Red Lights, Black Hearts

by Fabiola Francisco

  I gyrate my hips against his hand.

  “Is this what you want?” He puts his hand down the front of my jeans and spreads my wetness as he rubs my clit. His lips are still on my neck, my shoulder, biting my lobe. It’s a torturous delight. The hand that was tilting my head is now in my shirt, his warm fingers puckering my nipples.

  At this moment I am a woman with a need far greater than I thought I had. At this moment all thoughts of bitterness evaporate as I allow my body to give in to a pleasure I have not felt in years. This exceeds the pleasure of dominating. This is the pleasure of being wanted. I don’t deserve this but it feels so good.

  Max is gentle. The opposite of my other encounters and I assume it’s deliberate. He wants to mark an importance in my empty soul instead of getting lost in the pumping of my useless heart.

  My shirt lands on the floor. His hands grip my breasts that cover the cavern in my chest. I feel his sexuality spiked in my lower back. A sense of control washes over me. I turn around to tear his shirt off, and run my hands down his chest. This is the most exposed I’ve seen him. Me, he’s used to seeing me in nothing but lingerie, showcasing my assets to anyone who wants a peek. I’m expensive, but not inaccessible.

  Not tonight. Tonight I’m free. The cost of this encounter is his heart. That’s a far more priceless possession than bills. I would know.

  Our mouths collide, hands wander, and passion fires between us. His gentleness is gone now replaced with a desperate need for more. His ravaging a telltale that he’s been loyal to a woman who hasn’t been loyal to him, nor plans to. This is a fleeting thought as his body rubs against mine and it causes a surprising reaction from me.

  Passionate. That describes Max tonight. Determined.

  Me. I’m delusional.

  I grab hold of his member and pump him, indulging in the groans he makes. This is my way of control. His desire at my fingertips. His release dependent upon me.

  “Fuck, Sam. Don’t tease me,” he growls.

  “This is my playhouse.” I push him back.

  “This isn’t a game anymore.” He stands firm. He grabs hold of my hair and pulls me towards him, tongue invading my mouth.

  I don’t remember the last time I was kissed. Kissing is made of emotions. Emotions are made of illusion. Illusions are for the believers. The people who have faith. I rip away from him.

  Before he can protest, I get on my knees and swallow his cock. I suck and lick from base to tip. Max is a man after all, he will fall prey to me if it comes to a battle of heart and wits.

  He yanks me back up. It’s a seesaw of power barely balancing on a cylinder of overcharged emotions.

  I push him onto the bed, but he reaches for me so we both land in a heap of heavy breathing and sexual tension.

  “Don’t fight this. Flow with it. Allow yourself to feel and find something other than the lies you’ve been feeding yourself.”

  He kisses me again, rolling over so I’m pinned beneath him. His weight crushing me just enough to keep me captive as he rolls his hips into me and rubs his erection against my sensitive opening.

  “I’m going to fuck you,” he whispers into my ear. “You want dirty. I’ll pretend to play by your rules.” He rubs himself against me again. My legs fall open on either side to fit him better and a moan escapes me.

  The next time he thrusts his hips he enters me wildly and mercilessly. I don’t fight him anymore. I surrender. Just like I did earlier. I allow him to take what he wants. All I feel right now is the pleasure caused by his body and the excitement of both controlling and being controlled. A controversy I have been avoiding for so long. With Max it feels right.

  He hits every spot inside me most men don’t know exists. He pleases me with purpose yet is gentle in his actions. He’s a combination of my greatest fear and my most desired experience. He is perfectly balanced in what to do and say and how to. He is dangerous with his knowledge of me without me even giving in to his antics.

  My body reacts, wiping all thought from my brain. I close my eyes to pretend I’m behind that window and I’m fucking a client whose wife won’t satisfy him. I close my eyes and try to imagine anything but the man above me. I close my eyes, but all I see is light shining on my darkness, creating a beautiful shade of indigo.

