrists stiffening.
Is that what you wanted? he asks. He thrusts once—slow. Watching her face.
Yes, she says, and he knows she wants it. When he puts his free hand on her neck, he sees her eyes close in bliss. He chokes her, applying pressure, and she makes soft noises of pleasure.
But he wants more from her, more from this, wants to be affirmed absolutely that this is what he deserves. That he could—what? Own her? It’s good, the way their bodies move together. This is the language they both understand. When he releases her hands, she sighs, grabs her own small breasts, pinching her nipples, squeezing her tits together like a girl in a porno. He finds it touching. She is so young. He reaches down—grabs her jaw in his hand, runs his thumb over her bottom lip. She smiles. Sucks on his fingers, her cheeks going concave.
Who do you belong to? he asks, taking his hand out of her mouth. He cradles her face.
Without answering, she closes her eyes.
* * *
She knows what he wants her to say. She can feel it, too, jumping up in her throat—the way he fucks her is so good. She worries that the goodness will fill her up and make her say things she’s not ready to say. It’s here that she wants to stay, here in the rhythm of their bodies, her nails digging into his back, his cock inside her, moans spilling out. She forces down the urge to say anything she’ll regret. Instead, she raises her knees, pressing them against her chest, taking him even deeper inside her.
Sometimes she wonders if all that takes place between men and women is a battle of will. She knows that a small, soft animal lives inside her, and that that animal wants to be loved completely, flat on its back, kissed and cuddled. She wants that, too, the same way she wants to be dominated, the same way she submits to being pinned down, pressing her cheek into his hand. But at any touch of softness, a wall goes up in her that she cannot navigate around.
Fuck me harder, she says. Easy to be like this: hard. And he listens. He places a hand on the back of her thigh, shoving her knee up, lifting his other hand to slap her with an open palm, and she turns her face into it as a plant turns toward the sun, welcoming the blow, a smile stretching across her face.
* * *
After sex, she pees without turning on the water. He listens to her wash her hands. It takes her a long time. By now, the sun has set, and it is cold in the cabin. They are hungry. He rummages in the fridge for the groceries they bought on the trip up. They don’t talk much while he cooks and she inspects a bottle of moonshine they picked up at the farm.
Do you want to try it? she asks. She turns the weight of it in her hands.
Yeah, he says.
She opens it; it smells terrible, like gasoline. She pours a finger into the bottom of two glasses. It’s so bad it almost doesn’t have a taste, just burns.
They eat in silence and after, they sit on the couch together. Her feet in his lap. She makes herself drink more to feel more comfortable, overly conscious of their proximity.
Once, an old boyfriend of hers broke up with her because she was too vulnerable, or more precisely, because she was not vulnerable in the correct ways. He went so far as to write her an email. In it, he described what he perceived to be her character flaws. It seems to me that you are less interested in actually being vulnerable with others and more enamored with the symptoms of your own vulnerability, he wrote. This struck her as cruel. It was cruel. It was not untrue, which made it even crueler. Since then, she has been guarded, locking everything inside her like a series of nested chests. She is aware that this makes her difficult to love, but she doesn’t know how to stop doing it.
* * *
The man watches her. He pours more moonshine into her glass.
Let’s get you drunk, he says. He is already drunk. It is making him mean.
I’m not wearing any underwear, she says suddenly. She has changed into a white dress with a handkerchief hemline; the fabric of it is thin, with a small abstract print. He pulls her onto his lap and yanks up her dress, as though he is going to give her a spanking. There: her smooth buttocks, rising
like two little hills, her skin pale and untanned. Without the lacy apparatus of underwear to hide her nakedness, she seems neutered somehow, and precious, like a doll or Eve in Eden; but there is also something so pornographic about her audacity that for a moment the man veers wildly between the two axes, unsure of what to do next. She rests the side of her face on the arm of the couch, not moving.
You’re not, he agrees. Little slut, he adds experimentally.
Yes, she says softly. She cannot see his face. Her eyes are closed. He cups a hand around her ass, smacks it gently, then again, harder.
