by Elle Nash
“I HAVE REALLY STRONG FEELINGS FOR YOU.”
Matt moved away from my face, his eyes holding this innocent, childish look. In the mix of UV and dark and flashing lights, I felt dizzy. The lights flashed white; he put his hand on my waist and moved his fingers up the hem of my shirt. The bridge piercing between his eyes reflected every flash and my cloud-covered high zoomed in on the perfect intensity of his lips. He gripped the side of me, began to massage my skin, and the ocean feeling came back. The lights flashed purple, the music beat against me, the sweat on his chest was coming through his shirt. I stared at the tattoos on his upper arms, his chest, his eyes, his lips. The lights flashed a pale blue. I fell into him and placed my lips against his and we kissed and it was warm and the boundary dissolved between us until in the music there were just the two of us and no one else. Then the adrenaline rush, water hitting air and wet sand, waves cresting. It moved through my body, from the place where I bit my lip down to my core.
The music reverberated against the walls like a hymn through a large, empty church. I pulled away from him, feeling drunk, like I was inside a very humid cloud. My vision bludgeoned from his touch. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me closer, said he wanted to make love to me, not just animal-fuck. I put my hands together in prayer and he kept his hands wrapped around my wrists. I wanted his hands to squeeze tighter, to crush the bones into a single mass.
In the deep house beat with all the lights flashing, I kept my eyes closed and my hands in prayer and thought Daddy.
“I want to get closer to you,” he said. “Want to know you. Want to run away.” Matt pressed his body against mine through the heavy fog that felt so good. He said the words again, one by one, into my mouth.
“We could run away together, you know?” he said. “A place with evergreens growing, a place we can sleep in every Sunday morning. I’ll put you through college, whatever you want. Take me with you there.”
There were bruises on my body from the way we’d all been fucking. I pulled my hands out of prayer. “I want that too,” I said, chewing my tongue. “I want to feel like you own me, like you have all of me.” He looked so good in this moment with his heart beating sweat out of his chest and his pouty lips and because he was a father, whatever that reason was. Because I could hear the way Frankie called him Daddy, and I wanted to possess those moments the way she seemed to possess them so effortlessly.
The next morning I had another text from Patrick.
—whats up whatcha doing?
—not much, headed back to springs, I wrote back.
—have u ever seen frankie threaten m? I added.
I folded my phone over and over in my lap, seated next to Jenny on the drive back from the rave. The sun painted the trailer park all of the beautiful pastel colors of dawn. At home, I drank water hungrily and searched my room for candy or some lollipop to satiate my grinding teeth. Goa seemed like an appropriate soundtrack for my comedown, so I turned on a playlist and lay in bed to think about Matt and our moment, the way his fingers feathered over my skin in the flashing lights, his mouth hot in my ear and the words repeating over and over again.
I want to get closer to you.
I want to get closer to you.
I want to get closer to you.
Frankie was nowhere to be found. We were alone, my hands on his arms. I was lost in the visceral snap of hot air and the electric lights.
I want to get closer to you.
I was still pretty high. The skinfeeling of Matt’s body burned against me, a shadow echo of the night. I felt like his skin was still in my hands and mouth. Each minute of the comedown, the feeling became sand against my palms, my body became beach water, wet, lapped against the shores of his disintegrated body. The vignettes moved through my body in lulled pulses until I could no longer take it. I chewed what remained of the lollipop, chewed through the stick, and dug into my closet looking for art supplies, throwing boxes of torn-up magazines, old glue sticks, and paints onto the floor.
I settled on a small piece of cottonwood I collected from a car accident I got into once. I hit this log in the road while driving to work, thinking that it would go right in between my tires. I misjudged. The wood swung right up into my wheel well and popped up the driver’s side of the car. The tire was blown. I was right near work, so I stopped on the side of the road and called Sam to tell him I’d be late.
