by E V King
Again, I begged, “Just fuck me.” He obliged, but this time wasn’t as soothing as it had been before. I repeated my command again, firmly this time. “Harder. Fuck me harder.” And there it came, the glowing liberation from his hand smacking my ass, burning on the cadence of his hips. I threw my long hair back with a swift twist and took pleasure in its landing softly in the arch of my back, just before Milo collapsed on top of me. This had been sublime, the appropriate word for this…for whatever this is called. This isn’t me. This isn’t Estelle. Or is it? Was it me ordering him around just now, that girl? And what happened to the one I used to know? But the raw lust, the primitive urges, were so delicious and came so natural to me, that right then and there I figured it just had to be me.
Chapter Four
Hypnotized by recent events, I floated through every day on automatic pilot, surviving and doing all that was necessary, expected, wanted, just to pass the time and get closer to shreds of Milo. I spent my days yearning for him, and if I wasn’t doing that, I was dreaming of him like an enamored little schoolgirl, and although I was already considered an adult in most of the Western countries, I still didn’t feel like one most of the time. Message to message, word to word, call to call, that was the way I was living my life back then. I wanted the moments spent with Milo, and I wanted more days and hours spent unclouded by my boring, overbearing mind. And that was something I could only have when he was there in some way or another. I wanted my life to be a chain of days and hours spent with him. But it seemed like the world would spin backwards at my craziness if these thoughts, these words inside my heart, ever saw the light of day. So I kept them hidden and protected inside, like a dream I was living from time to time, buried away from the rational world and grown-ups and family and friends. In my mind, I was protecting my dream like a scared little bird kept inside, locked away from the crazy rationality of an outside world that would crush it instantly once I let it out to fly. So I figured I should keep hidden in the background, blending in and relishing the sweet delusion of it all every time I got the chance. My biggest mistake was probably never telling Milo about that, never even admitting to having actually fallen for him. I figured he was used to women falling all over him; I didn’t want to be one of many. If I was ever to be something, then I surely wanted to stand out. To be mad. To be magic. To be fire. I wanted—no, I needed—to be all of it or nothing. But, in retrospect, I didn’t even really admit to myself I was in love, even though I was dreaming about the whole ordeal more hours than I care to admit.
Weeks went by waiting for Milo, seeing him from time to time, experiencing my first instance of phone sex and then doing that from time to time, and, of course, fucking him from time to time. One night we found ourselves on an industrial site, parked behind a disgusting-looking construction that was supposed to be a potato processing factory of some sort. I didn’t actually know. But the smell lingering in the air surely spoke for itself. This was an impromptu date. Earlier that evening, we had been texting back and forth about how much we wanted to see each other again, although I was only sure of my role in that. Before jumping into the car I borrowed for the occasion, I had quickly slipped into some lacy lingerie with a curious pattern of blood-red flowers with gold-threaded details. Milo opened the passenger door and sat next to me. As usual, he looked almost painfully beautiful.
“I have missed you,” I said as I climbed on top of him.
I kissed him, but it was different. As a widely known overthinker, I could spot preoccupation from a distance. But I was young and selfish, and I frankly didn’t care about the impression I got. I was so set on getting my fix, I didn’t want to waste a minute talking. I was acting like an addict. And he was a man, so he fell in line with the half-naked woman sitting in his lap, fearlessly determined to get him inside of her. We did it right there. We got out of the car at some point. He pushed me down on the hood, and my moaning drifted on wafts of something that smelled like french fries, on into the darkness of that night. I remember him pulling my hair back roughly, just the way he knew I liked, and me getting high on our fucking twins reflected in the windshield.