How did you become the way that you are? the man asks her.
What? she asks.
I can’t figure you out, the man says.
I don’t know, she says. I think I’ve always been this way.
She cannot see his face, but she can imagine his expression, the serious, contemplative look he wears. She knows he is not smiling. There is a sharp edge to him now that she does not recognize, and it scares her. When she says she wants him to be brutal, she only wants him to be brutal in a cinematic, delicious way. She imagines getting whipped by long-stemmed roses stripped of all their thorns. She wants him to tie her up and fuck her but kiss her after, rub her body down with sweet-smelling oils. His fingers rest on her cunt.
No, he says.
She waits.
You want people to be open with you, but you don’t open yourself, he says. He slides a finger inside her—she is wet; it takes nothing. She sighs.
He massages her, thrusting his fingers in deeper, and she twists in his arms. Suddenly, the dense heat of her around him, he remembers the sound of her pissing, imagines the warmth rising from inside her and leaving her body in a stream. There is something about her pain that is exciting to him; he wants to crack her open to see what is at the middle, like a peach.
* * *
She sits up, bracing herself on her knees, her skirt falling over her lap. She feels sticky. She moves to straddle him, leaning over and tracing the shape of his mouth with her tongue. This is her way of changing the subject, of getting what she wants. He is simple; men are simple. He dives into her, pulling her dress up around her hips, and she feels herself hardening, the parts of her he can access receding further and further away.
They fuck on the couch, her dress still on, the white handkerchief hem bunched around her waist. She won’t look at him, and they do it doggy, her face mushed into the armrest. One of his hands is wrapped around her face, fingers in her mouth. That’s good, she thinks. She doesn’t want to say anything. She can feel him pounding away in her, too deep, too fast, and her mind twirls up into a beautiful, static void. It is quiet in the cabin. When he comes, he pulls out, jetting onto the small of her back. Overcome with sudden loneliness, she wants to cry but won’t.
They have bought candles at one of the shops in town, to ward off mosquitoes, though the bites are already rising on her calves and thighs and will leave scars that last long after the summer is over. They leave them lit while they go to sleep, the flames guttering in the metal votives and the smell of citronella rising to cover the smell of their sex.
* * *
The next morning. Cold, bright. She feels delicate and hollowed out, like an empty seashell. The candles are burned through. When she picks them up, she is horrified to see that in the night, several moths flew toward the light of the flames and their bodies are trapped in the molten wax. Some of the moths are big, over an inch long, longer, their wings splayed open like autumn leaves. She shows them to the man, their ruined bodies, trapped in soft, translucent layers of wax. She is worried he is going to put his finger in it, deep into the mess of dead things, but he just takes the metal votives out of her hands and throws them away.
Weekend things. Vacation things. Breakfast, eggs from the farm, coffee he makes with a French press, sweet cold milk in a glass bottle making swirling white clouds in their mugs. They go on a hike up a mountain that Jeff recommends. It is strenuous, but they enjoy it. She likes that they can’t look at each other while they climb, that they are having two discrete experiences in their separate lives. She likes the smell of her own sweat. At the peak, they watch the red-tailed hawks soar in slow circles, patrolling their territory. There are two, three, four hawks, all circling above the valley. Their bodies look sleek and dangerous; their wingspans huge, the feathers fanned out.
Their eyes are so sharp, they can see a mouse on the ground from here, the man says. One hawk suddenly swoops to the ground, moving swifter than she thought possible. He probably saw one just now, the man says. Dinner.
She is reminded of a time at a party in college where a girl, an economics major, was loudly talking about the two kinds of people in the world. Predator and prey, she kept saying. That’s all there is in this world. The girl looked her dead in the eyes. You’re prey, she said.
They lose sight of the hawk, descended into the forest. She imagines the mouse, killed, a little blood left in the dirt.
Below them, the valley is spread out like a meal. Rows of evergreens sparkling in the heavy sun. The mountains sloping off into the distance in one direction, each layer bluer than the last, tiny glimpses of the shimmering river below. They are so high up, and very small.