In five minutes, he had pulled up in his ’99 Camaro. It was cold and overcast and we could see our breath. I did not ask who was watching the store while he was there, jacking the car up. He tried pulling the lug nuts off with his bare hands and scraped his knuckles on the asphalt.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. The smell of burning tires rushed by on the asphalt. The way cold air makes things louder, sound travels faster. The way cold air sharpens the way everything feels.
Sam, in his fleece jacket, lanyard hanging out of his pocket.
“Shut up,” he said.
Sam didn’t see it, but I walked into the road to retrieve the piece of wood. Some kind of talisman for a time when someone cared for me. The way love is a power. The way it’s uneven, it can be abused. Here was somebody doing something nice for me in a way that no one else had before. Me and that daddy-shaped hole. His breath hit the air, making little clouds as he breathed.
Eventually he got the tire off and the donut on the car. I made it to work and back home that night
The Goa was still playing in my room and the drugs were wearing off. If I rubbed my skin or myself the right way, I still got little electric tingles through my body. If I let myself focus on the part of Matt I loved the most, his pouty lips, the cupids bow, I could close my eyes and let it flower into his face, face soaked into soft neck and neck into body. Hands into hair. I touched my hips, felt my pelvic bones and the raised scar tissue of the tattoo on my belly and thigh. The new skin, I felt my hand touch it, and I grabbed, tried to grab the way Matt would, the way he would sink his nails in and almost rip.
I pulled out my phone and composed a text message in the hopes of securing his attention.
—i fucking want you
Looking at the words on the screen, they seemed too aggressive. I deleted them and tried for something else.
—what could you possibly be doing other than thinking about me
That still wasn’t right.
—are you thinking about me?
Too needy.
—what are you doing?
Which didn’t get to the heart of what I wanted, which was:
—can’t you just talk to me instead of be with her
I deleted that too, and then,
—does she let you choke her
I watched the blinker blinking text and then deleted it.
I put my phone away, lay down, and finally slept.
HURT ME IF YOU WANT TO HURT ME
HOW DOES AN OBSESSION grow? Slowly, like a mold? The spores settle unseen and then blooms form, devouring any open brainscape. The genitals become infected quickly. I’m not sure how this process works exactly. A feedback loop. Mycelium reaches out, ridge by beating ridge, a thought, a heart rate rises, a feeling like sex or love, then another thought. Each pulse a quickening like river beneath the soil.
I could feel Matt there in my head, a bloom connecting to other toxic parts of me. I woke up manic. The pulsing thoughts kept pushing my muscles toward action, so I had to keep moving my hands, grabbed the piece of cottonwood and broke it into pieces. I carved into the wood with a knife. It felt so good to tense my fingers around this tiny object, to feel the wood rub against the ditches of my hands, the give of each chip or shaving. I held it in my hands, nicks and cuts on my knuckles, my muscles so tense they went numb. I tried to make a heart. Eventually I had something in the shape of a deformed egg. There was blood on my fingers and stuck to the wood. It seemed appropriate, blood on a misshapen heart. That I had failed to bring my vision to fruition made it an appropriate symbol of my struggle with Matt. That I had recycled
a talisman from someone else also seemed accurate, like something I would do.
I looked for sandpaper in my closet to smooth out the rough edges. There were divots in the wood that I couldn’t work into. The blood on my hands, I rubbed it into the cottonwood. I figured I could paint over it, and my blood was a good gift to give Matt.
My phone vibrated. It was Patrick.
—sometimes, frances does get violent, idk. its kinda crazy.
—idgi. why?
—shes just a control freak. you know? she gets angry when she can’t have her way.
Matt started coming by during my breaks at work. He called during his lunch breaks to ask if I was working the evening shift, and I usually was. I saw him walking up before he got into the store. The sky was this blue-gray color, the sun setting. You never see it set on the horizon here. It sets over the mountains—Pikes Peak, specifically, the closest mountain to the city. Everyone moves here because they think it’s beautiful, but it’s not. It’s not romantic, because the city is full of decrepit buildings that crowd the view. Dozens of car-sale complexes sit in the foothills, and behind that, the houses of rich people who never have to drive into the potholed neighborhoods below.
