I didn’t know. I stretch. I am tired, just coming home from working a double shift. It’s too much. It’s much too much. Well, I can’t tell if it’s all too much and not enough at the same time, but it is for him. So it has long been over. He’d made that clear two years ago, and I’d been unfaithful among other things so who could blame him. Except that it wasn’t, it never was. It’s just different now.
He says he’ll be over in forty-five minutes, so I light a beige candle next to my bed that promises to breathe like creamy, Tahitian coconut and sandy beaches. I jump in the shower before rushing to smooth down the messiness of my apartment and paint my face on. I’m in a hurry, fumbling with the brushes, powders and Mac’s Matchmaster SPF 15 foundation in the tan shade number six, that collectively I hope will have the same effect as an Instagram filter. Except I don’t smell coastal shorelines, only smoke. I poke my head around my bathroom door to investigate and there’s a fucking fire in my bedroom. The tropical candle has exploded and the bed skirt and my gray comforter with its red and white Japanese blossoms are alit with a flame that now reaches the ceiling. The smoke filling the room is heavy and my eyes are weeping from it. Even the box spring is catching sparks.
I’m still naked, but I dart outside, tits free, to grab my empty trash can at the end of my stairs and fill it from the spigot with water, all adrenaline, and hard nipples. It’s the first week of spring, and we had our last big snow. It’s sunny, but the ground is freezing cold and the furrows and grooves of my dirt driveway still have ice and thin slicks of snow in these serrated cracks. One full trashcan later, the fire is out and I’m left with little time to prepare.
He arrives when he said he would, punctual to a fault. I explain away the damp floor at the end of my bed, the campfire smell and the fire. He raises a bushy, straw-colored brow as if to say ‘see, this is the much I’m talking about’. Since he’s arrived, there is no more time allowed for preparation, so I crawl in bed next to him.
I put on a DVD, some independent film I picked up at Rite Aid out of the five dollar clearance bin. Neither of us watches much television, but he’s a brilliant photographer and an activist so I know he’ll appreciate it. Regardless of its placement on the selling aisle, it won numerous awards for its cinematographic efforts to expose genocide. He’s already taken off the worn, black jeans he always wears and stretches out across my bed. He’s gentle, and he raises my body up to heaven like it’s a holy vessel and his mouth begins its first descent into me. I spread myself and relax because this is one thing we absolutely never got wrong.
After it’s over, he holds me. We’re lying there and he’s got this wideness about him. There’s this broad range of the tenor of his voice, disposition, caresses, the way he drags his rich lower lips across the curve of my shoulder, right above my collar bone. His eyes are icy and silver like the color of shucked oysters and his chest is much hairier than I remember. He smells like salt and spicy perspiration. The antagonist on screen broods and hunts down his former lover because she’s different from him. The camera pans to wringing of hands and the biting of lower lips as our heroine hunches under a desk, praying for her life to the god they want to kill her for believing in. She can’t believe her lover would betray her this way.
We’re laying loin to groin in unlikely capitulating saccharinity, and somehow it’s just familiar. He’s known me, all these years. My neurosis, the way my little belly creases over into itself when I lean back on my hip. He knows I’m insecure because my mom left me and have struggled with intimacy and that my legs are always hairy. He has listened unwearyingly to all the times I cried when I worry about making rent and overworking myself. He’s watched me brushing my crooked teeth over messy bathroom sinks and laughed at the African print scarf I wrap around my head every night before I sleep. I smile to myself because I know him too. Even now in this friendship, we are navigating he gives me respect and the comfort of his body. He gives me what I ask for, what I say I need. Why? A question he often poses when questioning if we should even remain friends at all. It is a question I’m asking myself right now.
There’s a rapid-fire knock at my door. We both jump. He visibly recoils thinking it must be another man, and as I wrap a blanket around my middle I want to turn back and tell him that he’s my friend now and I’ll never injure him again. Except I can’t endure that gut sick ache in his eyes so I don’t look back. I just can’t.
But it’s only two cops, responding to a complaint about a naked woman roaming the neighborhood. They are simply performing a wellness check. It’s two police officers who have been to every neighboring house looking for this woman and all of my neighbors referred them here. And there I am naked, wrapped in just a blanket. There’s a whole speech about the perils of enforced modesty in a rape culture playing in my mind. I’m ready to tell them that my naked body is something to be celebrated and not feared, that a woman’s body should not be illegal. But they’re laughing and I’ve already had a near forest fire at the foot of my bed, so I laugh and explain myself while lying to them I will never again venture out of my house with no clothes. I close the door and turn to explain that things aren’t always this way, but when we were together, they had been. He’s unfazed, watching the script of names and their attached job descriptions scrolling along the screen. We missed the climax of the movie in the commotion.
“Are you trying to start it over,” he asks about the movie, settling back into the pillows.
“No,” I answer, “we’ve seen enough violence, we’re starting something new.” I’m talking about something else entirely, but that’s the truth of it.
Author: Jenn Kelly
Email: [email protected]
Author Bio: Jenn Kelly is an artist currently living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She writes poems, essays and creative, while also working with the mediums of photography, mixed-media collage and abstract painting through the expression of oil paints.
Link to social media or website: http://instagram.com/blackbettyk
