January 9, 2012

A Lost Cause (part 2)

(read part 1)

John had been one of her lovers in college. They had always skipped sleep in favor of each other, fucking on rooftops and in hurriedly locked bedrooms and stained bathrooms of loud bars. They would try to have conversations in coffee shops and wind up breathless, desperate to get elsewhere. She wasn’t surprised to hear of the marriage. Outside of her, he had a romantic sensibility, a kind heart. He had made vague attempts at a relationship, with her, even, dates and hand holding, but she was voracious for other people and would go out and show up at his door long past midnight, the taste of a stranger’s on her breath. He never turned her away.

When she called him to catch up, she hadn’t planned for a seduction, really she hadn’t. She wanted to see what had changed. But she felt no guilt, no. It was inevitable. And surely he understood, knew what he was getting into when he agreed to it. What they had was outside the bounds of time, convention, relationships.

But there had been a hint of finality that morning that she couldn’t shake off. She promised herself that she would not approach him again if he asked. She realized that his wife, a lovely woman she had met, deserved it. Still—she felt a tremble, a quiver between her legs as she remembered the way his arms pinned her wrists behind her back, how tantalizing his breath felt against her neck. She bit her lips quickly and returned her attention to the words in front of her.

 *

Her usual train was delayed that evening, and the platform had an air of suffocating restlessness. She tried to read, but the motions around her made it impossible. She watched a pair of girls in fringed tops and loud lipstick laugh, a hyper enthusiasm that could have only come from a newness to the city, perhaps tourists, perhaps Freshmen, and she felt a pang of jealousy. She got little joy out of her dim apartment and her aloof roommate. She still went on a walk in Central Park with the change of each season, but it felt tiresome, like she was trying to fulfill some standard of appreciation.

She had considered moving away, to an anonymous small town in the Midwest, where she would work for the local newspaper and give the writing thing another try. But that felt like giving up, even more than she already was.

At home she heated up the leftover soup for dinner and ate in in her room while she put on an old Marilyn Monroe movie. She left her window open, and the night air was a bit too cold, cutting into her bare arms. She fell asleep with the movie still playing at the foot of the bed, Marilyn’s breathless voice singing her lullaby.

 (To be continued…)

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