New Brunette

“From the moment he laid back and made it clear I was to straddle him, I wanted to go completely away. Instead I gripped the tightly pleated curtain above the headboard with my fingers still wet from lube and felt almost pleased at making it dirty, which is unlike me. But immediately I felt I could picture all the other paid women before me who’d touched this fabric with their slippery hands, in this storied hotel in this massive city, women who’d liked it or not liked it and who eventually left the hotel room and then left the building, and gone home to their lives, and I felt so close to them that it lifted me. I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase before, but it lifted me up, it lifted me out. It sustained me for as long as it could in a tolerable place.”

— One Wing

“I stayed quiet because I was becoming strongly angry, teenage angry, even, like I’d been personally slighted. It was almost out of my control when I blurted, ‘It doesn’t interest me.’
‘What doesn’t?’ He said, and that made me angry too, because I thought he should have been there with me, thinking like I was thinking.
‘Rehashing my life. Telling “my story.” I would have to talk about how I got started and…. It doesn’t interest me at all. I can’t think of anything more boring.’ I could barely speak for all the anger gathering. Sick of the suggestion that I should purposefully spread out my tired history, which I know so well, for palatable consumption and probably sick too of knowing it all the time, the way everyone knows their own history in every waking moment, like a scent you think you’ve gotten used to just before you catch a whiff of it again.”

— By The Time You Read This