Epitaph (fiction)

Looking at her now, focusing mainly on the heel of her crossed feet to avoid looking in her eyes, it’s hard to remember that we were ever in love.  She bounces her feet up and down, nervously.  We talk like this every few weeks, and each talk is almost as miserable as the weeks of not talking that precede it.  I’m on autopilot when I say, “I just know you as someone different now than I did before.”  I’ve said it so many times before.  She counters, as she does so often, having completely missing the point, arguing that “I just don’t think we’ll ever be the same as we were.”

“That’s what I’m saying.  There’s no part of me that even wants that anymore.”  I even slow down in the second sentence to be very clear.

“It just wouldn’t be good for me personally to go back to where we were.”  She talks to me like she’s interviewing for the job of not being my friend.

“Thats... yes.  That’s what I’m SAYING.  I am not interested in that.”

I am four, apparently, when she says, “I hear your anger.”  

JesusFuckingChrist I hate her.  Yes, you hear my anger.  You ARE my fucking anger.  It’s like we’re talking at each other through a long, long tunnel, and only little pieces of anything make their way from mouths to ears.  Still, it feels good to get things off my chest, even if I end each conversation swearing to myself that it is the last one.

I think I loved her within minutes of the first time we met.  I don’t know that we realized we fell in love though, until after we broke up.  In fact, we didn’t even admit to dating until half a year after we weren’t.  

Absolutely everything about everything about her is completely fucked.

We met at the Christmas party of a mutual friend that could, except for our meeting, be best described as “inconsequential.”  We met at the party leaning on kitchen counters and drinking earnestly at one another, each daring the other to make the first mistake.  We were both dating other people and shouldn’t have been flirting, except that’s what nearly everyone does away from the people they are dating all the time.  We flirted until we were friends.

This was fucking forever ago.

About a year from meeting, a year spent riding bikes and smoking too much weed and acting as just-friends who also-kinda-wanted nothing but to fuck each other until the whole world ran out of fuck, we gave up and started just loving each other.  

We loved each other like we were at summer camp.

We loved each other enough that it started to hurt that we weren’t touching, and so we started to touch all we could.

We were just friends, remember.  Except that when we got drunk I pulled her hair and she turned the color of turned on.

We were just friends.  Except that we’d watch movies laying front to back on a couch and feel so good laying next to each other we’d watch another movie after, and then maybe something else, or maybe just fall asleep like that for a bit.

We were just friends, right?  Except that we help hands when we drove together.  Except that we were embarrassed by our closeness when caught by total strangers.  Except that I’d get lost during conversation while staring at her neck.  Except at night I went to bed with her behind my eyelids, and in the morning I woke up aching from my fingertips.

Neither of us was dating anyone else.  Neither one of us really even kept in touch with our mutual friend anymore.  Neither one of us really kept in touch with anyone but each other, even when we were at parties full of people.  

We kissed for the first time because it was raining outside and it was night and we were in a car that had not been started yet and the night all around us told us it was about time to start.  

In our haste, we forgot to worry about clothes and touched each other over everything we had on top of everything we had been really reaching for for months.  My hand slid under her hair and across her stomach.  Her hand slid up the inside of my leg and grabbed my thigh.  Kissing that night was like the very best moments of our best conversations without the pauses or the silly wastefulness of words and meaning.  Kissing was everything right we had with each other, and we kept kissing until we were drunk from it.

It’s funny how you can be so close to someone for so long and touch them so much, but never learn how they like to have their nipples touched.  I learned there in the car.  She liked to have her nipples touched in lots of different ways, but there was this certain way that was a little like pulling and a little like twisting and rolling that involved my pointer finger and thumb working together.  She really liked that.  She growled at me.  That was new.

