by Gabi Moore
Mark: I understand. Hey, I don’t mean to be an idiot, it’s just that I’m not used to dating older women, and I guess it never occurred to me
My ears burned.
Kat: Well, I’m not used to dating men less mature than me either, so I apologize, I expected more
The phone started to buzz and ring in my hands. I hastily picked it up.
“I said I was at work, Mark,” I hissed.
“Hey, you’ve misunderstood me, can we just talk about this quick?”
I exhaled loudly.
“Sure, I’m sorry, it’s just been a stressful day.”
“Yeah, no doubt. Hey, I’m sorry. I’ve just …kids just kind of freak me out,” he said and laughed nervously. My mouth hung open. I couldn’t believe how adolescent he suddenly sounded.
“Is this …is this some kind of problem?” I asked.
The line was quiet for a while.
“Well, Kat, I’ve never been with anyone with a kid before, that’s all, you just kind of sprung it on me…”
“I didn’t spring anything on you.”
“Hey, calm down, I’m just saying I’m surprised.”
I laughed cynically.
“I’m surprised too. I didn’t take you for the commitment phobic kind…”
“Ouch.”
“I’m sorry, that was mean.
I could hear him breathing.
“Not mean,” he said. “Just kind of hypocritical.”
“Hypocritical?”
“Well… you’re the one who’s divorced, you know? And now you’re stringing along two men without committing to either of them.”
I felt so angry I wanted to throw the phone against the wall.
“I am not stringing anyone along. Jesus.
He laughed drily.
“Is that what you also tell Anthony?”
I hung up. I dropped the phone like it had turned to poison in my hands. I wasn’t mad at him. How could I be, when everything he had said was perfectly true? I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t explain why I had kept Anthony around, waiting in the wings like this. No, I had hung up because I was ashamed. Ashamed because he could see right through me, right through my fear. I was a hypocrite. I was fearful and cowardly and I didn’t have the guts to go for what I wanted.
Mark frightened me. I was afraid of myself, when I was with him. And every time I spoke to him it was to chase him away in fear, to joke, to deflect. I knew I did it. I knew what a phenomenal pain in the ass I must have seemed. But I couldn’t let go. I was too hurt. Too old. Too tired.
I had Nicky and a mortgage and a little clean house that could feature on the cover of Unexamined Life magazine and somehow, I just knew that Mark would tear all of that away. He’d expect more from me. He’d make me think about what I wanted, and then I’d have to admit to myself how so much of what my life wasn’t what I wanted…
And so I couldn’t speak to him. Not when I knew that I couldn’t be honest. Not when I knew I couldn’t offer all of myself. My phone pinged again.
Anthony: Hello princess. I have a surprise for you. Pick you up at work in half an hour?
My first thought was whether my tears had smeared my mascara and whether I’d have enough time to quickly apply a fresh coat.
Chapter 13 - Kat
And that’s how it came to be that I spent more time planning my wedding than dating the groom.
The next few weeks blustered by with their own momentum, like they were being chased. And I went along with it.
The strange buzzing between my legs, the heat, the delicious sparks and butterflies I had found in Mark’s workshop had long since fizzled out into embers, and then nothing.
He disappeared from my life almost as quickly as he had entered it. I mentally filed him away as a dream, a weird vision, a strange movie I watched once, nothing more. Nothing else in my life reminded me of him, and so it was easy to push his memory down and away, so that I only dreamt of him. Or at least, I felt like I dreamt of him, when I woke up with a weird taste on my lips and a dull, distant throb all through my body.
Life once again took on the safe, predictable rhythms I was familiar with. I had once let a handsome stranger lure me into his workshop and make me orgasm with nothing more than a whisper. But that was just a strange drug I took in a time long ago. A poisoning. A fever I had. I paid for the tree in full and never went to pick it up. He never contacted me again. Life moved on.
But it wasn’t so easy to get rid of him completely. He was a mark on me. Though I had scrubbed clean my mind and my daily routine, he still found his way into all those unmonitored, empty spaces throughout the day.
I found myself dashing across the road to escape oncoming traffic, but delaying just a fraction of a second longer than what was sane. Just to rub up against the warm shoulder of the possibility of death, just an affectionate nuzzle before I hurried off and went back to my life.
I felt him other places, too. The ache in my body was long gone but something in my mind was altered. Bodies are disposable. But a mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension. I found strange words coming into my mouth, like visitors. I woke up one day, as from a dream, in my office; wearing a skirt of such a violently red color it almost felt worse than being naked to wear it.
“Kat, are you with us?”
I shook my head and focused on the woman in front of me. A smiling pair of retirement-age ladies in twin sets, pearls and smiles fit for a washing powder commercial.
“Yes, yes I’m here, sorry I just blanked out for a second.”
“So what do you think of the gathering on the bust? We were going to make a decision on that today,” one of them said warmly.
I cleared my throat and considered my reflection for a moment.
Me, the wedding dress version. Great swathes of lace and tulle were bunched all over me. I hated it.
“It’s too busy,” I said plainly.