Matt had his hands in his hoodie pockets and followed his feet with his eyes. We locked stares through the glass when he got to the door. I finished ringing up the customer I had and turned to look at Jenny at the other register, her bangs in her face, ringing up video games and smiling at customers. Without missing a beat, she nodded at me.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll cover you.”
I stopped in the backroom to quickly check my phone.
—what are you doing tonight?
Another text from Patrick.
—can’t talk now, later sweet thing I texted back. I had begun using pet names to tempt him into opening up to me, to gather intel.
Outside in the cold, I shivered in my polo and khakis even though the sun was shining. A sudden cold snap had hit. We were just around the corner of the building, out of sight. Matt stood an arm’s length away from me and I leaned against the concrete of the building, resting my head against the wall.
“I love coming to see you,” Matt said.
I moved closer to him. I wanted to feel the bass of his voice reverberate through his chest when he said the words “love” and “you.”
“I want to see you alone,” I said. “Like, more often, not just this.”
I knew I was crossing a line. It was something I felt I shouldn’t demand, as the other woman. As a woman trying to get something from him. He had to want to give things to me.
“We will,” he said. “I’m trying to find time.”
I asked myself if he really loved Frankie. If maybe he wanted me because I treated him more sweetly. I asked nothing of him. When you don’t live with someone, you don’t get to see their imperfect facets. The mean side of them. The impatient, ungrateful side. Those things are revealed later, often when it’s too late. It was easy to see why he might want me, why I might be an uncomplicated addition to his life. I was molding myself to some image, trying to be better than what he already had. In these limited moments, he was able to project what he wanted onto me. I was happy to let him have whatever idea of me he wanted. Jealousy came from the fear of being replaced. I was The Replacer.
“It’s just harder now to control my feelings,” I told him, an unusual admission of truth. I had thought the truth would set me free, but it had not. I felt more trapped than before. The brainbloom of my obsession with him took up too much space in my head. I had become attached, and there was nothing I could do to go back.
I did not know what I expected him to say. I hooked my finger into his belt loop, tugged him a little closer to me. I bit my bottom lip and looked up at him. It was like a math equation, the way to charm him.
“Don’t you want me?” I asked.
I wanted to see what kind of sway I had over him. Our bodies near each other. In my head, we could be falling for each other and that meant I was winning. I had a feeling he would leave Frankie. He seemed to want to escape her. I wanted to escape the city. I saw no reason why we couldn’t run away together. We could move away from this town, away from Frankie, away from Sam, from the jobs we had and the blight of Colorado Springs and my mom’s trailer. A place of our own, our own wraparound velvet couch in some garden-level apartment. I even imagined taking the baby. We would be a family. Someday, he and I would share that one-bedroom apartment with Jett in the crib.
Someday I’d be calling Matt Daddy and he’d answer only to me.
“I do, I want you,” he said, his pouty mouth soft and relaxed. “I just need some time.”
A few weeks had passed since the rave. His hair had grown longer, enough to run my fingers through it.
I put my hand inside my pocket and fished out the wooden egg-heart. I felt it with its divots and jagged edges and clenched my fingers around it, fitting the whole of it into the palm of my hand. I clutched Matt’s own hand and spread his fingers open, watched his eyes as he looked down at what I was doing. I placed it into his palm and pushed each finger down until his hand made a fist around it. It felt like I was always waiting for him to put his hands on my neck. There was nothing I didn’t want to give him. I wanted him to hurt me if he wanted to hurt me. I wanted to explore the limits of my own pain, to push my psychological limits. I’d never been scared of the power of men before him. When he said he needed time, I resolved to give it to him.
