69
Hi. I wrote a new story that is due for workshop Wednesday, gets torn apart by the other kids Monday. I just finished it. You should tell me how it is. I decided to call it
We slept that way every night: head to foot with my cock resting in her mouth. She held it there like a talisman, as though it were warding away bad spirits in the night. It’s true that, for a time, she slept more soundly this way, but it didn’t last nearly long enough.
From the moment this nighttime habit was introduced she started to hide from me meticulously, a brick wall of body around her soul, a guard that she never let slip. But, as is commonly acknowledged in high school physics classrooms, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is to say: when something is being forced and squeezed into submission, it must have somewhere to leak. That is to say again: whatever her face and her voice were shutting off to me, they had to be coming out somewhere else.
That somewhere else ended up being her feet. Her silent, sleeping mouth gave her away too. It got so I could read her moods that way. I was, I can say now, more acquainted with her shins and toes than I was with her eyes or her waking body language. I could gauge her mouth only by feel, not by sight. Its twists and frowns meant nothing, but its subconscious nuances when fixed on my penis were never lost on me.
I don’t know why it happened, exactly. When she told me about it I thought that if anything it would bring us closer together. The suggestion (the need) of it surprised me. I felt completely estranged from her in that moment. I didn’t understand how this had never come up after a year of being together, of being as close as we had been. I assumed in the beginning that her insomnia and the few fitful hours of sleep she managed on lucky nights were a normal, if frustrating, condition. I remember asking her if maybe sleeping pills might be a solution to the issue, and her response was to look at me and say:
“I might have a different way.”
Reggie’s way of sharing was to leak out the information steadily, one episode at a time. On our first date she told me about her grandmother, who’d had a second stroke at the age of eighty-five.
“After it she wasn’t really all there. And like, I know that isn’t uncommon but still, it was hard on us. When you’d talk to her, she didn’t understand about 90% of it. And then she’d pretend to understand and just…babble nonsense back at us. I mean, she wasn’t entirely nutso. In a lot of ways she was there. But trying to decipher what she meant when she said ‘no no, the car is in the pickle’ was quite a feat.”
She talked about her gram a lot. Another time she told me about how once, about five years after that second stroke her cousin went into Grandma Wanda’s kitchen and found that someone had scribbled something in chalk over the doorway. No one thought it could have been Wanda because how would the old bag have gotten up there in the first place? Eventually Reggie’s mom saw it and said it kind of looked like it was in Polish. Gram had crawled right up onto a chair at ninety years old with a piece of chalk, and though she could barely speak English anymore and certainly couldn’t write it, she had managed to painstakingly draw out words which, to her mind, would keep bad things away from her home.
The first time we tried out the position:
Reggie didn’t say anything; she just sat on the edge of the bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. I settled down first and turned off the light, then pulled my cock through the opening in my boxers. Her feet appeared out of the dark on the pillow next to me, and the bed’s gravity shifted a little until I felt a hesitant breath. I got hard; I won’t lie, and in the moment she placed her mouth around it I became aware of one of the many complications to follow.
I never stopped being frustrated by this scenario. It was like picking up the same tease at a bar night after night. But I’d made the conscious decision to do this for her, and so despite aching balls and pent up sexual energy, I let her continue.
There were other things too. Night biting and teeth grinding, for instance. Or the fact that her saliva made it pruney by the end of the night, the way your fingers get when you’ve been in the tub too long. The wrinkled skin meant that it was more sensitive, so that even when she was doing something as innocent as light sucking I still felt it too much to be comfortable.
Three weeks after we’d officially started dating, she told me about her mom. Sherry, who was somewhere between a fervent and a lip service Catholic. She was (apparently) the kind of woman who wore a Virgin Mary medallion around her neck everyday and thought you’d go to hell if you didn’t believe in God, but who didn’t go to church all that regularly. Nor did she enforce it on her kids.
“After we were twelve or so she stopped making us go except on holidays. Only she never let up on the guilt. It was like that was the price you paid: you didn’t have to go to church or take CCD, but you had to hear about it every fucking day.” Maybe she was just a moderate Catholic, I don’t really know. But I’ve always considered them the most superstitious and primal of the Christian religions. So the religion didn’t really rub off on Reg, but parts of it did. The terror of something bad coming and the need to protect herself from that, to comfort herself, even if it didn’t make sense.