They looked at one another, like they were deciding whether or not to correct my bad etiquette, and then hastened to take the dress off again.
“That’s perfectly all right, dear, you take your time,” the other one cooed.
“It needs to be tighter,” I said.
“Tighter?”
“Yes, more snug around the waist.”
“Dear, this is already a corseted bodice…”
“Can it be made tighter?”
They exchanged looks again.
“And maybe I want a buckle, as well.
“Like, a belt?”
I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I looked better naked in any case. Wasn’t the best wedding dress to be naked? To come to your partner with nothing, no masks, no coverings, just as you were?
“And I want the garter belt to be a leather strap as well, with a buckle,” I said decisively.
I could see them tallying up the cost of an extra custom order in their heads. I didn’t care. I can’t say why, but that was what it needed to be. I wanted it.
“Hm, well I can’t say I’ve seen white leather before…”
“It won’t be white,” I said. “It’ll be red, of course.”
I didn’t care if they liked it. Wasn’t I paying them to put up with any bridezilla bullshit I threw their way? It was my ‘special day’, after all, and they were basically obliged to bring to life all my silly whims. I didn’t want something old, something new, something borrowed, or something blue. I wanted something alive, something dead, something black, something red. I smiled at the little rhyme I had made up. I don’t know when I had become so morbid, but in a way, a wedding was like a little death, wasn’t it?
The women left and returned with armfuls of other dresses, and some cheesy looking beaded belts. I decided before they had even placed them down that I didn’t want them.
I wished I could run away, right now. Run out of this stupid place, in my underwear. Run far, far away and never come back. I wish I could die. That something would come along and kill me, so
I could be a ghost and get the day off, and go somewhere where nobody knew me, and there were no rules, and nobody wanted anything from me.
And I wished that Mark was here with me. I wish that he would obliterate me, once and for all, and put me out of my misery.
I stood and looked at my reflection as the two women fussed around me, and all I could think about was his cock, and how magnificent it must feel to have it in me, all of it, to the hilt, and even further… I nodded and smiled and swished the skirts in the reflection, but inside I was lost in visions of perfect, total ruin. I wanted my entire body destroyed, burnt in flames till nothing was left. I wanted to be broken. And I wanted him to break me.
I put my clothes on and started saying my goodbyes to the women, making my next fitting appointment.
“I shouldn’t think it will be easy to find a white leather garter, to be perfectly honest, my dear…” said one.
“Oh nevermind, that’s not really necessary, I was just saying whatever came to mind. I don’t even want a garter, I don’t think.”
The day before I had read a story of an ostracized woman, in a village in Jaipur, who doused herself in petrol and set herself alight in her husband’s bean fields.
My destruction was quieter. The flames around me were made of lace and satin, but they were flames nonetheless. My cries for help were more like polite ‘thank yous’. But it was all the same. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I couldn’t stop. Why not marry Anthony? Why not dance this stupid dance right through to the end?
So that’s how my weeks went.
I picked out flower arrangements while imagining being fucked so hard I’d pass out. I took little sample bites of vanilla cake, then chocolate, then vanilla again, all the while thinking secretly to myself that what I really wanted was to taste the whip, to taste the sour tang of blood on my lip as I bit down in animal ecstasy. Anthony gave me little gems and trinkets as gifts, and I smiled and thanked him. And then imagined myself sliced open against their sharp edges.
Anthony didn’t touch me. I didn’t touch him. He believed that I was nervous, or chaste. I didn’t correct him.
Sleeping with him was a task that could wait. First, I had to book a wedding venue, and send out invites. I had to organize the dress. The reception. The favors. He didn’t seem to care. I waited for him to push the issue, he never did, and we both breathed a sigh of relief.
Chapter 14 - Mark
It was the third Sexpo I had been to. I had paid for a stall, rented the truck again and diligently turned up with a few of my finest pieces and a couple hundred glossy pamphlets for all the curious visitors who would inevitably walk by.
I debated whether to show a photograph of the tree I had built for her, but decided in the end that I would. It was a work of art, and I was damn proud of it. A tool was still a tool, even if the people it was designed for only ever used it once.
“Oh wow, what’s that?”
A pretty girl peeled off from the crowd in the bustling arena and made her way over to my newly erected stall. My first visitor for the day. I smiled and watched as she looked over the display and ran her fingers over the sample items.
“Your arms go in the buckles, over there, and your feet hang down here, loose.”
She nodded and smiled. She seemed a bit young, but whatever. I watched her with interest as she flipped through a folder laid out on the table.
“And you make things like this on demand? Like, people can order things?”
I scanned the crowd around her, making sure I wasn’t missing any legitimate potential customers. She was cute and all, but there was no way in hell a moon-faced twenty-two-year-old was going to cough up for one of these pieces. No, that’s not what she wanted. That’s not what she wanted at all.
She was a perfect ambassador for what I’ve come to think of as ‘pink flags’: little signs and signals from a woman that will seem utterly endearing if you’re horny and not thinking very clearly …but like blaring warning signs if you’re not.