Today still, that particular odor of food will get me worked up, wet and excited, as it is linked to that memory in my brain. But it is also intrinsically linked to a sad emptiness, because that was the last time I saw him that year and for two more years to follow. I hadn’t realized it back then, although I should have. Milo had not only seemed different; he was different, and his mind was pondering on something that made him look guilty. In the days that followed, the days that everything turned silent with the disappearance of his voice, all of life went silent and dead, too, because I had not said anything, and he probably—in my mind at least—had grown tired of me. So I wallowed for some time, and hit the road with my girlfriends again. Because that is what you do when you are young: you just move on, thinking it is probably for the best, not even considering that silence is a two-way thing, not even reasoning that I could just send a message myself, call him myself, for something other than fucking for once. With Milo, I had discovered a side of me I wasn’t aware of before, and I was so amazed, so self-indulgent that, somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that after all he was just a human being like the rest of us.
Chapter Five
Three years of silence later, three years after first meeting Milo, I found myself a hundred miles from home in my own apartment, not far from the campus where I continued studying for my master’s. Deb was somewhere in that same city, but I couldn’t have cared less. I had barred her from my life ever since she had tried to move in on a meaningless boyfriend I had had a year before. Still, she broke the girl code, so she was out there somewhere, and that was fine as long as she stayed away from me. But the memory of her had entered my mind upon getting a text earlier that day.
Hi, buddy. Guess you are studying for your master’s by now. I am in the city today. Coffee?
Apparently he still had my number. And apparently I still was in no position to resist, and I replied I would love to.
That afternoon I was so deep in essay-writing mode that I almost didn’t notice the piercing sound of the doorbell. Without much thought, I buzzed in my visitor and swung open the front door to my apartment in advance. I rushed back to my laptop to mark where my train of thought had been interrupted. I straightened out my top and walked back to the door. I heard his footsteps turning around the corner, and there he was, my once-beloved, mounting the concrete stairs back into my life.
“Hi, buddy,” he said, and he smiled with the same easy charm he always did.
I secretly hated him for calling me that. Buddy. But looking at him made up for a whole lot of wrongdoing, so I never said anything about it. All the thoughts and fantasies I had entertained myself with every night for the past years, everything I thought I would or should say, everything I thought I would and should do if ever Milo was standing there, as he was now, right in front me, all went straight out the window. I pulverized all such thoughts to unimportant debris, and I brushed them into a back corner of my mind. I let him in and offered him the cup of coffee we had previously agreed on, although one lone look provided enough clarity and honesty; we both knew well enough that drinking coffee was never our sole intention. That was what we believed, what we wanted to believe, perhaps, but the power of memory was smoldering underneath. Maybe our recollection of the past had been deformed by time. The imperfection eroded until there was nothing left to remember but polished imprints on our souls that would fascinate us forever.
“Maybe later.” His hushed words rolled around my face. He must have noticed somehow. The longing was still there, where he’d left it years ago, and that must have been written all over my face. My capacities for reasoning shut down, and I followed my heart into my room. Milo followed. “So that’s where you’re at.”
I took a step closer, and folded my body around his hips to tap the door just hard enough to close it slowly. �
�Yes,” I said, smiling.
I backed toward my desk, not thinking about the mess that was about to happen, not stressing about it either, and sat down on top of my notes as Milo came closer. He put his arms around me as he always had, I threw mine around his neck as I always had, and we looked at each other as if no time had passed at all. As if he didn’t have a family now, as if I had not been missing him, nor regretting letting him go. This whole ordeal felt so familiar that our momentarily suspended look only could end the way it did, with us kissing as we always had. His hands slipping underneath my skirt as they always had. My fingers roaming his hair as they always had.
I still remember that particular good-bye as if it happened only yesterday. As I watched, Milo walked out the door and down the first flight of stairs. He turned around, saw me standing there, in the doorway still, not wanting to miss a second. He ran back up and kissed me again. Our lips hardly parted while we descended the stairs of my apartment building together. We took turns having our backs pushed up against the wall on our way down. I still remember his hand sliding up my leg, his fingers pinching my ass, savoring every second until there were none left. Later in life, whether I was daydreaming or actively thinking about him at night, I would often travel back to that particular instant in my mind.
