Backwards: a fiction
Mar. 28th, 2007 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldThe following mostly-original fictional sketch[*] is intended for mature audiences only. It contains graphic language and frank expressions referring to certain sexy behaviors. It may be inappropriate reading for small children, several teenagers, certain adults, many senior citizens, most pets and almost all household appliances.
Backwards
Glossy pictures of her stuck to his fingers as he shuffled them in silence.
God damn this furnace, he thought. Sweating through his cotton shirt on what was otherwise an icy night, Jeff momentarily fretted about his hair and whether it was still laying flat. He was careful not to lean back, not only because it would be so easy for him to fall asleep right now, but because to do so would seriously mess with his coif.
Sandy brown and impeccably trimmed – except for the scratchy brush collecting on the back of his neck – Jeff's hair was the perfect touch to his crisp profile. Sarah once speculated with a chuckle that Jeff's silhouette was the inspiration for the Tomah Golf and Racquet Club logo. Jeff would probably have blushed at this, back then, had one been able to see the circulation of blood behind his deep olive tan. He was paler now, and it felt like his shirts were suddenly two sizes too small.
Sarah always protested that she didn't care about Jeff's hair and his body and his naturally musky aromas. But Jeff didn't entirely believe her. To believe that she could see something in Jeff beneath his sepia glow was unfathomable to him and, if ever comprehended, would only shatter his self-concept. And anyway, did he ever offer her anything else to see? Sharp stings of regret vibrated in his temples.
In case she walked in at that moment, a powerful part of him wanted to look good, just in case, as a reward for her coming back. And in case someone came to call and said she was gone for good, he wanted to be able to pretend that he was going to be just fine.
It would be so much easier if she were dead, he honestly told himself. Certainly much more agreeable than the rumors floating around Tomah about her and that piss-ant piece of trash. That sonofabitch couldn't handle her, would be a waste of her. The thought of that ringed finger on that imperfect hand scraping his back – it nauseated him, and a pinch of bile crept up the column of his throat.
His swelling fury was compressed to fit the head of a pin, leaving only the smallest parcel of space for "I love her." He squinted, relaxed, and rolled his eyes. "Her," he thought, he seethed. Goddammit.
The ring was spectacular, 20 carats of gaudy pride. He remembered how she squealed like a tea kettle when she saw it. The price was exorbitant, even as luxury items go, but at the time it was worth it, if for nothing else to get their folks off his back. Back in the beginning – or maybe it was the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end – he bought it with the idea that he could amortize the cost, with each fuck thereafter being less and less expensive. But it was always worth it.
Sarah was a nuclear-powered submarine in bed, stealthy and sleek and powerful. She blessed you with her body, bending her sex into whatever you wanted until all you wanted was her, every lithe inch. And yet – as athletically exhilarating as the act was – what really got Jeff off was the look in her eyes as she undressed him.
Unbuttoning his shirt, her breath quickens.
Pulling back the curtain, his muscular torso in perpetual candlelight, her eyes widen.
Those eyes follow her fingertips down the trail of tiny, soft hairs between his chest and through his individually-wrapped abdominal muscles, and she surreptitiously licks her lips.
It could have been over quickly, but he always held out for the clench; penetrating her was like drinking lemon juice in the middle of the desert, and her eyes made him thirsty.
In Vancouver, for Aunt Bitsy's wedding just before Thanksgiving, they fucked like death row prisoners. The sex was molecular level, electricity shimmering along supple sheets of sweat and saliva. Heavy breathing, she moans, he grunts, she squeals, he comes, in intervals of thirty minutes.
He stopped asking months ago if she officially came. If she could lie with her body, mid-act, Jeff figured, she could just as easily lie to your face. She had told him that he was her first "real" lover, whatever that meant.
At 2 a.m. Jeff got up from the bed to get a beer and a package of Oreos from the mini-bar. Total: US $12.50. Jesus Christ. "Sarah, do you want something? Water?"
No answer. Jeff filled a tumbler with leftover Evian and ice and strutted back to the bed. Sarah was curled up on the edge of the king sized mattress, wrapped in the comforter. Her body was motionless but her breathing was too uneven for her to be sleeping. Jeff noticed a shiver.
"You feeling okay?" He asked. "Did I hurt you?" The presumption of prowess inherent in that question flashed in front of his face and then dissipated like mist.
"No," curtly. She sounded pissed. What the fuck? Jeff shook his head, took a swig from his Heineken and pouted for a moment, to no one in particular, before slouching further into bed and letting his eyelids droop. As the room went black the bed shook.