She was too young, for one. How could you tease the edges of a woman’s limits if she hadn’t even had time to grow any yet? Plus, she was playing coy. You know the kind of thing – cocking her head and giggling with all the confidence of a girl thinking she’s gonna blow my mind later with some wild Cosmo magazine tips or a novelty condom she bought with her babysitting money. Girls like this are like cotton candy – just sugar that dissolves, no base note, no grit. And while she may get off on the idea that you’re some big bad corrupting wolf, the game hit a little too close to home for me, honestly.
She was that girl who’d enthusiastically agree to a no strings arrangement but then linger around, hoping you’d marry her by accident or something. She had those long fake nails but hadn’t ironed her shirt. She seemed a little drunk. Like she’d come on to you but then call you a pig when you responded.
I smiled vaguely at her and nodded.
“Yup. Everything you see there was built specifically for each customer.”
“Oh wow, that’s so awesome.”
She just stood there, pretending to be interested in the folder.
“I love talented men, really. I’m an artist myself,” she said and tilted her head to the other side and smiled.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Mostly sculpture. I find your work so inspiring…”
“Oh, well thank you.”
She dawdled, looked at her feet, cleared her throat.
“Do you use any of these things yourself?”
I lifted my eyebrow at her.
“That’s a very personal question,” I said, laughing. Her face lit up and she kind of leaned in and gave me a breathy giggle.
“I guess. I don’t know if you’ve noticed though, but we are at a sexpo…”
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but at that moment I found her almost unspeakably annoying. It’s not that she was immature. Something told me that she was perfectly mature, only this was her adult, fully settled form. There was just something wrong about it all.
“Yes, well, I try to keep my private life out of my work,” I said curtly and gave her a polite smile.
She looked deflated.
“Oh, sure, yeah, I understand that. Just curious.”
“Well, they’re really built for the connoisseur, you know? For people who actually take this kind of thing seriously.”
Her face fell. She pretended to look at something else and then hurried off, mumbling something and looking a little embarrassed.
“Poor little thing!”
I turned to see Valerie behind me. She wore beaded cat ears, black whiskers painted onto her cheeks and a naughty grin.
“Oh hey, I didn’t see you lurking there,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s like watching a nature documentary. I thought that little gazelle was toast for sure.”
“Her?”
“Yeah, are you feeling OK? You sick? The Mark I know would have pounced on that, no question,” she said cynically.
“She’s a baby,” I said with some irritation, and lined up the edges of the business cards for a second time.
She laughed.
The funny thing was that it was almost exactly the same way I had met Valerie. She had been some plucky, ‘curious’ girl at a kink festival two years back. I had just started making custom pieces, and feeling like a rock star, and when she sauntered over and twirled her pigtails at me I didn’t give it a second thought. She pouted, asked me to ‘initiate’ her and within three months we were already up to two pregnancy scares, one death threat from her ex and one evening in which her guinea pig escaped but because she was on MDMA she was convinced I had assassinated it and she called the police on me. One evening, after we had a stupid fight about whether Down’s Syndrome was caused by toxins, she broke up with me and said she’d kill herself for sure.
I don’t know how the hell it happened, but Valerie and I eventually became friends. She slowly shifted her crazy onto other unsuspecting fools, and I became so
mething like her big-brother confidante, either because she grew up and felt bad for making my life a living hell, or because I was the only guy in her life not trying either to fuck her or actively get a restraining order on her.
And so I’d see her around. She’d pop up at events like these and come and find me, and I didn’t mind the company so much. Sometimes she’d hit me up late at night when she’d just broken up with some guy, or she’d tease me and try to make me blush with some sordid detail of her always-insane sex life. But for the most part, there was a touching familiarity there. I guess seeing one another at rock bottom has a way of bonding people.
“Hey, Mark, seriously, are you tired or something? You look like shit.” She thumbed through the catalogue herself.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Oh come on, I’m serious. You OK?”
She tilted her little cat ears to the side.
“Perfectly fine.”
She stared at me and widened her eyes.
“Ooooh, I get it. Girl trouble!” she said, like she had just figured out a riddle.
“Shut up.”
“Oh. My. God. Spit it out. Who is she?” She slid up to me like we were in a romcom and like I didn’t have a stall to manage and shit to do.
“She’s nobody. There’s no one,” I said and walked over to the other end of the stall. She gasped and looked me up and down.
“Oh man, it’s more serious than I thought.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school? Don’t you have a court date to get to or something?”
“Ok, fine, don’t tell me, I think I can guess anyway,” she said, and held up her fingertips to her temples pretending to be some kind of mystic divining the future. Her eyes fluttered closed.
“I’m seeing …I’m seeing a beautiful woman… yes, a real hottie. You think she might be something special, you’re a little scared actually, but what’s this? You’ve said something stupid to her? Ah, yes, I can see it now, clear as day… she’s so complicated, she comes with so much baggage, you’re really attracted to her it’s just you don’t know if you can take all of that shit on…” she said, using a phony voice.