I could read the signals through my nighttime discomfort. I said that she slept more peacefully for a time, and it is in this phase where my cock was used more as a pacifier than anything else. Really I was grateful that this was the only mild issue I was having, and this brief month came to characterize our most peaceful, post-Cock Discussion period. It was when the charm of sleeping head to foot began to fade that my anatomy suffered and I learned to use this for insight.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cock Discussion, I didn’t necessarily recognize the shift that was taking place. I thought we were doing better, if only because now she seemed to be more at peace in general, and if the conversation was dropping off a little, well then our lives were just falling into a comfortable routine. We didn’t always need to know everything about each other. But it didn’t take very long for me to start recognizing that I was being cut out of her life in certain ways. When one day Reggie came home from work (an office job she may or may not have been happy at- I wouldn’t know anymore) and walked past me sitting in our living room without so much as a smile was the first time it sank in. There was no argument; it just felt like a sudden drop off. I still wasn’t used to living with someone else and before this I felt like maybe she just needed space or we were getting used to each other. How are you supposed to know how to live with the person you love?
This instance also marks the first night that my cock suffered any real pain. The month of relative bedtime calm (during which the following events desisted: lights on until four in the morning, tossing and turning, shaking me awake to keep her company, late night phone calls to her sister, crankiness and exhaustion the next day, etc.) didn’t necessarily end; she still slept through the night. The only thing was that somewhere around two in the morning I woke up with her teeth like a vise around my head, and as suddenly as they’d clamped down, they relaxed. From then on there was a constant string of this. Gnashing and fitful as she was, I started having a hard time falling asleep because I didn’t want to be wrenched awake in pain a few hours later. I felt like if I stayed up and watched, kept an eye on it, I could control it a little. Draw away when it looked like it was going to be bad, loosen her lips with my fingers ever so slightly, something.
Not that it was effective, but my reluctance to fall asleep and the dark quiet of the room gave me plenty of opportunity to watch her. Most times I’d just lie on my side and trace the outline of her feet and her toes, and from there I started to notice the details.
I noticed that sometimes she was careless about shaving her legs and missed a sparse patch of hair right where the ankle meets the main body of the foot. Other times she was meticulous about it and her bony shin had a smooth sheen to it all the way down that I could see even in the dark. And still other times she would go longish periods without shaving at all, abandoning her legs altogether so that not only did the hair get long and black, but the skin was dry and white.
A month and a half into our relationship she told me she was scared of everything. She was scared of going to Hell, and of failing to find something to do with her life; scared that her mom had been wrong about God all along because even though she didn’t believe she still didn’t know, it was still a question in the back of her mind. She was scared of unraveling like her grandmother had in her old age, or of not even getting that far, of diseases, of losing control of her organization, anything at all. “I used to stay up in my bedroom in high school, just laying in the dark trying to get to sleep. And it didn’t really work some nights. So I’d lay there for hours, wide awake, but as the night dragged on and it got toward three in the morning, my head would get all muddled. And I’d just start imaging things that freaked me out, like what I’d do if a fucking killer came in through my bathroom door and into my room. Don’t ask me why he wouldn’t just come in through the bedroom door, but I’d make myself sick and terrified thinking about what he might do to me. And then I’d start to wonder how I’d act. Would I beg for my life? Would some perverse part of me like it? And what he’d ask of me, I wondered that too. I’d scare the shit out of myself so much that I would start to hear stuff. One night I was up all the way through sunrise, and about four a.m. I heard these sounds on our roof. I don’t know, it was probably birds, but I convinced myself that people were going to break into our house, and that since I was the only one up I’d be responsible for waking up my family and being the hero. It was fucked up. I get scared like that a lot.”
There were times when she was drifting off to sleep that she rubbed her feet together, back and forth, switching left to right until she passed out and the motion lazily dropped off. Other times they lay on the pillow like limp fish, flopped in any position, grotesque. Crossed ankles, legs splayed like scissors, knees to the chest in a curved fetal position, it was different every time, but her upper half steadfastly held its position.
I saw the little hairs that grew in on her big toe, and I could always tell when the bottoms of her feet were dirty because there was always a bit of residue around the edges of her toes. I watched as her toenails went from freshly polished to slightly ragged to grown out, cracked, and chipped. Different colors of nail polish began to represent different things, a veritable rainbow of her emotions, ranging from the cliché associations to the bizarre. Like red, red could mean anger or it could mean triumph, and green could mean she was ill or that she was tired, blue meant happy, orange content, silver depressed, black was confused, and whether or not I figured out the system I still couldn’t do anything with it.