She sat her hand right between my legs, moving it just enough to feel how hard I was getting as we kissed.  My fingers ran up and down the line of the stitching between the legs of her jeans, feeling warmth and little else of what my kissing was doing to her.  She slid her hips down, pushing herself against me so I pushed harder, rubbed more.  I could tell from her shoulders when I was doing something right.  She rolled them backwards when what I did felt good, slid them forward when she wanted something more.

She came so quickly it didn’t even count.  She came a little release of an orgasm and we grinned the grins of drunken morons and made unspoken promises about next time and next time and next time.

I slept soundly that night, wrapped in the wonderful thing that was about to happen.

It’s hard to remember now, sitting across from her while we disagree on how best to not like each other, if things ever got that wonderful again.  As she continues on her parade of “there’s just no place in my life for a friendship like we had” and I, for the thousandth time in the last few months wonder if she’s deluding herself or just lying to me, I glance at the bump in her shirt from her nipple and think again about the finger trick I know works so well on her.  The response from my stomach is immediate, and it does its best to curse me with anger and spite for thinking of such things.

Mainly, when I think about the sex we ended up having, I just wish that we didn’t.  Mainly, I can’t remember having any impulse to touch her, though I know somewhere it was a lot stronger than an impulse.  I know I felt sick when we went too long without touching.  The sex we had was perhaps the best I’ve ever had in my life, and is certainly my least favorite to think about.

Shortly after the night in the car, and with some short stolen moments between (quick kisses in the hallways of parties and one time when we met on our lunch break she kissed me right before I went back to work like she was daring me to think about anything else for the rest of the day (I didn’t)), I went over to her house because of Space Invaders.  She had a Super Nintendo and had recently purchased the 1979 classic, re-released for Super Nintendo in 1991.  It was to be a night of double-layered nostalgia for an era of gaming neither of us was ever interested in.

Yes, if you’ve noticed, I’m intentionally avoiding saying her name.  I hate her fucking name.

Anyway.

I came over and we space invaded and it turned out that video games from 1979 are absolutely ridiculously impossible.  We space invaded poorly, so much so that it became a bit of a race to see which of us could pass even the first level.  At first we cheered each other on, but the cheering quickly became shit talking and then outright subterfuge.  During a turn when I was doing well she stood up calmly, walked to the the television, stood and faced me, and took off her shirt.  Pow.  Dead.  More disappointingly, the shirt was back on before I really got a good look.

During her turn then, I did the same, calmly walking to the television, letting a brief moment of anticipation fill the room up with energy, and then removing my shirt.  Laughter.  Pow.  Dead.

It was always understood that she was the hot one.  Like so many of my relationships with women, it was my humor and not my appearance that got me through the door.

There were many turns taken before I started doing well again.  Enough that I was starting to wonder how anyone ever learned to like video games until Excitebike came out.  When finally I did start to do well, clearing the first three layers of whatever-they-are’s from the screen, she flashed me again, this time from right next to me on the couch.  I was ready though, steely-nerved and dead-eye-locked on the screen.  I saw movement in the corner of my eye that I imagined or hoped was her playing with her nipples, but remained focused on invaders.

She reached over and grabbed my cock through my pants, but I was ready, smiling as I said, “You’re welcome to, but it’s not going to-” Pow.  Dead.  

I didn’t wait for her to do well.  I matched her bet immediately, kissing her neck as soon as her turn started, finding her nipples through her shirt and putting my thumb and fore-finger right where- Pow.  Dead.

“No fair.  I was winning.”  She wasn’t, but whatever.

“Sorry.  Them’s the rules,” I started reaching for the box to the game, “they’re right here in the rule book.  Nipple touching wasn’t off limits until the N64 version.”  Did I mention I had no girlfriend at this point?

“Your turn.”  She was on her knees next to me on the couch, and as I picked up my controller again, crouched as if ready to pounce.   She invaded before the space thingies, and had my pants open before I hit start on the game.  As the first alien/purpley-blob things drifted down in the range of my tank/shooty-blob, she threw her head under my arms and my cock went from underwear to cold air to warm mouth in less than a second.

