Tangible

Lori,

Just this. I’d like you to read it, but it’s mostly for me.

I would drive at night, thinking of your breasts, wondering if you’d be up , if either one of us got sleep anymore. I would drive at night, slowly slipping down your alley. If the lamp above your stove was on, your husband would be up, if the light above your television, and only the light above your television, were on, I’d know it was you, and I’d wait, the motor on my car swelling in idle, until the top of your head appeared, and it would turn to look down on me, and I would pray that tonight you would come down. You did. You came down your back stairs, a silhouette of joy, backlit by your security light in your pathetic back yard. I knew it was safe then to dream of you, that I could think about you without wondering whether it was alright to think. As your hair began to take shape on your shoulders, and my eyes could focus, as they would only when I let them. You never entered the car here, but went to the front of your house, and I would drive around to meet you at the end of your block. You didn’t know these neighbors, probably think you were a teenager sneaking out anyway. You’d climb into the car in whatever you were wearing in the house, mostly a t-shirt with no bra and a pair of loose shorts. Your legs would move easily in them, would betray the shape I was so surprised to see every time I saw them, the swinging curve of your ass in them too, so much smaller than the shorts.

We could talk when we wanted to. Your husband was never much for surveillance. We had chats and emails and sometimes even the phone to communicate with. The phone calls were chaste, the only flirtation in smoke signals and innuendo. The emails were deeper, because we only emailed just before masturbation. The chats, during and shortly after if the other party was still working on it, were one-handed, all-small letters and no punctuation.

do you feel me inside you
yes
fuck me
yes
im in you so hard
i know harder
yes
god
your cunt
your cock
fuck me

It was always a surprise to see you, to know I hadn’t imagined you, that you weren’t just an electronic ghost, but you were beautiful and flawed and graceful and you had a mole, a real one, at the inside of your inner thigh. It was hard to make eye contact with you. You always seemed to avoid it. Your breasts, well I called them breasts for you, your tits were always rolling at turns in stoplights under your shirt. I’d take the corners hard to watch them. We parked down my alley and went to my neighbor’s back yard, a beautiful and hidden one, with acres of not much, all covered in insects and low-branched trees. We lay down on their bench, which read “God brought the sun so that we can recognize good.” It was always dark on that bench, but I saw nothing but good when you lay across the bench, your shorts billowing at one ankle, my job now to slowly lift the shirt.

Your tits were small and fit perfectly in my palms. I obsessively worked at them until they locked in, the nipple in the crevice of my heart line, my fingertips over the skin. That was happiness there, your tits locked into my heart lines on the bench. If you were an object to me, it was only through idolizing you. We didn’t have time to ruin it. I couldn’t believe at the time that I could drive through your alley to get this, that a simple gesture like that in the world could find such results. Tangible ones, if I ever really believed it was happening.

Your knees would lift sometimes when you were ready, but I’d let them cradle me for a while before I unzipped. You were so soft against the bench, but solid. You let me kiss you for a while before I entered you. I felt bad giving you no foreplay all the time, but you never seemed to want it. You never seemed to come either. What this was for you wasn’t quite what it was for me, but I just let myself think that you found something in me, whatever it was that you needed somehow. Maybe all you wanted was the weight of a body pressing into you. When you closed your eyes, I never asked what you were thinking.

And so I would move inside of you, wet anyway and pushing back, and imagine that you were in love with me, or needed me, or whatever I could placate myself with while my body turned slowly to hunger and satiation. The endless story of our lives, we need, we get, we need, we get, we need to need, and we find a new thing to need, and we try hard until we get. Sometimes I needed to look at your face and pushed your hair back over your forehead to look at you. Sometimes I needed to watch your neck until I saw your blood jump in it. Sometimes I just needed to look at your tits as they bounced under me.

I don’t think you needed me, and it’s shameful that it’s only occurred to me now. That basic need you created in me, a need to come and getting it, was, to me simple enough. As I unloaded inside you, pumped into you, it was enough for me. That you’ve decided not to stand up as I drive by, though it is only the light over the television on, means that whatever need you’ve got, you’ve created it over something else. I won’t drive by anymore, and it’s okay. I think all the bruising will heal after I press send.

Hal