It’s not as if before she stopped being a part of the pair she’d just blurt out information, I’d listen and that was it. It’s not like there wasn’t anything in between. Or it could be that there wasn’t; I don’t trust my abilities for figuring this out anymore. After all, I didn’t see any of it coming, I didn’t know it was fizzing out or being screwed shut, not until it happened and it slapped me in the face. Reggie was just a naturally reserved person. I never knew why she couldn’t sleep; that was one thing she never shared. I learned all about the way her sister tried to commit suicide when Reg was 14, and about how when she was a kid she’d talk out loud to herself all the time.
“I’d be talking in the car, just because I was so full of energy that I had to get things out, and my parents and Jess would get tired of it. And they’d just say ‘let’s see if you can be quiet for five minutes, let’s see how long you can go without chattering, Noonie.’ So I’d try, but I’d get so bored holding it all in and it’d all build up right behind my tongue so that I had to get it out. There was always something to comment on, and so two minutes into I’d start bugging Jess again or making noise somehow. I was really hyperactive until I hit high school. And when I’d finally calmed down, they used to joke about how much I talked and how I clung on my sister so much that I was like a postage stamp. But I just wanted to be included.”
When she was agitated, that’s when she’d grind her teeth in the night. Not much, but enough to really hurt. When she was upset she’d kind of latch onto it and dig her hands into the back of my thighs. Sometimes I’d get turned on against my will, other times I’d get worried and consider waking her up to get her to face me and let me hold her like I should be doing, like I wanted to do. And still other times I’d lay awake waiting for it to go away and wishing it wasn’t like this or that we weren’t together at all. It really wasn’t fair at all. How did I get roped into this? At some point my conscience kicked in and the rationalizations. She needs this, don’t be selfish, it’s a sign of faith that she even told you about it, we’ll get stronger through this. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. Then her hands would loosen and her mouth would slack a bit and I’d drift back into sleep like it never even happened in the first place.
There was nothing she hated more than being told to calm down. Tell her that and she’d freak out. I think it was because of all that high strung business as a kid. She never got to be as loud as she wanted, and so now it just set her off. I learned quickly never to say it, especially not in an argument. The last argument we had, in fact the last time we had any decent interaction, I forgot.
Everything just began to build. The inverted way we slept had obvious negative effects on our sex life. Because of my struggles with untimely erections, I tried to condition myself to remove the associations of mouth + cock = sex. Not that she often wanted to have sex anymore, but when she did my reservations got in the way. Blowjobs were out of the question. We had sex two nights after our first test run of the head to foot position. I honestly think now it was more to keep up appearances than anything else. When she started going down on me, I couldn’t help it; I twitched backward. We didn’t try anything for awhile after that.
The first time I ever saw her naked:
She took her clothes off and stood in the middle of the room, so matter of fact, so comfortably. There weren’t any lights on, just what came through the slats of the black blinds, striping her pale skin with the purple of twilight. The corners receded into shadow and the bed behind her slid out of focus. I thought of that night every time I woke up in pain, every time I had doubts, every time there was silence between us. I thought of the whisper of her clothes hitting the floor and the way she glowed, and of the silence in the room, but how it was an okay kind of silence. It was a silence that quickly became movement and touch and bliss.
Before everything went wrong, this is what we were like. This memory sticks out because it was the very first time, and if nothing else it came to symbolize everything I missed about us. It wasn’t just that I missed making love to her or that I resented the discomfort to my dick all that much, it was just a certain degree of closeness that was missing. It was the wrong kind of closeness. I wanted it to go back, I wanted it to change.
“Reg.”
“Yes.”
“I- can we maybe just talk tonight?”
“What?”
“Do…you want to go to dinner tonight and just talk. It’s been awhile. You know.”
“Is there something wrong, babe?”
“No, I mean it’s just been awhile since we spent some real time together.”
“We live together. We’re together all the time.”
“Yea, I know I just…okay I guess I just wanted to make you feel special. Or something.”
“Look, Dave, I’m kind of tired. Can we just skip it and pass out early? I have things to do tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
I kept going over the last good memories I had with her. What was the last thing she told me that was important? And I kept looking for a reason that it had to be that way. I don’t know what it was. There were things she was hiding from me all along. Like I said, I never knew why she couldn’t sleep. And I never knew why she was so terrified. These stories she told me, all the information she leaked, it was so incomplete. And whenever I tried I failed. So I kept doing what I was doing: watching her, keeping quiet, sleeping with my cock in her small mouth every night. I wanted to see what would come of it.
Before. Beforebeforebefore. It became my whole concern. I became obsessed with it. After I asked to talk and go out to dinner, she ground her teeth in bed. Agitation. I’d overstepped a boundary. It was that I wasn’t supposed to call attention to it, to anything that was going on between us. It was part of a tacit agreement I’d made and it was part of the way she closed herself off.
