Steamy Dorm

by Kristine Robinson

  Put simply, I'm using her. I'm doing the things she blames me for, because she created that monster. I am the product of my upbringing. She wanted to see me as the life-wrecker so much that I inadvertently hit all the buttons she dreads.

  I tried showing her I was nothing like my father for nineteen years. I tried everything I could to receive her love. My efforts reached nothing but dead ends, and the empty spot in my heart that has never closed up.

  The devil you know is better than the one you don't.

  I examine Ria's sleeping face as I absently chew on a strand of dark blonde hair. She's been surprising me the past two months, and it's confusing me a great deal. At first, we just met up to drink and have sex, or just go straight to sex. She rings me if she feels like it, I ring her if I'm the same. She's almost always at a bar, bad-mouthing people or flirting, and it gets on my nerves, because I know if I'm exposed to that kind of environment all the time, I will at some point give into temptation. Maybe I'm projecting my insecurities onto her, but I can't help the initial unease.

  There's something about her that makes me want to cling. It's not just the fantastic sex, the erotic mannerisms of her lips and body, or the way she can melt hearts with one sultry glance. It's not just because of her no-nonsense, don't-give-a-shit attitude, either. It's the fact I feel myself changing.

  When we began our arrangement, she had no job. Two months ago, she announced to me that she got a job working as a sales assistant in a local store, Jenn's Food. Ria had previously given no hint that she planned to start working, since I think she lived on the backs of others, getting men to buy her drinks or take her out for meals. Or being fed by whatever shitty home situation she had.

  On her first paycheck, she took me out to mini-golf, a complete surprise after I had finished my shift, and went to a fancy restaurant up town. I think it cost her nearly all her wages, but she said she wanted to treat me, because I deserved it.

  I didn't feel like I deserved any of it, but it still struck that warm place inside. We've gone out a few times to bars, but she's drinking far less than I remember. She got off her face often in our early days, stumbling in for drunken sex, sometimes with me equally drunk.

  It's like watching her emerge from a surly cocoon to become a creature of majestic beauty. She's cleaner, has lighter-shaded clothes, and we're actually hanging around one another for the company, and it doesn't always lead to sex.

  I like seeing this change. It's the reverse of jumping into a relationship, only to find that your lover has three heads and some incurable disease or something. I'm watching someone from dubious origin become someone respectable and proud – even though she always acts like she doesn't care what others think.

  I like who I'm becoming, as well. I like my new job, the fact that I'm only seeing one person, that I'm making money, and being treated to dates and a sense of security.

  It's so strange, though. I don't know what to make of it, and it scares me.

  Speaking of changes, Wendy is going through a transformation of her own. She's actively been jogging with me, once every two days, so her body can recover between bouts. At first, she was agonisingly slow, but I stuck with her.

  Now she can keep up with me. She's not her ideal weight, but she's lost a substantial amount of fat, and you can see the pleasure and happiness in her face because she's admitted to the truth of her problem, and is doing something about it. It's moments like that when you know the effort is worth it.

  Ria stirs beneath my touch. Her astounding eyes open and take me in, before she delivers a sleepy, content smile, making my heart thud faster, and my fingers tremble in her hair. I'm not used to seeing that kind of expression, like someone is genuinely truly happy to see me, and it hurts. I don't understand why it hurts.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” I say, concealing my wave of sadness under a perky grin.

  “Morning,” she says, voice deep and thrilling, sending additional waves of satisfaction through me. “Not a bad thing to wake up to. Your face.” Her thumb lightly caresses my cheek. The understatement amuses me.

  “I can say the same about you. I can grow used to this.”

  “Mm. Me too. I can also grow used to... this...” She begins kissing me gently at first, light feathery brushes against my lips, and I welcome the contact, and breathe in the delicious cinnamon scent of her. She adjusts herself so she's on top of me, and waves of desire ripple through as she begins her erotic conquest of me, one kiss at a time. We're both naked from the events of last night, and her skin is baby smooth. She rakes fingers through my hair, and kisses more passionately on my lips, her tongue now tasting and testing the waters. I nibble at her ear when she starts moving her lips to my neck, and then she stretches like a cat against me, letting out a low moan.

  This never fails to send violent shivers through me. Her body is flush against mine, and things are heating up fast and reaching boiling point. She's making my heart go crazy, my cheeks flare crimson, and my excitement peak.

  It's more than just a casual screw. I anticipate her. I desire her. She's amazing, and I honestly wouldn't mind being stuck on a desert island with her, so just we could have each other for the rest of our lives.

  Her fingers caress and scratch and glide, and I let out little gasps of pleasure, which intensify when she moves down my body to kiss me on my thighs. I let out a whimper of longing as she alternates between my thighs, and I feel her grin pressed on my flesh.