The typically gray sky hardly scared me away, as I made my daily thinking march through the city’s center the day after. The bass lines of music penetrated my ears and decided my pace. I hated the loitering, the blocking of life, those interfering with the people of action—the walkers and runners—and hated the people doing the loitering, cobblestone by cobblestone, centimeter by centimeter, exploring their ways full of doubt. For me, it mattered to get ahead. Move forward and push through. Keep the pace. As if that constant pace was emptying my head of noise, step by step, bass per bass, making room for clear thinking. Pure thought, without making lists. No loitering between my ears. What happened yesterday? A rediscovery of life. A rediscovery of Milo. For the first time in a long, long time, I felt life bubbling inside again. It had come back to me, flowing along my lips, that living fire of Milo. I had swallowed it all and whole, and it was swarming underneath. The years had loitered, but all was forgotten now, replaced by the irrepressible pace of our kiss. Just for a moment, the silky touch of his lips had preached their rugged passion again, and our lips had prayed to the fire in return. Those eyes. Those lips. Those hands. I had no problem with his hands loitering along my body, the only thing that made loitering worthy of the time spent on it. For just an instant, the gates of delirium had been reopened. My skin still glowed from the kiss with which Milo had once again carved his way into my soul.
A chilly wind mumbled and cried through my hair as I walked on. My eyelashes were glued together from the drizzling rain, while darkness stretched out in the sky above, obscuring my heart in the process. Only a stretch of asphalt separated us, but there he was for sure: Milo…and with him were his wife and Milo Jr. My feet froze at the sight of him across the road: the simple coincidence of a brutal run-in with reality. There she was, right in front of me, the woman who had it all. All of it, constantly and within reach. Every bit of honor I would never get: a tangled life, days entwined, a blood connection, a melt of all moments good and bad, beautiful and ugly alike. Milo’s gaze came to a standstill on my petrified body, just a few steps away from him. The peace I usually felt in his presence turned into horror as I spotted the look of a concerned father on his face. My melancholy condensed into the air, and unnoticeably, imperceptibly, I cried along with the clouds.
I turned my eyes away from it all—especially the family scene I had secretly wished for years before—and commanded my feet to start moving. They regained their pace. Time to go on. Move forward. Push through. Bite through the pain of my crumbling self; I transformed into a sad little girl and started moving, determined; step by step, dreading it, yet relieved at the same time to gain some distance from all that commotion. Hard is the knowledge that the world stretches so far outside the self that there is so little we can control, and that there is so little in the cruel world that cares even to blink at our sufferings. The hurt, everything, was drained of life yet again. Hollowed out. Free of us. Free of me. That was exactly what he should be, what he deserved. Milo must be free as well, free of me. I didn’t live in the illusion that I could even make this hard on him, but one never knows. I didn’t even want the chance to have that chance, that benefit of the doubt everybody always so fondly talks about, even if that chance only existed as a figment of my imagination. That was my opinion on the matter. He would never want me. But if I was serious about this, if I wanted this for him, then I needed to give him the best thing I could: the freedom to be happy and clear of me. So I went on, moving, biting through that excruciating tearing at my soul, and I didn’t look back. I couldn’t, or I would have frozen again. This time it was me taking the road, deliberately so. He needed to continue without me lingering in the background. I had to move and disappear. Continue without Milo, without fire. My happiness would lie in allowing him to have it all, all he ever wished for. And maybe, just maybe, I would one day see a little flickering, somewhere, in a man who would remind me of Milo, and maybe, just maybe, I could learn to content myself with a faint reminder of that fire I once loved.