On our fifth date she told me her favorite flowers were Calla Lilies. They reminded her of the movie Aladdin. She could never decide whether she was a Smiths person or a Cure person, or for that matter a Dostoevsky person or a Tolstoy person. She went into a long speech about how pudge lacked artistic value, merely in an aesthetic sense, but that she didn’t care anyway- she was especially jealous of girls with fuller arms and thighs. It was the most disconnected she’d ever allowed herself to be, and I reveled in the information. She felt that nearly every woman wanted to be Holly Golightly but that no one had ever succeeded. Not even Audrey Hepburn; she was merely a construct of the character, and while she played it beautifully there was no satisfaction in the real because it wasn’t there. And she told me that she was superstitious. That she had rites and rituals for keeping herself safe.
It wasn’t that I got fed up. It wasn’t that I got so selfish I stopped caring. It was a simple fact of missing things and dwelling on the before. I became just as superstitious as she had been, so afraid to touch this delicate and empty balance we’d kept up in a vain effort to overcome insomnia djinns. It was that I got so confused and wrapped up in the whole thing that I just wanted it figured out. I appreciated the way it felt; after awhile it didn’t feel right without her lips wrapped around me and I’d have trouble sleeping. This was of course all after. After I jumbled it all up, after I had to know and forgot in the process the one thing she hated most. I’d never thought about it before, but maybe the blankie or the teddy bear feel an absence when they aren’t squeezed tight. Perhaps their physical matter- the actual particles that make them up- create a space for one’s arms, like miniscule molecular dents. Dents like these, I think they take time to create, but that once the arms or the mouth are gone, the absence is suddenly felt and things, molecularly, are a bit off. In any case, I started something I shouldn’t have. Something I couldn’t finish.
Reggie woke up one morning. The alarm went off and she opened her eyes, slid her mouth off my morning wood (which I still sometimes couldn’t help) and went into the bathroom to get ready for work. I lay there a bit considering. What to do when to do how to do. I could just see through to where she was brushing her teeth and then her hair before closing the bathroom door, stripping and getting into the shower. It struck me that there was nothing I wanted more than to see her naked body the way I’d seen it that first night. I didn’t want to touch or leer and I didn’t want to see her mouth tighten and her shoulders go rigid when I came into the bathroom. That was what she did when I saw her. What I truly, honestly wanted was not the nudity and the sexuality, but the openness they implied. In that moment I wanted this so bad that I got up from bed, opened the bathroom door and
“What the fuck happened?”
“Dave?! I’m getting ready for work. Could you please give me a little privacy?”
“No. I mean...no. I’ve given you plenty of privacy.”
“What the fuck do you consider this?”
“I consider it asking you what the fuck happened. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve given up plenty of my dignity just to let you have ‘privacy’ Reg, and now I want to know why.”
“LOOK DAVE, NOW REALLY ISN’T THE TIME FOR THIS. CAN YOU GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE?”
As the argument escalated she became more and more frazzled. The water fell interminably in that shower, and the long it went on the calmer I got. I could hear her frantic scrubbing. I swear she must have washed and conditioned her hair at least six times. And after realizing finally that she would stay a locked up box and that the only thing I would get out of this outburst were some night bites and a lot of foot rubbing, I asked her very simply to calm down.
“DON’T YOU FUCKING TELL ME TO CALM DOWN, YOU PRICK.”
Then silence. The shower handle squeaked the water flow to a stop and she said very quietly like nothing was wrong, “I need to get out and get ready now. Mind giving me a minute?”
We slept that way every night: head to foot with my cock resting in her mouth. We kept sleeping that way for some time, even after what occurred in the bathroom. The problems were simply compounded from thereon and thus bottled up ever more tightly. I’ve gotten so I can sleep without the soft feel of a mouth using me as a pacifier at night and maybe she found a new way to conquer the insomnia. I wouldn’t really know. The only thing is that I still think of her all the time, infinitely and not just the before either. I miss the image of her smooth body in twilight and the vacant look she’d get whenever she’d start in on her past. But I think what I need her to know is that I also miss other things. Like the feel of her mouth and the way she sometimes could sleep soundly through the night. And the outlines of her calves, shins, ankles, feet, toes: the movements they made, their shapes in the dark, and what they meant. I do. I miss it. And I miss her slowly unfolding story, working for it, piecing it together, and I wish it hadn’t stopped coming. That there could have a way to sleep head to foot and still be able to face each other.
