Somewhere around the point where my drink stops tasting like bright summer days and starts reminding me of the stuff they smear on wounds, I decide to go home with my date. I don’t even find him attractive, this Hinge swipe #2,395 (approximately) with his glassy blue eyes and watery smile and thick black hair. Maybe it’s because he’s shorter than me, maybe because his eyes remind me of the taxidermied animals at the oddities store downtown. But he’s wearing some pretty cool cowboy boots—turned up at the toe, leather so burnished it almost glows—and I justify my decision by telling myself maybe I can swipe them on my way out of his place.
In his bed: I’m not wet enough. What’s wrong with me that I’ve only been able to get wet for three fucking people? A tongue on my clit and, according everything I’ve ever read about sex, I’m supposed to be gushing like the compliments pouring from a drunk sorority girl—but I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. When he enters me the words I’m not find a rhythm, match themselves to his movements. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. And yet he is all of these things: he’s a battering ram, he’s an archaeologist excavating my hollow, he’s a miner tunneling for gold. He’s hitting my cervix and it’s starting to hurt, a cramp rippling ominously through my lower stomach.
I think about telling him to stop and wonder if it will be worth the possibility of him ignoring me. I decide it’s better to suffer a few more minutes of discomfort than risk having to walk out of this apartment thinking I have just been raped, and right then, he finishes. For a moment we’re pressed together and I pretend the freckles on his shoulder are a constellation: tiny, brown, undiscovered. It’s been years since I’ve seen any real stars.
I don’t steal his boots. Outside: deli-lit night and sticky sidewalks and the close, conspiratorial smell of smoke. Ahead of me the fractured eye of a streetlight blinks yellow in three different segments, a pie chart where every slice is the same: encapsulating everything, representing nothing. A siren wails in the distance, brittle, winding its way toward me in the translucent dark. As I cross the street I feel that cramping again, not just in my lower stomach but in my whole body now, rising through my feet and my spine and my brain stem, splitting me like torn paper.