Sarah flopped over and looked at him, her aqua eyes glowing in the dark. Squinting,
"Are we getting married?"
The tenor and total of this question threw a gray net over him, and he stared back, dumbfounded. Sarah was a great girl, and she had his ring on her finger, so it was a perfectly fair question. Jeff, however, had been proceeding in the relationship from one square to another, and had not thought to plan his next move yet.
He began to squirm inside the cage. In the next instant his feeble mind constructed a variety of possible extramarital opportunities, and the associated probabilities of his being able to get away with them. Flash to the other side, the vision of her holding a child with sandy brown hair in her arms. And then back to reality, he was once again in the tractor beam of her eyes in which the lust was replaced with a less flattering neediness. Jeff's tongue unfolded but no words came out.
He panicked. He expected the logical follow-up: "Do you love me," a question that he was ill-prepared to answer comprehensively. As he anticipated the question, he looked at her with greater scrutiny and fully swallowed her beauty, and realized that mostly he really wanted to fool around with her again. The room shrunk.
He thought he loved her, but what did he know? He knew he liked her better than anything else in Tomah, better than his parents, better than his friends, better than beer. "I like you better than beer," he thought. The corner of his mouth turned upwards for a moment.
Seriously, now. He stared away, out the window, and slowly swiveled his head back to her. He looked into her eyes, which were still fixed on him, and was suddenly rocked from inside-out when he saw … space. Between the stars and planets and oceans of discovery, there was empty space waiting to be filled. This was the first time he had ever seen the space in her eyes instead of the space between her legs, and for a moment he felt small.
Jeff could not bear the smallness, had never known it. In that second, he resolved to jump in, step in, expand to fill it. This fleshy shell of a girl had chosen him, and it was about time he chose something, even if it was to choose her or not her or something else entirely. The walls disappeared, he effortlessly fell into the space and kept falling.
In that second he chose her, and was immediately overwhelmed by joy and fear and holy shit, here she was asking about marriage and Jesus Christ, I just made this monumental left turn and now she wants to know about a date and a wedding and can't we just celebrate this moment by having sex again?
And he sat there, jaw half open.
But the question never came. Maybe she was thinking it, but perhaps acknowledging Jeff's vacancy, she simply tilted her head a few degrees, "never mind. Good night," sweetly, rolled over again and slid into sleep. The next morning they kissed each other awake, shared a shower and had scones and coffee for breakfast. Jeff kept his epiphany for himself, pushing the fortune back into the cookie for the time being. There was time.
Two weeks later she was gone.
The phone rang and shook Jeff from his waking dream. As he had done for the past week, he expected it to be her.
"I'm sorry," she'd say. "Can I come home?" And he would let her dangle there for a while, asking her the standard questions and making her answer them just to prove that she was wrong. And she'd collapse and fall into his bed and invite him in again. He waited three rings, so she wouldn't think he was waiting by the phone.
But it was only Dr. Andrews. "She's okay, Jeff. She's in Seattle." She had called her folks. But not him.
A deep breath. Silently, "Shit." And he grabbed his keys.
A year and a half ago, he met Sarah at her Dad's Clinic for Beloved Animals, a half-shelter, half-hospital for Fido and the like. Jeff was doing his mom a favor, bringing in a lost kitten that was born under the Jacuzzi and had subsequently adopted the family.
The task was somewhat distasteful to Jeff, who preferred hunting animals to petting them. Furthermore, the damn thing was squirming the whole way there, and he could tell by her turgid belly that she probably had who-knows-what inside her and he didn't want it coming out. He just wanted to drop it off and join the boys at the Uptown.
She looked familiar, standing behind the counter, banging on a calculator. She had her hair pulled back in a hurried ponytail, but some of the auburn tendrils had fallen loose and dangling in front of her eyes. She kept flicking her head back and blowing at the strands, refusing to manually tuck the confederates behind her ear.
It was a good day for a gingham dress and too hot for makeup, and she glowed in the heat like a dream, like MaryAnn from Gilligan's Island after a shitty day over the fire. On her left hand there was a three-inch scar from the third knuckle down to the wrist, and Jeff made up stories in his head about where it came from. Kitchen accident? Clawed by a client? Satanic cult? It looked almost cute.
Jeff couldn't hear her voice but he could see her mouth forming the curse words as she tap-tap-tapped on the plastic keys, teeny-tiny beads of perspiration flinging from her upper lip.