I’m sorry, Reggie.
. And I'm pretty sure it's obvious why.
We slept that way every night: head to foot with my cock resting in her mouth. She held it there like a talisman, as though it were warding away bad spirits in the night. It’s true that, for a time, she slept more soundly this way, but it didn’t last nearly long enough.
From the moment this nighttime habit was introduced she started to hide from me meticulously, a brick wall of body around her soul, a guard that she never let slip. But, as is commonly acknowledged in high school physics classrooms, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is to say: when something is being forced and squeezed into submission, it must have somewhere to leak. That is to say again: whatever her face and her voice were shutting off to me, they had to be coming out somewhere else.
That somewhere else ended up being her feet. Her silent, sleeping mouth gave her away too. It got so I could read her moods that way. I was, I can say now, more acquainted with her shins and toes than I was with her eyes or her waking body language. I could gauge her mouth only by feel, not by sight. Its twists and frowns meant nothing, but its subconscious nuances when fixed on my penis were never lost on me.
I don’t know why it happened, exactly. When she told me about it I thought that if anything it would bring us closer together. The suggestion (the need) of it surprised me. I felt completely estranged from her in that moment. I didn’t understand how this had never come up after a year of being together, of being as close as we had been. I assumed in the beginning that her insomnia and the few fitful hours of sleep she managed on lucky nights were a normal, if frustrating, condition. I remember asking her if maybe sleeping pills might be a solution to the issue, and her response was to look at me and say:
“I might have a different way.”
Reggie’s way of sharing was to leak out the information steadily, one episode at a time. On our first date she told me about her grandmother, who’d had a second stroke at the age of eighty-five.
“After it she wasn’t really all there. And like, I know that isn’t uncommon but still, it was hard on us. When you’d talk to her, she didn’t understand about 90% of it. And then she’d pretend to understand and just…babble nonsense back at us. I mean, she wasn’t entirely nutso. In a lot of ways she was there. But trying to decipher what she meant when she said ‘no no, the car is in the pickle’ was quite a feat.”
She talked about her gram a lot. Another time she told me about how once, about five years after that second stroke her cousin went into Grandma Wanda’s kitchen and found that someone had scribbled something in chalk over the doorway. No one thought it could have been Wanda because how would the old bag have gotten up there in the first place? Eventually Reggie’s mom saw it and said it kind of looked like it was in Polish. Gram had crawled right up onto a chair at ninety years old with a piece of chalk, and though she could barely speak English anymore and certainly couldn’t write it, she had managed to painstakingly draw out words which, to her mind, would keep bad things away from her home.
The first time we tried out the position:
Reggie didn’t say anything; she just sat on the edge of the bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. I settled down first and turned off the light, then pulled my cock through the opening in my boxers. Her feet appeared out of the dark on the pillow next to me, and the bed’s gravity shifted a little until I felt a hesitant breath. I got hard; I won’t lie, and in the moment she placed her mouth around it I became aware of one of the many complications to follow.
I never stopped being frustrated by this scenario. It was like picking up the same tease at a bar night after night. But I’d made the conscious decision to do this for her, and so despite aching balls and pent up sexual energy, I let her continue.
There were other things too. Night biting and teeth grinding, for instance. Or the fact that her saliva made it pruney by the end of the night, the way your fingers get when you’ve been in the tub too long. The wrinkled skin meant that it was more sensitive, so that even when she was doing something as innocent as light sucking I still felt it too much to be comfortable.
Three weeks after we’d officially started dating, she told me about her mom. Sherry, who was somewhere between a fervent and a lip service Catholic. She was (apparently) the kind of woman who wore a Virgin Mary medallion around her neck everyday and thought you’d go to hell if you didn’t believe in God, but who didn’t go to church all that regularly. Nor did she enforce it on her kids.
“After we were twelve or so she stopped making us go except on holidays. Only she never let up on the guilt. It was like that was the price you paid: you didn’t have to go to church or take CCD, but you had to hear about it every fucking day.” Maybe she was just a moderate Catholic, I don’t really know. But I’ve always considered them the most superstitious and primal of the Christian religions. So the religion didn’t really rub off on Reg, but parts of it did. The terror of something bad coming and the need to protect herself from that, to comfort herself, even if it didn’t make sense.