It was the first time I was truly vulnerable with someone else. It was the first time I was so wild in my lust that I lost myself, let myself fall in love without worrying about the consequences. I just wanted to be vulnerable, to let the restrictions go and let someone else control me, to be ripped open raw. Dick-drunk fucked into love.
“I want you to know every part of me,” I said. I chewed on my tongue and wondered if it would always feel this way, illegal. Matt looked down at the heart in his hands and took a deep breath in.
“I think I’m falling in love with you, Lilith,” he said.
Matt’s shadow shielded the setting sun. The way he was standing, a halo of light hovered just behind his head. The closest we could be was fucking when Frankie was watching, her hands on my thighs. We had never been alone long enough to have sex just the two of us. I knew I was romanticizing the longing too much, but I wanted the pain. My heart was beating too hard. I wanted it to be wrong. Our moments, we’d keep them. I thought it would win him over, that it was what he wanted. That’s what I thought in that moment, like I was in a fucking romance novel, saying stupid shit like I want you to know every part of me.
I reasoned with myself by attempting to lie. I told myself it wasn’t my attraction to him that was making me feel this way, but that I was addicted to doing the wrong things. Breaking the rules felt wrong at first, but it was exciting. It raised the stakes. I liked to do drugs, so it was only natural I would also like to do other bad things. Sleeping with Sam, my boss. Hiding the relationship with this couple from Sam and my mom and everybody. Stealing my mother’s drugs. Sleeping with Jenny, who was supposed to be a friend. Breaking the rules by being emotional with Frankie, and then going behind her back with Matt. The last and final rule: don’t fall in love with a taken man. A man who is a father, who is committed not just through lust but through his own blood.
Yes. It had to be that. I was just a rule-breaker. Girl from dirt, not from rib. I looked at Matt, not into his eyes. I looked at his third-eye spot. Matt said it again: “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
I didn’t say it back.
THE SATANIC BIBLE SAYS MAN IS JUST ANOTHER ANIMAL
I’M PRETTY SURE THE meaning of life is about sex. Otherwise, why do we suffer so much for it? Why do guys get jobs they hate? Why do men marry women they don’t like? Why do girls do the stupid shit they do? Why do they all seem so fucking unhappy? This whole game is just a giant trick to get us to fuck each other and make more ugly people until the Earth burns
. Solve et coagula. People die, they become dirt, people are born, they suffer, they fuck, give birth, die, dirt. Over and over again. Everything in between is us running away from it. Even if you never make babies, there’s some bullshit in your blood that just pushes you to fuck people. The sooner we all accept that, the easier our lives will be.
When I talked to Jenny, it wasn’t because I loved her. That is in-between shit. That is crazy-making. It is the shit that makes me drink, probably, my daddy-shaped hole. Really, I just couldn’t stop thinking about the way her body felt against mine.
Like with Patrick. Why was I naïve enough to think he just wanted to be friends?
Maybe I wasn’t that naïve.
Attention feels so good. Surely some god made me like this. Otherwise, why the fuck was I chasing it so hard?
When I gave Patrick my number, what I wanted was information about Matt and Frankie. I knew that some biological undercurrent would pull him toward me. He was in his early twenties. I was nineteen.
I also knew about the situation with his cousin. I texted him about it because I was too much of a coward to ask in person. are you going to be with her forever, why don’t you just move away from your family and get married?
It seemed as though he wasn’t very happy with her. Maybe it wasn’t true love after all. That was disappointing. I had hoped it was true love, that something like that could exist. Instead, it was just sex. Like everything else.
This was confirmed when Patrick texted me the very same words Matt whispered against my ear. It did not have nearly the same effect.
—i really like you, said the message.
I tried so hard to get Sam’s attention and he was so fucking stingy with it. He was on and off ignoring me. And here was Matt, and his friend Patrick—these two men whose lives I just showed up in and they were perfectly willing to give me all of the attention I wanted. I wondered if this was how Frankie felt, being in control all the time.