She was in Jeff's English class two years ago, when Jeff was a senior trying to fulfill his graduation requirements and she was a sophomore who still had ambition enough to take AP classes. Jeff didn't realize this coincidence in history until their second date, when she confessed to a schoolgirl crush on him.
Puffing out his chest and consciously wrinkling his brow with concern, he strode up to her and practically threw the kitten onto the counter as if it were a pork chop. The disturbed girl glared up at him through slitted eyes that slowly rounded into form. With his right hand, he gently moved the loose strands of hair behind her left ear. A week later she was in his bed. Two days later, he found out her middle name.
From the beginning it was backwards.
Driving west to Seattle, in his rattling, freezing Miata, he kept seeing her standing in the road, right in front of him. Wearing her gingham dress and a sad smile. The same one from Vancouver. At first he braked, hard, sliding on black ice and stopping short of the image. Through glassy eyes, he saw the ghost dissolve, he caught his breath, and drove on. Every 500 yards the ghost appeared, and after a while he stopped stopping. And then he stopped slowing down.
And he thought of the other man, and his fury grew at the man's knowing what only Jeff was supposed to know, of occupying the space that Jeff had discovered and claimed and owned. And the fury grew darker, as his imagination projected tape loops of him fucking her like Jeff used to fuck her, of his cock in her mouth, played in filthy, grainy quality over and over and over like the Zapruder film.
He began to accelerate through the image of Sarah, the smile looking sadder with every mile marker, though you could barely tell at this speed. Something in him wanted to obliterate that vision of her, conquer it, kill it, flatten it and fold it into something he could use. But he couldn't even touch it.
He made it to Seattle in record time, out of breath and cheeks wet with rain.
December 14. He looked at his watch and held it up to his ear – clearly ticking. He knew the watch was working from the stuttering second-hand – motherfucker better work for two grand – but what he really wanted was to confirm that all his senses were sharp. After two weeks of amateur reconnaissance work she was nowhere. Jeff's gray eyes began to dull at visions of strangers who were not lost like him. Or, rather, like her.
He pushed through the revolving door of the hotel on to the sidewalk outside. The city stunk of coffee and pine trees and the place was teeming with over-insulated College students who didn't have anything to do until second semester started. Oceans of turtlenecks and puff-ball hats and mittens flowed past him as if everything were just fine. In the corner of his vision, on the arm of a bench, he saw a cranberry-colored boot with bright red laces splayed from it, and immediately cursed it, for distracting him.
And the hands appeared, fumbling with the laces, and one of those hands had a scar and a space where a ring used to be, and the hand was Sarah's. Her several layers of sweaters and coats and scarves could not hide the smooth grace of her movement. The sharp focus of her features sliced through the blue-gray Pacific fog. Jeff plodded intently in the direction of her image as the muscles in the small of his back tightened like steel beams. She brushed against him as she straightened, and her incandescent eyes found him again.
She jumped back and whirled at an angle for a moment, a pair of hand-knit mittens fell from her hand, and a pause that lasted a fraction of a second felt like another week. A brisk wind blew through her and into him, seeping through every thread of his sweater, piercing every pore of his body, and his eyes welled up against the daggers of rushing air. And her eyes watered too, even with her back to the wind.
Jeff wanted desperately to believe that it was her heart and not the wind that had pushed her back into his arms. But he didn't care. He pulled her in and lifted her up. Her hot breath felt like steam on his neck, and the muffled squeal sounded like a muted clarinet.
And in the corner of his moist eyes, he saw the back of the other man in a pallid shade of avocado green, thick black hair spurting from a ski cap, a mitten in one hand, cigarette in another. I win, Jeff thought, and closed his eyes.
Sarah squirmed a bit, trying to turn around, but Jeff was stronger, and held her in place, and said "let's go home." He didn't wait for an answer.
Sarah grabbed the keys from the coffee table where Jeff had left them, leaned over and kissed him on the ear. "Going out for a while."
He smiles weakly. He doesn't know where she is going. Whether that white-trash-bag is still clinging to her boots or not, Jeff's pull was stronger and is stronger now than before. He knows now that she is inextricably bound to him, by a thick gravity composed of lust and duty and the fleeting promise of happily ever after.
She is escaping him, but only for moments. She is at the apogee of her orbit, to return after a few revolutions; love, as gravity, is unavoidable. Love is gravity, which is why it hurts when we fall.