She climbs out onto a rock, where the ground falls away and trees jut out at an angle, to take a photograph. She wants to preserve this moment, it is her way. Historian and hagiographer of her own life.
You want a selfie? he drawls.
Don’t be mean, she responds. Maybe it’s better when they’re not talking. When they’re quiet, she doesn’t have to worry about the shape the thing between them isn’t taking. She takes a picture of all that stretches below her, bathed in light, carefully framed.
Come stand here, she says, dropping back onto her heels. I’ll take a picture of you.
I don’t want a picture.
Well, okay, she says, her feelings hurt again.
* * *
When she gets out of the shower she’s taken to rinse off the grime of their hike, the man is gone. Naked, she walks around the cabin, dripping water onto the wood floors, looking for a sign—his wallet, a note, anything. There’s nothing. His clothes are still neatly folded on the bed, his bag on the couch, a paperback hanging out like a lolling tongue. This isn’t alarming yet, she knows; the man needs his space, he’s prone to disappearing. She’s already lost him more than once in a museum. It’s possible that he’s just outside, taking a walk, waiting for his turn to shower. She towels herself dry and dresses quickly. When she opens the door, she’s startled by how bright it is outside, and how hot, the heat rising in visible shimmers.
Outside, her hair still wet and pushed back from her face, she sees Jeff, getting something from the shed where she knows they keep the firewood, and garden tools, and whatever else it is that people in the country seem to always have around. Propane tanks? A lawn mower?
Hi, she says.
Hi, says Jeff.
She realizes the little red Kia is gone.
Did you see him leave? she asks.
Nope, Jeff says. Just got back from running an errand myself.
Oh, she says.
Did he run out on you? He shouldn’t have done that, Jeff says.
No, he shouldn’t have, she agrees.
She walks in a short, helpless circle around the gravel driveway. Oh, she says again. In the meadow, surrounded by small yellow flowers, the horse and the pony are twitching their tails at flies. The meadow overlooks a valley. The view is so pretty it makes her heart ache. When she comes closer to the animals, she sees that the big horse is wearing black mesh goggles to protect its eyes from the biting flies. There are too many flies all over its face, buzzing and squirming—it makes her skin crawl. She wants to wash its sweet, bony face, wipe the crust from its big, long-lashed eyes. The pony is squat, its body like a barrel, its legs like tree trunks. Its belly is so close to the ground. Where could he have gone? she thinks.
It is so hot. Her neck prickles wit
h anxious sweat. The world is too large and too loud and bright, and she is alone. She walks up to the fence that separates the meadow from the rest of the property, reaching for the horse, wanting to comfort it as though in doing so she would comfort herself. Then she stops herself, feeling muddled and abject—she’s scared of the flies, and worried, suddenly, that to reach out and touch another living thing would only make clear how alone she is now. She feels trapped without the car, without the man. There’s no way she has of leaving this place. Was that all it took for her to feel free? Or is it that now, suddenly loosed into the world, she doesn’t know what to do with herself?
She goes back to the cabin, stepping into the cool, dark interior. She makes herself a drink. Rummages in his bag for a pack of cigarettes, extracting one. She lights it as she’s leaving the cabin, where Jeff is standing in the driveway.
He didn’t tell you where he was going, says Jeff.
I was in the shower, she says. It is too easy for her to do this, to make herself available to strangers. She looks at Jeff sidelong, avoiding eye contact. He just left without saying anything.
Jeff lets out a low whistle. Well. He’ll be back, he says.
Will he? she thinks. His things are still in the cabin. Sure, she says aloud, exhaling a stream of blue smoke.
If he’s not back by—Jeff glances at the sky—dinner, you’re welcome to come by mine. I went fishing today, got a good catch. You know, I could even take you out tomorrow. If you want.
Oh, that’s so nice of you. But I’m okay. I’m sure he’ll be back soon, she says.
Well, you could still go fishing, Jeff presses.
No, that’s really okay, thank you.
Most of the folks who come through here do it. They go with me, out on the boat—they really like it. They love it. There aren’t many people who don’t go out fishing with me.
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