I fought orgasm from the first moment.  I’d been wishing for this since just before the first time I saw her, been sick with desire for this since the first time we held hands on a long car ride, had imagined this happening so many ways it was most shocking that I hadn’t seen this coming until just before it happened.  The orgasm I could see from a mile off, but couldn’t get myself to steer off course.  It would have been easy, just a matter of playing slightly less awesomely than I was playing that round, but the aliens were kneeling before my might just as she moved to kneel in front of the couch.

Holy shit.  I mean, holy fucking shit she can suck a cock.  

So I waited until just after the last second of when I should have made her stop.  So she stopped, she looked up all proud and mischievous and what’s-next and I felt my cock pulsing and pulsing and tried every trick I learned since I was 10 to keep from coming. With my cock the only exposed part of either of us, and shiny and swollen from her mouth, she made me come from two feet away, leaning back on crossed ankles.

Pow.

I caught it in my hand like it was stolen candy.  I took my flannel off and rubbed my hand clean.  We shared our first, very very first, awkward silence.  

“Your turn.”

She laughed, thank god, and reached across me for her controller.  Before she could grab it, I grabbed her sides and lifted/threw her to the couch.  I said again, as sexy as I could manage without sounding silly, “your turn.”

She undid her pants for me, slid them past her ankles and to the floor.  I kissed every part of her that stood still for more than half a second.  My lips found arms and her stomach and her neck and her legs and her lips and her lips and her lips.

I lifted her shirt up, did my best to replicate with teeth and tongue and lips the thing I was doing with my fingers.  I ran my hand through her hair and balled it into a tight fist at the back of her head, pulling her hair back because I liked the things she did with her lips and the noises she made when her hair was pulled.

As my lips moved down her body and over her thighs and up her thighs and between her thighs, I thought about her squeak of an orgasm in the car, I hoped the both of our first orgasms were get-it-out-of-the-way orgasms and that our number twos would be better.

Once I could taste her I knew things would be different and this would be no squeak.  She grabbed my hair and her hips jerked under me as I sucked her clit between my lips.  There’s nothing in the world so hot as a woman enjoying sex, and nothing so good for one’s ego after a humblingly fast orgasm.

My hands found her breasts and nipples and her neck felt so like sex as my fingers ran up to her lips.  She sucked my fingers as I sucked her clit, bit and licked her pussy as she growled encouragement and something that sounded like Romanian swear words.

She came hard enough for aftershocks to be felt some three miles away, some months and months later.  She came hard enough to stop time, to stop me breathing, to stop us from being the anything that we are besides human animals in orgasm.

She pulled me up to her and we kissed the way people kiss when they’re scared of what might come out of their mouths if they stopped.

She felt me hard against her as we kissed and sent her hand on a friendly mission of exploration.  She found immediately and undeniably that, yes, I was ready to try again.  As she unzipped my jeans again, I straddled her just above her hips.  She reached between us, still close enough to kiss, palm up towards my stomach, and started to touch me slow.  Our lips were linked somehow with my cock and I felt the power of our kissing everywhere her hand didn’t cover.  This was her.  This was her and she wanted me so bad to come again for her.  This was her, and we were kissing and our mouths tasted like her pussy and she wanted me so bad to come onto her.

I came onto her stomach as she smiled into our kissing.

We cleaned and cuddled against each other and stared at the paused screen of a 1979 video game from 1991 for almost an hour.  We hummed into each other’s necks and shoulders and said almost nothing else.  

Sitting across the table from her at the most boring coffee shop on the planet, I am not curious, not in the littlest bit, who she’s fucking now.  I hope she’s having great sex with as many people as she wants and I’m happy as hell that she’s not having sex with me.

As we started getting more naked more often, started spending nights in each other’s beds and making breakfasts that took hours to make and hours to eat, we were still friends.  I thought we understood that.  Thought we understood that we were friends who wanted to fuck each other’s brains out and were almost certainly, probably, completely in love.  I thought we could be like that forever if we felt like, because it worked so well for us.  