  Eventually, she latches onto the little nub at my core, pinching her lips so it rolls around with her, and electricity sizzles my nerves. I arch uncontrollably, hissing in delight, my limbs twitching like crazy.

  She's like a magician with the way she does it. Her fingers work inside me, take up all the space possible, and her tongue whips me into an onslaught of ecstasy.

  I tumble into climax with a shivering cry, before doing the same deed to her.

  When we both are finished with one another, we spend around twenty minutes just snuggling, content to cradle one another. The cradling used to be such an alien sensation, but I find myself getting used to it.

  “Good morning,” I purr again, which elicits a chuckle from her.

  “Same to you. Just so you know,” she says, brushing my long dark blonde hair, staring into my dark eyes, “there's something I wanna talk to you 'bout. But let me recover some more first.”

  My mind races, wondering what she wants to say.

  Usually when someone claims they're going to talk, it means something bad. It might be about breakup, a source of disappointment or a mistake. Anything negative, I expect it, and I've heard it. However, she's smiling at me and cuddling me, and we've just had epic sex, so it can't be too bad or break-uppy.

  God, I hope she doesn't break up with me. I feel like I'm finally gathering the pieces of my life together, and there's a direction I can head in as I figure out the dreams I've never built. I feel like I'm becoming this person because of her.

  That peculiar spot in my heart that eats away at my emotions is slowly filling up.

  “I never took you for a cuddler,” I whisper, kissing her forehead. The kiss feels like the right thing to do, even though I can count on one finger the number of times someone has given me that kind of contact.

  “I am around you,” she says, and my heart does that stupid lurch again. “Listen. Got something to say.” She rubs her nose fondly against my cheek, before pulling back. My heart stops for a full moment, and I'm not entirely sure I'm dying at this point when she says, “Got my paycheck. Would like us to look for an apartment together and move in. If you want.”

  Holy shit. The moving in stage. Fuckity duckity. She wants to move in with me. Me. With the moving in.

  I feel as if all the air in my lungs has been sucked out.

  “You want to move in with me?” I finally squeak, wincing at my pathetic attempt at speech.

  Ria nods, ocean blue eyes softening. “Could give it the ole college try. I hate my place, you hate yours. I like you,
you like me. Makes sense.”

  “Yeah...” I say, my mind drifting elsewhere. I feel like a ghost, transparent and floating in mid-air. There's nothing in my limbs except shock and a curious void. “It does,” I manage.

  She senses the drop in my expression, and her brows furrow. The excitement in her face from the announcement fades. “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing!” I say. “Nothing at all. I just... I wasn't expecting to hear that. I've kind of shut down.”

  She squints at me suspiciously. “Good shut down or bad?”

  “I don't know,” I answer. It's the truth, I don't. Part of me is elated. The other part is whispering it's too soon. It won't work out. It's too good to be true.

  That's the voice I'm struggling with.

  It makes my heart cringe when I see her face glaze over in darkness. “I see.” I don't blame her. I'm not leaping for joy, I'm not squealing and hugging the breath out of her. I'm just frozen.

  I hastily try to salvage the situation, though I feel snatches of hope crumbling around me. “Give me a little time to process this. I... I want to move in with you. Let's start looking on the weekend.” She merely grunts her consent, but rolls out of bed naked, and begins dressing. For some reason, this overwhelming sense of despair is creeping through, spreading darkness to every blood cell. It's a horrible sensation, something between guilt and fear, and I get out of bed and dress in silence as well.

  My mother's at work when I head to the kitchen, and she's left nothing in the fridge, having eaten the snack I brought the other day. The despair needles in deeper, with this small, daily reminder of how much my mother doesn't care and doesn't love. I'm unlovable. If my own mother couldn't love me, then what chance did I have?

  People like the fake me, the one that flirts and smiles and knows all the secrets of a body.

  They wouldn't like the real me.

  This fear pervades me all the way to work. There's no Wendy to burble at me today, and the manager is on holiday, so I'm left to my own devices in my corner of the workplace. How ungrateful I must seem to Ria, with everything she's doing to bolster our lives. She's been curbing some of her wilder antics, treating me like a girlfriend, and I've been using her this whole time as a chew toy to screw when I get lonely.

  She doesn't deserve this. Moving in with me is a horrible mistake, and I know the fact that I want it is another indication of that. I will want it so I can keep using her. She's certainly no angel herself, but this is fucked up, and unfair.

  When I return home, nobody is there. I stare at myself in the mirror for a long time, before I start rifling through my drawers and finding my best, most provocative outfits. I shower and struggle into them, then, after a thoughtless observation, I turn off my cellphone. My mind is screaming to escape, to run away from the chaos that is waging in my heart and making it hard to think or function.

  I hop into my run-down car, hoping the little bastard doesn't cough into a miserable halt, and I drive up to a bar I haven't visited in a while.