I could read the signals through my nighttime discomfort. I said that she slept more peacefully for a time, and it is in this phase where my cock was used more as a pacifier than anything else. Really I was grateful that this was the only mild issue I was having, and this brief month came to characterize our most peaceful, post-Cock Discussion period. It was when the charm of sleeping head to foot began to fade that my anatomy suffered and I learned to use this for insight.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cock Discussion, I didn’t necessarily recognize the shift that was taking place. I thought we were doing better, if only because now she seemed to be more at peace in general, and if the conversation was dropping off a little, well then our lives were just falling into a comfortable routine. We didn’t always need to know everything about each other. But it didn’t take very long for me to start recognizing that I was being cut out of her life in certain ways. When one day Reggie came home from work (an office job she may or may not have been happy at- I wouldn’t know anymore) and walked past me sitting in our living room without so much as a smile was the first time it sank in. There was no argument; it just felt like a sudden drop off. I still wasn’t used to living with someone else and before this I felt like maybe she just needed space or we were getting used to each other. How are you supposed to know how to live with the person you love?
This instance also marks the first night that my cock suffered any real pain. The month of relative bedtime calm (during which the following events desisted: lights on until four in the morning, tossing and turning, shaking me awake to keep her company, late night phone calls to her sister, crankiness and exhaustion the next day, etc.) didn’t necessarily end; she still slept through the night. The only thing was that somewhere around two in the morning I woke up with her teeth like a vise around my head, and as suddenly as they’d clamped down, they relaxed. From then on there was a constant string of this. Gnashing and fitful as she was, I started having a hard time falling asleep because I didn’t want to be wrenched awake in pain a few hours later. I felt like if I stayed up and watched, kept an eye on it, I could control it a little. Draw away when it looked like it was going to be bad, loosen her lips with my fingers ever so slightly, something.
Not that it was effective, but my reluctance to fall asleep and the dark quiet of the room gave me plenty of opportunity to watch her. Most times I’d just lie on my side and trace the outline of her feet and her toes, and from there I started to notice the details.
I noticed that sometimes she was careless about shaving her legs and missed a sparse patch of hair right where the ankle meets the main body of the foot. Other times she was meticulous about it and her bony shin had a smooth sheen to it all the way down that I could see even in the dark. And still other times she would go longish periods without shaving at all, abandoning her legs altogether so that not only did the hair get long and black, but the skin was dry and white.
A month and a half into our relationship she told me she was scared of everything. She was scared of going to Hell, and of failing to find something to do with her life; scared that her mom had been wrong about God all along because even though she didn’t believe she still didn’t know, it was still a question in the back of her mind. She was scared of unraveling like her grandmother had in her old age, or of not even getting that far, of diseases, of losing control of her organization, anything at all. “I used to stay up in my bedroom in high school, just laying in the dark trying to get to sleep. And it didn’t really work some nights. So I’d lay there for hours, wide awake, but as the night dragged on and it got toward three in the morning, my head would get all muddled. And I’d just start imaging things that freaked me out, like what I’d do if a fucking killer came in through my bathroom door and into my room. Don’t ask me why he wouldn’t just come in through the bedroom door, but I’d make myself sick and terrified thinking about what he might do to me. And then I’d start to wonder how I’d act. Would I beg for my life? Would some perverse part of me like it? And what he’d ask of me, I wondered that too. I’d scare the shit out of myself so much that I would start to hear stuff. One night I was up all the way through sunrise, and about four a.m. I heard these sounds on our roof. I don’t know, it was probably birds, but I convinced myself that people were going to break into our house, and that since I was the only one up I’d be responsible for waking up my family and being the hero. It was fucked up. I get scared like that a lot.”
There were times when she was drifting off to sleep that she rubbed her feet together, back and forth, switching left to right until she passed out and the motion lazily dropped off. Other times they lay on the pillow like limp fish, flopped in any position, grotesque. Crossed ankles, legs splayed like scissors, knees to the chest in a curved fetal position, it was different every time, but her upper half steadfastly held its position.
I saw the little hairs that grew in on her big toe, and I could always tell when the bottoms of her feet were dirty because there was always a bit of residue around the edges of her toes. I watched as her toenails went from freshly polished to slightly ragged to grown out, cracked, and chipped. Different colors of nail polish began to represent different things, a veritable rainbow of her emotions, ranging from the cliché associations to the bizarre. Like red, red could mean anger or it could mean triumph, and green could mean she was ill or that she was tired, blue meant happy, orange content, silver depressed, black was confused, and whether or not I figured out the system I still couldn’t do anything with it.