I guess I should clarify that we never really fucked, either.  We really wanted to, and talked openly and often about it.  She would talk about wanting to get fucked by me.  I would talk about how great it would be to fuck her.  This would happen randomly.  We would be out drinking, and she would wait for whiskey to hit my lips and say, “don’t you wish we were fucking right now?”  I would cough a “yes” out through Jameson.  We never really fucked though, because we never really dated.  You’ll either understand this completely or not, but we fucked like friends for months and months, and it was always clear to both of us we would never be more than friends with benefits in love with each other.

See, even though we were all of these things to each other, we would still often go a few weeks without seeing each other.  We bored the shit out of each other when we talked about anything in our real lives.  We openly encouraged each other to date other people, and both worked effectively (sometimes spectacularly) as each other’s wingmen when we were out places where cute people were.  When one of us felt like we were maybe going to date someone else, we cooled it on the getting each other off.

I thought we understood that’s how things were.  I swear we talked about that’s how things were, but it’s hard to remember now if we did.  It’s hard to imagine she didn’t understand that I wanted her to find someone to be really happy with, that I was willing to give up the sex when that happened to save the friendship.  It’s hard to imagine she didn’t understand that because I distinctly remember saying it all the time, and I’ve never once lied to her about anything, even when it was hard as hell not to.  I encouraged relationships, and so did she.  I asked after the doofy guy who painted shitty paintings as if neither of those things were true about him.  I acted worried when they were having troubles.  I offered helpful suggestions that served to keep us from having sex more often.  It’s impossible for me to imagine she would be worried about dating other people.

I’m sure it’s not difficult now to imagine where things went wrong.

I saw her out at a bar.  She was with her girl friends, all of whom I thought I was pretty cool with.  I was with the drinkers from work, out drinking after work.  She lit up when she saw me across the bar as we walked in.  She waved and I waved and I held up a finger like “just a sec” because I wanted to sit and I wanted a fucking drink because I was drinking after work.

I sat with the work drinkers and we got our drinks ordered and by the time I looked back up to her table, maybe five minutes later, she and her friends were gone.  I texted her “?” and kept checking through second and third drinks and she didn’t respond.

The fuck?

The fuck.

Sitting across the table from her, far away from couches and retro video games, far away from the time when we met when it was dark out in places that were fun, I find that I hate the way she picks at the muffin at her plate.  I want to scream at her to just fucking eat the thing already.  I also want to explain to her again how she fucked all this up, but I can’t imagine her caring anymore.

Besides, she’s made it my fault that she brushed off the bar thing when we talked next, and when we talked on facebook the next week and I asked her if she was up for some Space Invaders sometime soon she called me a ‘perv’ and changed the subject to something the opposite of sex.  She’s made it my fault that she fucked up.  She’s probably partially right, though to this day I can’t figure out how.

A few months after the bar, I was laying on the floor at work.  I was in the little kitchenette off to the side of all the offices.  No one goes in there after noon, so I figured it was a decent place to lay down.  Not until I had been laying down for five or ten minutes, in the dark, on the small patch of carpet on the opposite side of the room from the sink, did I ask myself exactly what I was doing there.  It had something to do with emails, I remembered.  I also knew I didn’t feel like standing up anytime soon.

I had been walking through months of uncertainty with her.  There were flashes of flirty texts and then days of silence, of coldness. There was one party where her mean-spiritedness towards me led three separate people to come up to me and ask what was “up” with her.  I had no answer.  I had no idea, except one day I would have (and did) trust her with any secret in my life, and suddenly I was being treated like a stranger who spit on her sandwich.  There was a knot, like a peach pit, in the top right of my stomach.  It never stopped hurting, dull and sometimes sharp, for two straight months.  I named it after her until carrying something named after her that close to me just made it hurt more.

