From “Control”
I gripped the sink with both hands, bent over. I didn’t look at our faces in the mirror. I looked at the black stockings and my skin. I tried not to make noise but I couldn’t help it. He made noise. He whispered to me the entire time.
On his lap I leaned back and watched my patch of pubic hair move up and down. There was a faint pink stain on his white shirttail. I couldn’t think of what it was from until I saw the bright ring of blood at the base of his cock.
“Oh baby,” he groaned. I held the handicap bar behind his head. “You’re going to make me come. You’re so beautiful. Oh…”
Afterwards, I wet a paper towel and tried to wipe it away. It was stuck on the underside; it stayed flecked there and I didn’t want to rub too roughly.
“It won’t come off.” I was still trembling. Sex with him involves so much adrenaline, and it starts before he’s even inside. It’s like he’s caught me wild, escaping from a fire. Like I’m trying to run from him before he fucks me.
“It doesn’t matter, sweetie. I’m going right home.” I passed him dry paper towels and he wiped his hands.
“Does that always happen?” I’d asked him this before.
“Not always. Normally. We go really deep. And you’re so skinny. I think you’re skinnier than me.”
“I’m not.” I said. He wrapped me in his arms and I ran my hands over his back, then up to his head. His hair was soft and short in my fingers. I kept trying to slow my breath. I wanted to lie down with him. He kissed my cheek and my neck, held me patiently. I didn’t want to be that girl, using sex for affection. But I wanted so much affection from him. I was that girl. Did he know it? Is that what he was thinking? He has a daughter, a very young daughter. What would he think of his daughter someday bleeding on an older man’s cock?
He asked me my real name. I’d promised I would tell him and I did.
“Oh baby, that’s a beautiful name,” he said, as though I didn’t think so.
On the escalator he let his hand drift down my arm and pause over my fingers. He looked at me with that faint smile.
“There are a lot of hot women here,” he said, and I thought he was joking, but then a petite brunette in a pink shirt walked by.
“She was hot.” I murmured.
“She was. I liked her sweater. It looked so soft.”
I stared out the windows as we passed. The trees in the courtyard were covered with snow. Nothing was coming from the sky.
“But not like you,” he said, low. Men and women in wool coats moved around us. So much black and gray. “Nobody here is like you. I fantasize about you all the time….”
I republished several of my old blog entries that had been offline for a long time. This is one is possibly my favorite thing I’ve ever written, probably because it is exactly what I remember. It is the most completely I’ve ever captured my experience. It has become one of those self-fulfilling memories, like frequently viewed home movies, where you can hardly tell if the moment created this product or if the product created the moment.