  What are you doing? My mind screams. I drown it, telling myself that I just need some time to think and calm down. One drink, however, turns into two. Then three. By the fifth, I'm completely smashed out of my skull. My memories are a blur after that, but I vaguely remember speaking to a sympathetic stranger and bawling my eyes out because I don't know what I should do, because I'm not the kind of person who anyone deserves to suffer from.

  Everything after that is wiped from memory.

  I do, however, wake up in an unknown bed, next to an unknown person, and I'm naked from the waist down. My thighs ache, with that familiar sensation of rough sex. Guilt stabs my heart, and I gasp in horror.

  Holy shit. I didn't mean to. I didn't. I didn't.

  The guilt crushing every ounce of personality I have left, I gather up my clothes, silently sobbing, and exit the apartment as quietly as I can. It takes a while to locate the bar where I left my car, and I return home with thunder rumbling over my head. When I check my phone, there's about twelve missed calls from Ria, and two from my mother.

  Like a coward, as I finish washing off the grime of last night, I text her and say, Hey. At home.

  She doesn't respond, but turns up at my doorstep half an hour later, looking like hell.

  “Where,” she says, “the fuck have you been?” No greeting, no ceremony, she heads straight for the jugular, body tense like a panther's.

  “I needed time to think,” I say lamely. “Went to a party.” Ria snorts.

  “I'm talking to you after I've showered. Heating at my place has gone.” She stomps off to the shower, and I stand rigid for a moment, before following her. Her ocean eyes are smoggy in anger, and her back is to me as she peels off her shirt. My eyes immediately bulge at the scratches along her shoulder blade, and then her stomach.

  “Ria, what the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  She persists in this stubborn attitude. I know I have no right, given what I've just done, but an irrational surge of jealously overtakes me, and I keep pushing her, keep digging.

  Eventually, she snaps, “I went to a party too, when you didn't answer the phone. And I slept with someone.”

  My heart ices over.

  “I was drunk,” she says, twisting her mouth as if she's tasted something bitter. “I'm sorry. I was mad. It seemed like you didn't want to move in. And I just... I don't know what came over me.”

  “You slept with someone? How dare you? I told you, I needed time to think! Why the fuck would you do that? Am I not good enough for you now?”

  I can't help it. Venom and fury spit through my mouth, and the hypocrisy of my rage makes me lean against the wall, shaking. She shrieks back as well, until I spit at her, because she's making me feel awful, that I slept with someone too.

  In that terrible, terrible silence, I know that our relationship is over.

  Chapter Six

  The break up leaves me hollow. Defeated. Unlike the other times, however, when I parted from my potential dates without that much sorrow in my heart, this time there's a chilling coldness inside. It's as if a snowstorm has covered all my organs, leaving me a lethargic, barely functioning human being.

  I've never felt like this before. This is what it means to be heartbroken. Somewhere, deep inside, I had grown attached to Ria. I had loved her. What was meant to be a way out of my addiction ended up evolving into something else. I can't pinpoint the transition. It was just simply me working, then her working, her dating, smiling more, making me smile more, making me look forward to seeing her each day for a reason other than sex... it just changed.

  And, like a complete and utter fool, I shot this gift in the mouth. I lost it. The habits I tried to keep at bay couldn't be fixed simply by practising monogamy.

  My mother wants me to get back with Ria, just so she doesn't have to see my melancholy face day in and day out. And that's saying something, given that she didn't want me hooking up with Ria at all.

  I miss the smell of cinnamon, the mischievous smiles she gave, the way her body felt against mine. I miss the hope she gave me, the feeling that someone might get to know me and actually like what lurked underneath.

  Wendy tells me that she thinks that for the last few months she's been friends with me, she's liked my attitude. Even my bitchy friends, when I go to see them, grudgingly admit that when I was with Ria, I seemed different – less wild and prone to making them feel bad. Maybe this admission came because they were secretly glad I was dating a woman, leaving the selection of men free, but it made me sit down and think.

  Regardless of what I believed, everyone had noticed something different and better about me. Even my mother, who doesn't care at all.

  In a stark gust of clarity, as I'm sitting at home, listlessly staring at the curtains of my small bedroom window, dressed in grizzly-bear pajamas, I realize what the problem is.

  I went into the relationship with Ria for the wrong reason.

  That was why it was doomed to shatter
apart from the start. I come to terms with this thought over the process of the next few weeks, during the radio silence between me and Ria. I notice she hasn't blocked me on anything, and I don't feel inclined to block her. We both made terrible mistakes, but I can't pretend I didn't escalate the situation with my reaction.

  I can't pretend that I'm not a better person with her. I had a dream. A real, shining dream for the first time in my life. More than a just get the fuck out because my mother is annoying kind of dream. More than grabbing someone to sleep with just so I don't end up doing the rounds with the whole city.