After walking through months feeling like the bad guy in a very special and emotional episode of Saved By The Bell, I sent her an email.  The email was a few pages long, meticulously edited and re-worded.  It said, effectively, “What the fuck?”

I refreshed my email so many times while waiting for her response that when it finally showed up, bold and foreboding, I hit refresh twice more just to make sure it was real.  This was her “I’m sorry” letter.  I would quote lines to you except I’ve deleted everything sent and received from her so I would stop going back and re-reading it.  It said, effectively, “I’m sorry.  I fucked up.”

She met a guy.  Fine.  She met a guy and decided that she couldn’t be serious with this guy and still mess around with me.  Fine.  She did, like an adult, decide to tell me that was the case.  She did, not like an adult, wait for three months until telling me and only as a reply to my reaching out.  She said she still cared about me.  She said she wanted to talk.  I read the email 10 times and then went to lay down somewhere dark and as quiet as I could manage.

We got together at the same coffee shop where we are sitting now.  We have been here five or six times, you know, “to talk.”  The coffee shop has tables spaced comfortably far from each other.  They play crappy music lightly, their coffee sucks (though not worse than their muffins) and there is always plenty of spots to sit down. There are always other people here having conversations like this, because this is a place where relationships go to die.

My thing was:  It’s not that you met a guy.  That would have been a bummer for me, but the kind of bummer I would get over in a week.  It’s the not trusting or caring enough to come tell me.  It’s the getting distance from me by treating me like shit instead of saying you need distance.  It’s the months and months of waiting for a best friend to show up because I didn’t know what had changed.

She got that.  We talked for two hours of angsty, emotional crap.  Had we stood and puked all over the coffee shop and each other it would have been less gross, and likely more pleasant.  Still, I walked away with that knot in my stomach feeling better, and with some hope that things would really get better.  I could take a few pages to explain the next few months after that, but I can spare you that garbage and sum things up clearly in five words:

Things did not get better.

It’s now about a year since Space Invaders, and across the table couldn’t feel more distant a space than it does.  I watch her talk, because listening stopped helping months ago.  I spend the time thinking about the what-was and not the could-have-been.  I watch her talk about moving forward but not knowing where forward is, but knowing it’s not where it was, but not being okay where we are (but not wanting to do anything to change it).  

I think about the last time I watched her orgasm.  She and her roommates threw a huge party at their house for someone’s something, and we spent the whole night pulling each other into dark rooms and kissing our drunk all over each other.  We sat on the couch, and as the last guest left and the last roommate went to bed, she let her head fall into my lap.  I played with her hair and we talked about who was there and what they said, and how what they really meant was something else and all the anything people talk about after parties.

With one hand in her hair, my other hand played along the hem of her shirt and down her arms.  My fingertips traced the line of her jeans and as I got to the middle of her waist she dipped her stomach down to say, “please go touch.”  So I did, unbuttoning her jeans enough to get my hand flat and down.  She closed her eyes when my fingers found her clit and I rubbed slowly and gently, drawing out the night as long as I could.  She kept her eyes closed and moved her mouth as if talking, with only drowsy mumbles finding their way to my ears.  

She came and I carried her to bed because I’d never done that for anyone before.  I slipped my shoes off and curled up next her.  It’s hard to say most nights if the drunk is really worth the hangover.  I’m still not sure.

When she gets up to leave from the coffee shop, I don’t get up to go with her.  I don’t watch her walk out.  I stare at the speckles of the formica and the little crumbs of muffin littering her side of the table. I stare for a long time and think about how long ago this all was, and how long this has been fucked.  I think about all the things she’s done I see as crappy and self-centered and childish, and I realize, just like that, that I’m not angry anymore.

I’m not angry anymore.

Instead of the anger or the saddness or the lust or the love or the fun or the friendship, instead of the anything, there is nothing.  It’s all gone now, and I know when I get up to leave that I’m not coming back here again.