  My orgasm washes over me as this shade of blue swirls in my imagination, causing it to react to emotions. I lock them out. Emotions are for the weak. Indifference. I want my indifference back.

  Max grunts and thrusts into me, his own release following mine. Gone is the demanding man. He’s been replaced with the gentle soul who thinks there’s good in the world. Except he’s lying in bed with someone who knows how ugly that world really is.

  “Don’t run.”

  Silence.

  “I told you once you could wash away the stains from your soul. What you don’t see is the beauty held within those stains.”

  “Stains are not something found in beauty. They are reminders of the pieces of you that have been torn apart against your will.”

  “Again, so vague.”

  “So nosy.”

  He doesn’t leave. He stays wrapped in my sheets as sleep takes over him. I stare at the ceiling. Sleep a distant thought. I can’t give Max what he wants. I’m not the saving soul he thinks I am. I repeat this to myself. I’m not a damaged person that needs fixing. I am the enemy. I am the one that creates the damage as a result of the experiences I was forced into. I am the person who doesn’t want to seek refuge in another person out of fear that the hurt will be the final strike in destroying me altogether.

  I am also part of the person that crawled out. The one who remembers a distant dream and happiness. I am a combination of personalities bound to one body. I am the catastrophe Max doesn’t need and the hope he’ll get if he sets me free.

  I’ve tried for silence. What I get is an overflow of words. Guilt. Hatred. Frustration. Everything but indifference. Memories resurface. Blood smeared in my thoughts. More hatred.

  People are made to hope. They are created to fight. Fight gives you adrenaline. Adrenaline pushes you forward. Moving forward gives you drive to be better. I’m not made of hope; therefore, I don’t strive for perfection.

  I live in my own madness that keeps me sane. I don’t seek refuge to pretend my reality is better than it is. I simply know the facts of life without a mask clouding my vision. I’ve been in the center of the storm and I fought the demon until his blood was splayed on my floor. I have been that person lost in the night and that person swallowed by insanity. I have grieved. I have fought. I have given up. I have found my strength unconventionally. I have seen the face of disgust and risen above it. I have come too far to fall again.

  “You’re even beautiful in the morning,” his hoarse voice vibrates against the silence in my room, fighting to be heard.

  “Beauty is a myth created by the beholder.”

  “Then leave me to believe my own myth.”

  “Myths are the companion of those who refuse to see the world for what it is.”

  “It’s all about perspective.”

  I roll out of bed and walk straight to the shower. Max doesn’t follow me. Being with Max last night felt like a salvation I don’t deserve. Being with me will be a torture he never asked for.

  We’re both masochists.

  I knew Max would be gone by the time I got out of the shower, but my surprise is seeing a note left for me on my small kitchen counter.

  It’s all relative.

  I go for a run to wash away the scent of Max off my soul. The cold air will freeze it until it is a block of ice that shatters on the ground.

  I focus on my step. The pounding of my feet crushing the icy, cold ground. One, two. One, two. Harder. Forget. One, two. One, two. Pump indifference through my system. One, two. One, two. His breath on my skin. I squeeze my eyes shut but the memory of last night has taken over my senses. The memory has triggered a fantasy. Is it real or not? Is it considered real when fantasy has taken the form
of reality?

  One, two. Left, right. If I focus on that, I will block out the rest. I don’t understand how people march, left, left, left, right, left. If you’re constantly stepping with just your left foot, you are stuck in place until that one lousy right comes along offering you just one step forward to once again root you in that spot.

  When I’m frozen from the inside out, I walk into The Bulldog for a coffee. I keep my hoody on and sit at a corner chair as I observe people coming in here for all sorts of things, including weed this early in the day.

  It’s all relative.

  I think about Max’s note. Everyone has a choice to see things differently. You have a choice to see beauty or fear. You have a choice to wear rosy colored glasses, or to view the world without the rainbow adding a distraction to observe in awe.