It’s not as if before she stopped being a part of the pair she’d just blurt out information, I’d listen and that was it. It’s not like there wasn’t anything in between. Or it could be that there wasn’t; I don’t trust my abilities for figuring this out anymore. After all, I didn’t see any of it coming, I didn’t know it was fizzing out or being screwed shut, not until it happened and it slapped me in the face. Reggie was just a naturally reserved person. I never knew why she couldn’t sleep; that was one thing she never shared. I learned all about the way her sister tried to commit suicide when Reg was 14, and about how when she was a kid she’d talk out loud to herself all the time.
“I’d be talking in the car, just because I was so full of energy that I had to get things out, and my parents and Jess would get tired of it. And they’d just say ‘let’s see if you can be quiet for five minutes, let’s see how long you can go without chattering, Noonie.’ So I’d try, but I’d get so bored holding it all in and it’d all build up right behind my tongue so that I had to get it out. There was always something to comment on, and so two minutes into I’d start bugging Jess again or making noise somehow. I was really hyperactive until I hit high school. And when I’d finally calmed down, they used to joke about how much I talked and how I clung on my sister so much that I was like a postage stamp. But I just wanted to be included.”
When she was agitated, that’s when she’d grind her teeth in the night. Not much, but enough to really hurt. When she was upset she’d kind of latch onto it and dig her hands into the back of my thighs. Sometimes I’d get turned on against my will, other times I’d get worried and consider waking her up to get her to face me and let me hold her like I should be doing, like I wanted to do. And still other times I’d lay awake waiting for it to go away and wishing it wasn’t like this or that we weren’t together at all. It really wasn’t fair at all. How did I get roped into this? At some point my conscience kicked in and the rationalizations. She needs this, don’t be selfish, it’s a sign of faith that she even told you about it, we’ll get stronger through this. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. Then her hands would loosen and her mouth would slack a bit and I’d drift back into sleep like it never even happened in the first place.
There was nothing she hated more than being told to calm down. Tell her that and she’d freak out. I think it was because of all that high strung business as a kid. She never got to be as loud as she wanted, and so now it just set her off. I learned quickly never to say it, especially not in an argument. The last argument we had, in fact the last time we had any decent interaction, I forgot.
Everything just began to build. The inverted way we slept had obvious negative effects on our sex life. Because of my struggles with untimely erections, I tried to condition myself to remove the associations of mouth + cock = sex. Not that she often wanted to have sex anymore, but when she did my reservations got in the way. Blowjobs were out of the question. We had sex two nights after our first test run of the head to foot position. I honestly think now it was more to keep up appearances than anything else. When she started going down on me, I couldn’t help it; I twitched backward. We didn’t try anything for awhile after that.
The first time I ever saw her naked:
She took her clothes off and stood in the middle of the room, so matter of fact, so comfortably. There weren’t any lights on, just what came through the slats of the black blinds, striping her pale skin with the purple of twilight. The corners receded into shadow and the bed behind her slid out of focus. I thought of that night every time I woke up in pain, every time I had doubts, every time there was silence between us. I thought of the whisper of her clothes hitting the floor and the way she glowed, and of the silence in the room, but how it was an okay kind of silence. It was a silence that quickly became movement and touch and bliss.
Before everything went wrong, this is what we were like. This memory sticks out because it was the very first time, and if nothing else it came to symbolize everything I missed about us. It wasn’t just that I missed making love to her or that I resented the discomfort to my dick all that much, it was just a certain degree of closeness that was missing. It was the wrong kind of closeness. I wanted it to go back, I wanted it to change.
“Reg.”
“Yes.”
“I- can we maybe just talk tonight?”
“What?”
“Do…you want to go to dinner tonight and just talk. It’s been awhile. You know.”
“Is there something wrong, babe?”
“No, I mean it’s just been awhile since we spent some real time together.”
“We live together. We’re together all the time.”
“Yea, I know I just…okay I guess I just wanted to make you feel special. Or something.”
“Look, Dave, I’m kind of tired. Can we just skip it and pass out early? I have things to do tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
I kept going over the last good memories I had with her. What was the last thing she told me that was important? And I kept looking for a reason that it had to be that way. I don’t know what it was. There were things she was hiding from me all along. Like I said, I never knew why she couldn’t sleep. And I never knew why she was so terrified. These stories she told me, all the information she leaked, it was so incomplete. And whenever I tried I failed. So I kept doing what I was doing: watching her, keeping quiet, sleeping with my cock in her small mouth every night. I wanted to see what would come of it.
Before. Beforebeforebefore. It became my whole concern. I became obsessed with it. After I asked to talk and go out to dinner, she ground her teeth in bed. Agitation. I’d overstepped a boundary. It was that I wasn’t supposed to call attention to it, to anything that was going on between us. It was part of a tacit agreement I’d made and it was part of the way she closed herself off.