Backwards
Glossy pictures of her stuck to his fingers as he shuffled them in silence.
God damn this furnace, he thought. Sweating through his cotton shirt on what was otherwise an icy night, Jeff momentarily fretted about his hair and whether it was still laying flat. He was careful not to lean back, not only because it would be so easy for him to fall asleep right now, but because to do so would seriously mess with his coif.
Sandy brown and impeccably trimmed – except for the scratchy brush collecting on the back of his neck – Jeff's hair was the perfect touch to his crisp profile. Sarah once speculated with a chuckle that Jeff's silhouette was the inspiration for the Tomah Golf and Racquet Club logo. Jeff would probably have blushed at this, back then, had one been able to see the circulation of blood behind his deep olive tan. He was paler now, and it felt like his shirts were suddenly two sizes too small.
Sarah always protested that she didn't care about Jeff's hair and his body and his naturally musky aromas. But Jeff didn't entirely believe her. To believe that she could see something in Jeff beneath his sepia glow was unfathomable to him and, if ever comprehended, would only shatter his self-concept. And anyway, did he ever offer her anything else to see? Sharp stings of regret vibrated in his temples.
In case she walked in at that moment, a powerful part of him wanted to look good, just in case, as a reward for her coming back. And in case someone came to call and said she was gone for good, he wanted to be able to pretend that he was going to be just fine.
It would be so much easier if she were dead, he honestly told himself. Certainly much more agreeable than the rumors floating around Tomah about her and that piss-ant piece of trash. That sonofabitch couldn't handle her, would be a waste of her. The thought of that ringed finger on that imperfect hand scraping his back – it nauseated him, and a pinch of bile crept up the column of his throat.
His swelling fury was compressed to fit the head of a pin, leaving only the smallest parcel of space for "I love her." He squinted, relaxed, and rolled his eyes. "Her," he thought, he seethed. Goddammit.
The ring was spectacular, 20 carats of gaudy pride. He remembered how she squealed like a tea kettle when she saw it. The price was exorbitant, even as luxury items go, but at the time it was worth it, if for nothing else to get their folks off his back. Back in the beginning – or maybe it was the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end – he bought it with the idea that he could amortize the cost, with each fuck thereafter being less and less expensive. But it was always worth it.
Sarah was a nuclear-powered submarine in bed, stealthy and sleek and powerful. She blessed you with her body, bending her sex into whatever you wanted until all you wanted was her, every lithe inch. And yet – as athletically exhilarating as the act was – what really got Jeff off was the look in her eyes as she undressed him.
Unbuttoning his shirt, her breath quickens.
Pulling back the curtain, his muscular torso in perpetual candlelight, her eyes widen.
Those eyes follow her fingertips down the trail of tiny, soft hairs between his chest and through his individually-wrapped abdominal muscles, and she surreptitiously licks her lips.
It could have been over quickly, but he always held out for the clench; penetrating her was like drinking lemon juice in the middle of the desert, and her eyes made him thirsty.
In Vancouver, for Aunt Bitsy's wedding just before Thanksgiving, they fucked like death row prisoners. The sex was molecular level, electricity shimmering along supple sheets of sweat and saliva. Heavy breathing, she moans, he grunts, she squeals, he comes, in intervals of thirty minutes.
He stopped asking months ago if she officially came. If she could lie with her body, mid-act, Jeff figured, she could just as easily lie to your face. She had told him that he was her first "real" lover, whatever that meant.
At 2 a.m. Jeff got up from the bed to get a beer and a package of Oreos from the mini-bar. Total: US $12.50. Jesus Christ. "Sarah, do you want something? Water?"
No answer. Jeff filled a tumbler with leftover Evian and ice and strutted back to the bed. Sarah was curled up on the edge of the king sized mattress, wrapped in the comforter. Her body was motionless but her breathing was too uneven for her to be sleeping. Jeff noticed a shiver.
"You feeling okay?" He asked. "Did I hurt you?" The presumption of prowess inherent in that question flashed in front of his face and then dissipated like mist.
"No," curtly. She sounded pissed. What the fuck? Jeff shook his head, took a swig from his Heineken and pouted for a moment, to no one in particular, before slouching further into bed and letting his eyelids droop. As the room went black the bed shook.
Sarah flopped over and looked at him, her aqua eyes glowing in the dark. Squinting,
"Are we getting married?"