  He sees beauty in me because he doesn’t see the true me. He sees what he wants me to be. The person behind the glass that uses it as a hideaway. He sees the woman who secretly wishes to be saved. I’m neither. I work behind that glass because I soar on the control I get in that room. That doesn’t mean I need saving.

  I shake my head. Enough thinking. Thinking only gets you into trouble. Look what happened when I stopped thinking. I took back the reins of my life. I acted skillfully so and destroyed the disease that was eating me up alive.

  I pay for my coffee and chug a glass of water before I jog back to my apartment. I’m a contradiction to myself. I believe indifference is a dangerous place and here I am wishing I were put in the center of that danger versus the thawing of my emotions. The thing is that when you reach such depth of indifference, you care nothing about life, yourself, or consequences because nothing is worse than the shit you’ve been through.

  It’s better to be pursued by a human than haunted by a ghost. Humans move, get bored, die. Ghosts. They have infinite time to torture you with their memory—their scent, their intense stare, their touch.

  Max is a human. I can quickly move along life without his memory. But the scars caused by my past are phantoms that move throughout me. I walk through them, chills rising on my skin as the memory of pain tears down my indifference. That same pain can be caused by a being that lives in this material world. This is why connections are irrelevant. They are meant to comfort you but will tear you apart. Leave me to live my life in the purgatory behind my glass wall that allows me to see the world without the world seeing me.

  But that same human, who I think I can so easily leave behind, is the one that has caused me to feel. He is the person that for a split second saw beyond the crystal because I was vulnerable. Therefore, my purgatory has been high jacked, invaded by someone who believes in the magic of life.

  I dance again, my daily routine, my sanity. The beat is never ending on the inside of my mind as it pushes me around. Where my mind goes, my body will follow. My mind goes to a beat that drums uniquely. My body moves to it, keeping a tempo.

  My bystanders’ minds focus on my body. Their bodies follow their thoughts, drawing them into my haven. My next client enters, clearing his throat, before I can close the drapes. From the window I see a figure half lit by the red lights.

  I meet his eyes across the window and see him trying to reach into my soul, trying to lighten my heart. He thinks it’s possible but it’s not. There isn’t more to me than a woman who prostitutes herself for the sheer pleasure of getting off on a dick. Proving him wrong, I turn to see my next client standing at the door and return my gaze to Max. I walk up to the window, close the curtains in his face, and turn.

  After last night, he expects me to stop. I know that look. It’s the look of betrayal. We had sex, nothing more. We slept in the same bed, but not together.

  You’re beautiful. His words haunt me. I’m not beautiful. I’m seductive because I have learned to use my assets to control the masses. Beauty is different. Beauty is a mask to hide imperfections we don’t want the world to view.

  I look at my client, his pudgy figure less of an attraction. He smiles and I inhale deeply. This is not like my usuals. Every now and then a less than attractive man will walk in, and as a professional you suck it up. Closing my eyes, the person I visualize is neither pudgy nor balding. He’s tall and lean, with the shadow of a beard and blue eyes. He’s the man I just shut away.

  When people are hurt they say hateful things. When people are scared and threatened, they act in a way that pushes others away. I’m a tornado that destroys everything in her path. He is the sun that shines after the storm has demolished hope.

  Max never came in tonight. I didn’t expect him to. The look on his face when I shut him out was enough to make me think I’d never see him again. Instead, he waits for me to finish and walks me home in silence. That is worse than never seeing him again. For once, I feel shame for my actions. For once, I feel guilty.

  “Goodnight,” he says and turns to walk away. I want to apologize, but I can’t. When did I start becoming accountable for someone else’s feelings? When we made a connection. That was when.