If only it were possible. If only it were possible to say good-bye just one last time, because I had to. For you. For her. For the arrival of natural love in your life. I had to take a step back, or maybe even a few hundred. Never would you know it all, never would I tell you. I think you deserve the simple happiness of your choice. And was it that? Maybe my honesty wouldn’t even matter to you, but merely the possibility of a chance of the opposite, that I could confuse your happiness or even tear it down, makes me nauseous. In that case, I would rather live with the pain of the ceaseless desire that will devour my insides for years to come. Denying myself this possibility leaves me hollow, a shell filled with an emptiness I can already feel, an emptiness that used to be your place in my life, a large gaping wound in my soul where once you shacked up without even knowing. There is a strange kind of satisfaction that lies within this suffering, a bitter kind of happiness that is fed by your well-being, although it doesn’t seem to coincide with that of mine. I am sighing to my demons as I write this because, had this been fiction, its portrayal of reality could never have been as cruel as the truth has turned out to be. Your smile is worth it all. Your smile is enough for me. I can love you from anywhere in this world. From anywhere in this world, I can cherish you forever. You do not need to be sitting there right next to me. You do not have to be mine. If only it were possible to say good-bye just one last time, to taste the salt of your skin just one last time. How I would kiss you as if there were no tomorrow. How I would not waste a single second of it, breathing you in and never wanting to breathe you out, even if it would mean me dying in the process. But it is not possible. It isn’t any different. So today I am setting you free without such good-byes, just that last look and a bunch of memories. I am locking you in my heart, throwing away the key, and hoping my melancholy will wear off, eroded by the winds of time, and that only my happiness for yours will remain.
That is what I had scribbled on the inside of the back flap of my copy of The Canterbury Tales. Now, though, I am about to break the promise I had made to myself nearly four years and a wedding ago by releasing my truth from the confinement of my mind. I felt it coming on strong, but I couldn’t help myself. Nostalgia got the better of me. I never imagined myself admitting to the deep love I had felt, still feel, so recklessly though indirectly. And so, this silent desire for Milo crept into my words. He never saw it coming, and frankly I didn’t either. It just kind of happened. The words just slipped out one day. Milo had come across a picture of me and decided to ask me how things were. Not long after, those relentless feelings of mine snuck up on me.
“Of course I remember that time, that was the time I would have walked a thousand miles bare
foot to your house.
It wasn’t much of a reply to his probably quite innocent reminiscing of our time together. I didn’t say much, but it was enough for Milo. He knew. He just did. Sometimes we don’t need much to understand it all. He knew I would be easy prey if ever he wanted to revisit that time, just because of that stupid little phrase I once typed into my chat screen, without giving it the consideration it deserved. These were the words that would cause me to break my word, and my oath to myself to let him be happy. All those years, weeks, and days I had been a fool, that much was sure. But had I fooled myself all that time, too? I don’t really know. Maybe. Probably. I think so. Why did I never tell him? Why did I go the extra distance for other, crappy people and never even bother to tell him? And also, had I changed at all, or had I just ignored my natural fire by forcefully pushing it into a back crevice of my mind?
I had read those thoughts of the younger me, and I still didn’t get it. It was probably because Milo was older, and because I was scared of the reactions, of the others, of people. I don’t really get how we ended up losing each other the first time. I remember being jealous and reckless and self-involved, with a certain fear of talking, of telling him about the battles in my head. Of admitting to checking my phone every minute just to make sure I could read his messages as soon as he sent them. Of admitting how I lay in my bed every night fantasizing about a not-too-distant future, when I could touch him again and have him there next to me. Admittedly, I was lost on him already. I had been, and still was, so addicted to Milo. He could bring me to the brink of insanity just by looking in my direction. But somewhere deep down, even when I tried to ignore it all, I had always known. I had felt it then, deeply. But I knew I was too young, too idealistic, and most of all, too naïve. There was too big of a difference between our worlds. Perhaps I was too crazy and too much of a challenge, even for him. I was wandering, a lost soldier on an empty battlefield of a war that had been decided long before it started. I was a lonely specimen, denying reality with a passion and with diligence: out of idealism, out of romance, out of desperation for a supposed love. Even now, this current of events makes me cry, breaks me down. I had loved him so much back then. Back then, when all was relatively simple. Back then, when we could have had it all. Back then, when I wasn’t bound to a life I didn’t want. Back then, when I could have given him everything.