The tenor and total of this question threw a gray net over him, and he stared back, dumbfounded. Sarah was a great girl, and she had his ring on her finger, so it was a perfectly fair question. Jeff, however, had been proceeding in the relationship from one square to another, and had not thought to plan his next move yet.
He began to squirm inside the cage. In the next instant his feeble mind constructed a variety of possible extramarital opportunities, and the associated probabilities of his being able to get away with them. Flash to the other side, the vision of her holding a child with sandy brown hair in her arms. And then back to reality, he was once again in the tractor beam of her eyes in which the lust was replaced with a less flattering neediness. Jeff's tongue unfolded but no words came out.
He panicked. He expected the logical follow-up: "Do you love me," a question that he was ill-prepared to answer comprehensively. As he anticipated the question, he looked at her with greater scrutiny and fully swallowed her beauty, and realized that mostly he really wanted to fool around with her again. The room shrunk.
He thought he loved her, but what did he know? He knew he liked her better than anything else in Tomah, better than his parents, better than his friends, better than beer. "I like you better than beer," he thought. The corner of his mouth turned upwards for a moment.
Seriously, now. He stared away, out the window, and slowly swiveled his head back to her. He looked into her eyes, which were still fixed on him, and was suddenly rocked from inside-out when he saw … space. Between the stars and planets and oceans of discovery, there was empty space waiting to be filled. This was the first time he had ever seen the space in her eyes instead of the space between her legs, and for a moment he felt small.
Jeff could not bear the smallness, had never known it. In that second, he resolved to jump in, step in, expand to fill it. This fleshy shell of a girl had chosen him, and it was about time he chose something, even if it was to choose her or not her or something else entirely. The walls disappeared, he effortlessly fell into the space and kept falling.
In that second he chose her, and was immediately overwhelmed by joy and fear and holy shit, here she was asking about marriage and Jesus Christ, I just made this monumental left turn and now she wants to know about a date and a wedding and can't we just celebrate this moment by having sex again?
And he sat there, jaw half open.
But the question never came. Maybe she was thinking it, but perhaps acknowledging Jeff's vacancy, she simply tilted her head a few degrees, "never mind. Good night," sweetly, rolled over again and slid into sleep. The next morning they kissed each other awake, shared a shower and had scones and coffee for breakfast. Jeff kept his epiphany for himself, pushing the fortune back into the cookie for the time being. There was time.
Two weeks later she was gone.
The phone rang and shook Jeff from his waking dream. As he had done for the past week, he expected it to be her.
"I'm sorry," she'd say. "Can I come home?" And he would let her dangle there for a while, asking her the standard questions and making her answer them just to prove that she was wrong. And she'd collapse and fall into his bed and invite him in again. He waited three rings, so she wouldn't think he was waiting by the phone.
But it was only Dr. Andrews. "She's okay, Jeff. She's in Seattle." She had called her folks. But not him.
A deep breath. Silently, "Shit." And he grabbed his keys.
A year and a half ago, he met Sarah at her Dad's Clinic for Beloved Animals, a half-shelter, half-hospital for Fido and the like. Jeff was doing his mom a favor, bringing in a lost kitten that was born under the Jacuzzi and had subsequently adopted the family.
The task was somewhat distasteful to Jeff, who preferred hunting animals to petting them. Furthermore, the damn thing was squirming the whole way there, and he could tell by her turgid belly that she probably had who-knows-what inside her and he didn't want it coming out. He just wanted to drop it off and join the boys at the Uptown.
She looked familiar, standing behind the counter, banging on a calculator. She had her hair pulled back in a hurried ponytail, but some of the auburn tendrils had fallen loose and dangling in front of her eyes. She kept flicking her head back and blowing at the strands, refusing to manually tuck the confederates behind her ear.
It was a good day for a gingham dress and too hot for makeup, and she glowed in the heat like a dream, like MaryAnn from Gilligan's Island after a shitty day over the fire. On her left hand there was a three-inch scar from the third knuckle down to the wrist, and Jeff made up stories in his head about where it came from. Kitchen accident? Clawed by a client? Satanic cult? It looked almost cute.
Jeff couldn't hear her voice but he could see her mouth forming the curse words as she tap-tap-tapped on the plastic keys, teeny-tiny beads of perspiration flinging from her upper lip.
She was in Jeff's English class two years ago, when Jeff was a senior trying to fulfill his graduation requirements and she was a sophomore who still had ambition enough to take AP classes. Jeff didn't realize this coincidence in history until their second date, when she confessed to a schoolgirl crush on him.