On our fifth date she told me her favorite flowers were Calla Lilies. They reminded her of the movie Aladdin. She could never decide whether she was a Smiths person or a Cure person, or for that matter a Dostoevsky person or a Tolstoy person. She went into a long speech about how pudge lacked artistic value, merely in an aesthetic sense, but that she didn’t care anyway- she was especially jealous of girls with fuller arms and thighs. It was the most disconnected she’d ever allowed herself to be, and I reveled in the information. She felt that nearly every woman wanted to be Holly Golightly but that no one had ever succeeded. Not even Audrey Hepburn; she was merely a construct of the character, and while she played it beautifully there was no satisfaction in the real because it wasn’t there. And she told me that she was superstitious. That she had rites and rituals for keeping herself safe.
It wasn’t that I got fed up. It wasn’t that I got so selfish I stopped caring. It was a simple fact of missing things and dwelling on the before. I became just as superstitious as she had been, so afraid to touch this delicate and empty balance we’d kept up in a vain effort to overcome insomnia djinns. It was that I got so confused and wrapped up in the whole thing that I just wanted it figured out. I appreciated the way it felt; after awhile it didn’t feel right without her lips wrapped around me and I’d have trouble sleeping. This was of course all after. After I jumbled it all up, after I had to know and forgot in the process the one thing she hated most. I’d never thought about it before, but maybe the blankie or the teddy bear feel an absence when they aren’t squeezed tight. Perhaps their physical matter- the actual particles that make them up- create a space for one’s arms, like miniscule molecular dents. Dents like these, I think they take time to create, but that once the arms or the mouth are gone, the absence is suddenly felt and things, molecularly, are a bit off. In any case, I started something I shouldn’t have. Something I couldn’t finish.
Reggie woke up one morning. The alarm went off and she opened her eyes, slid her mouth off my morning wood (which I still sometimes couldn’t help) and went into the bathroom to get ready for work. I lay there a bit considering. What to do when to do how to do. I could just see through to where she was brushing her teeth and then her hair before closing the bathroom door, stripping and getting into the shower. It struck me that there was nothing I wanted more than to see her naked body the way I’d seen it that first night. I didn’t want to touch or leer and I didn’t want to see her mouth tighten and her shoulders go rigid when I came into the bathroom. That was what she did when I saw her. What I truly, honestly wanted was not the nudity and the sexuality, but the openness they implied. In that moment I wanted this so bad that I got up from bed, opened the bathroom door and
“What the fuck happened?”
“Dave?! I’m getting ready for work. Could you please give me a little privacy?”
“No. I mean...no. I’ve given you plenty of privacy.”
“What the fuck do you consider this?”
“I consider it asking you what the fuck happened. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve given up plenty of my dignity just to let you have ‘privacy’ Reg, and now I want to know why.”
“LOOK DAVE, NOW REALLY ISN’T THE TIME FOR THIS. CAN YOU GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE?”
As the argument escalated she became more and more frazzled. The water fell interminably in that shower, and the long it went on the calmer I got. I could hear her frantic scrubbing. I swear she must have washed and conditioned her hair at least six times. And after realizing finally that she would stay a locked up box and that the only thing I would get out of this outburst were some night bites and a lot of foot rubbing, I asked her very simply to calm down.
“DON’T YOU FUCKING TELL ME TO CALM DOWN, YOU PRICK.”
Then silence. The shower handle squeaked the water flow to a stop and she said very quietly like nothing was wrong, “I need to get out and get ready now. Mind giving me a minute?”
We slept that way every night: head to foot with my cock resting in her mouth. We kept sleeping that way for some time, even after what occurred in the bathroom. The problems were simply compounded from thereon and thus bottled up ever more tightly. I’ve gotten so I can sleep without the soft feel of a mouth using me as a pacifier at night and maybe she found a new way to conquer the insomnia. I wouldn’t really know. The only thing is that I still think of her all the time, infinitely and not just the before either. I miss the image of her smooth body in twilight and the vacant look she’d get whenever she’d start in on her past. But I think what I need her to know is that I also miss other things. Like the feel of her mouth and the way she sometimes could sleep soundly through the night. And the outlines of her calves, shins, ankles, feet, toes: the movements they made, their shapes in the dark, and what they meant. I do. I miss it. And I miss her slowly unfolding story, working for it, piecing it together, and I wish it hadn’t stopped coming. That there could have a way to sleep head to foot and still be able to face each other.
I’m sorry, Reggie.
. And I'm pretty sure it's obvious why.