  Growing up, I hated disappointing people. I would try to stay within the lines of good to not disappoint my mother. I would follow the arrows pointing in the direction the world wanted me to follow in order to not disappoint my peers. I hated the feeling of knowing I had disappointed someone, until I was on the receiving end of disappointment. For someone who tried to keep peace, it was hard receiving the emotion I tried so hard not to cause in others. It was always a failure waiting to happen. At one point we always disappoint another because we are humans. We make mistakes, and we don’t always agree with each other’s actions. However, that first wave of disappointment brought about a tsunami into my life until I became numb to the feeling and careless to the action.

  That necessity I had as a little girl is back. Seeing Max’s disillusionment reminded me why I never liked making someone feel that way. It triggered that little girl who looked into her mother’s eyes and saw sadness for cheating on a spelling test because she was too scared to let her down by failing. Sometimes we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

  I stare at the specks of light again in my room. There are more than the other night. I count them often. That keeps my mind focused on one thing instead of the storm in my mind. It keeps me focused on something else besides the light trying to shine hope in my world.

  The morning light brings more confusion than clarity. I spent the night viewing Max’s face across the window, hauntingly beautiful.

  I get up and suit up for a run. I jog down the stairs and use the last steps to stretch my calves before braving the cold.

  When I return from my run, I push open the door to my building and kick forward an envelope. I pick it up to place in the receiver’s mailbox but see my name written across the front. No address. No stamp. Hand delivered.

  I open it knowing who it is from and pull out a black piece of paper. In silver ink, it says, Everything has the ability to receive light. Hold it up to the sun.

  I step back outside, holding the paper up like a young child uncovering the most mysterious truth. Through small piercings on the paper, the sunlight shines. I turn it over, looking at the paper as if waiting for it to disappear.

  On the back, he wrote, The Moon needs the Sun just as the Sun needs the Moon. Earth needs both to light its path.

  I tuck it away as chills cover my skin. I blame it on the cold, but his words affect me. It all comes back to connections. The Sun, Moon, and Earth are all connected. He and I are connected. I can deny it or accept it.

  I run up the stairs, breathless, and hide the envelope under my mattress.

  Do you ever feel like you’re spiraling out of control? Like the hold you had on the world and yourself was ripped out of your hands and everything you thought you knew is no longer so? Like all this time you were the one living in a fantasy of denial and the fantasy you thought was made up by the weak was the true reality? How do you know the difference between real and pretend? In the end, does it really come down to perception
and we all just live in our imagination?

  I perceive the world as dark and my heart tainted, but in the eyes of another I am beautiful and whole. It the end, our own experiences attract us to what we need and to believe what we want of the world and its people.

  “You received my letter.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I did.” I close the drapes, still not facing the man who is slowly awakening more of me. I’ve been off today. My rhythm different, and my conquests distracted, mirroring my own behavior.

  “You’re the moon, living in the darkness of the universe, but you light up the night sky on Earth.”

  “Actually, the sun is what causes the moon to shine.”

  “The sun just uncovers the beauty the moon hides in the dark.”

  We’ve barely spoken in two days and this is what he comes to say. He approaches me, his eyes stuck on mine despite my body being on full exposure for him. This is out of my comfort zone. A man preferring to look into my soul and discover it than reach into my body and own it.

  He wipes away my hair, and runs his hand down my face to cup my cheek. His lips touch mine briefly.

  “Goodnight, Mond.” This is the first time I hear him speak German. Of course he would save it for something intimate like the moon.

  He only granted me five minutes of his time, which is ironic for me to feel duped when he’s the one paying for mine.

  I walk home in the cold after a long night of dancing and seducing. A night that felt endless with the taste of a man’s kiss that was inaccessible. No one has ever kissed me with the subtle fierceness Max has. That spiral continues to drag me under, forcing me to see through the haze.

  Maybe a lack of control is needed to force us to open our eyes. Or it just uncovers the truth that has been lingering. The opposite would be lies. Lies. They poison you with resentment for hiding the truth from you as if you were too weak to embrace it. Meant to protect you, they destroy you. The first time I felt like I had spiraled out of control was when those lies of my past were uncovered. The truth of people revealed.