Puffing out his chest and consciously wrinkling his brow with concern, he strode up to her and practically threw the kitten onto the counter as if it were a pork chop. The disturbed girl glared up at him through slitted eyes that slowly rounded into form. With his right hand, he gently moved the loose strands of hair behind her left ear. A week later she was in his bed. Two days later, he found out her middle name.
From the beginning it was backwards.
Driving west to Seattle, in his rattling, freezing Miata, he kept seeing her standing in the road, right in front of him. Wearing her gingham dress and a sad smile. The same one from Vancouver. At first he braked, hard, sliding on black ice and stopping short of the image. Through glassy eyes, he saw the ghost dissolve, he caught his breath, and drove on. Every 500 yards the ghost appeared, and after a while he stopped stopping. And then he stopped slowing down.
And he thought of the other man, and his fury grew at the man's knowing what only Jeff was supposed to know, of occupying the space that Jeff had discovered and claimed and owned. And the fury grew darker, as his imagination projected tape loops of him fucking her like Jeff used to fuck her, of his cock in her mouth, played in filthy, grainy quality over and over and over like the Zapruder film.
He began to accelerate through the image of Sarah, the smile looking sadder with every mile marker, though you could barely tell at this speed. Something in him wanted to obliterate that vision of her, conquer it, kill it, flatten it and fold it into something he could use. But he couldn't even touch it.
He made it to Seattle in record time, out of breath and cheeks wet with rain.
December 14. He looked at his watch and held it up to his ear – clearly ticking. He knew the watch was working from the stuttering second-hand – motherfucker better work for two grand – but what he really wanted was to confirm that all his senses were sharp. After two weeks of amateur reconnaissance work she was nowhere. Jeff's gray eyes began to dull at visions of strangers who were not lost like him. Or, rather, like her.
He pushed through the revolving door of the hotel on to the sidewalk outside. The city stunk of coffee and pine trees and the place was teeming with over-insulated College students who didn't have anything to do until second semester started. Oceans of turtlenecks and puff-ball hats and mittens flowed past him as if everything were just fine. In the corner of his vision, on the arm of a bench, he saw a cranberry-colored boot with bright red laces splayed from it, and immediately cursed it, for distracting him.
And the hands appeared, fumbling with the laces, and one of those hands had a scar and a space where a ring used to be, and the hand was Sarah's. Her several layers of sweaters and coats and scarves could not hide the smooth grace of her movement. The sharp focus of her features sliced through the blue-gray Pacific fog. Jeff plodded intently in the direction of her image as the muscles in the small of his back tightened like steel beams. She brushed against him as she straightened, and her incandescent eyes found him again.
She jumped back and whirled at an angle for a moment, a pair of hand-knit mittens fell from her hand, and a pause that lasted a fraction of a second felt like another week. A brisk wind blew through her and into him, seeping through every thread of his sweater, piercing every pore of his body, and his eyes welled up against the daggers of rushing air. And her eyes watered too, even with her back to the wind.
Jeff wanted desperately to believe that it was her heart and not the wind that had pushed her back into his arms. But he didn't care. He pulled her in and lifted her up. Her hot breath felt like steam on his neck, and the muffled squeal sounded like a muted clarinet.
And in the corner of his moist eyes, he saw the back of the other man in a pallid shade of avocado green, thick black hair spurting from a ski cap, a mitten in one hand, cigarette in another. I win, Jeff thought, and closed his eyes.
Sarah squirmed a bit, trying to turn around, but Jeff was stronger, and held her in place, and said "let's go home." He didn't wait for an answer.
Sarah grabbed the keys from the coffee table where Jeff had left them, leaned over and kissed him on the ear. "Going out for a while."
He smiles weakly. He doesn't know where she is going. Whether that white-trash-bag is still clinging to her boots or not, Jeff's pull was stronger and is stronger now than before. He knows now that she is inextricably bound to him, by a thick gravity composed of lust and duty and the fleeting promise of happily ever after.
She is escaping him, but only for moments. She is at the apogee of her orbit, to return after a few revolutions; love, as gravity, is unavoidable. Love is gravity, which is why it hurts when we fall.
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mostly-original fictional sketch*
Date: 2007-03-28 10:08 pm (UTC)Anyway, I happened upon this recently and figured it could see the light of day. Maybe this will inspire me to write something newer. Hopefully.
Re: mostly-original fictional sketch*
Date: 2007-04-05 06:57 pm (UTC)