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This is a lesson:
“Tell me again,” she says, and it’s a begging.
A begging like what? Something that carries shame and smallness in the shape of it. Stay a little longer. It humiliates him for the wretchedness it pulls from him. Joel, please. Seeping blood the color of her supplication. Please , she says, please . And who else says please to him anymore? Who asks him for anything anymore but her? The only ones who ever had are long past and gone, and he can’t even barely remember they were ever really there to ask anything of him to begin with—can’t remember what it feels like to owe someone something and want to give it to them in a way that will actually make him.
Tell me what again? That I want you? That I’ll stay? That I love you? I’ll come back , he says instead, the only thing he can promise and keep. And he wonders if it humiliates her too, the way he lies, the way he runs, the way he swears, the way he always comes back and comes back but never returns with the things she needs. A humiliation just like it is a begging.
The thing they have: it’s strange, fickle, honest in its lies, very, very ugly. An ugliness that is shocking in a world gone to rot already. The sky doesn’t shine anymore and they bask in it.
But also, and , the thing they have: it’s physical, saving .
This is obvious too, even if only to them.
He slides inside and you’re what? Hot and wet and slick, and—yes, a thing like a dream, but still only a thing. Something to have, something close to desire, but not quite, more like biological want. Woman turned possession. In his mind this is an excuse, a reason, a begetting. Like, what—like what? Like when you want a thing very badly but it is very bad for you, and you need to make up any excuse to have it, lie and lie and lie—to your mother, your best friend, the mirror—a begetting like that. Easy to understand only if you’ve been there.
It started simple, it started like nothing, it started like the first time you meet someone and you know they’ll matter, you know they’ll mean something. So it started like what? Like a lie.
Shifts at the QZ, long and toiling and reminders of the sort of life that died in an outbreak of monsters, only if for how unlike that past it was. Humans or fungus or—
—men who hurt—you, men who refuse your love, Joel Miller.
The crutch of your age, of you being weaker or smaller or in need, him being easily felled, wooed, easily conquered by something young and given without a try because there was never the opportunity for trying before.
Now, it is like this: you take my cock and you take my come and you take my nothing, and I give so little and yet you still find a way to take and take and take, leech of a girl, dream of a girl, hungry. And with the excuse that it’s only in a way you contrive for your own self. But in the end, what does that make you? What do I make you into?
These are the things he asks himself.
Perhaps she goes away for a time, tries the route of escape, of variety. But when she inevitably comes back because addiction is riddled always in the same sorts of ways: did you try different bodies? Did you try different flavors and sounds? Did you look for me in all of them?
The answer is usually yes.
At reunion’s turn: he rolls her over to face her, Joel , damp and panting and trying to be something—perhaps better, more honest—after a season of variety and honest attempts and shut eyes. He’s so hard for her, always is.
Again: he slides inside and you’re what? His, undeniably. Not yours. Something to want but not desire because it’s too romantic a notion, and yes, there’s a difference even if he can’t put into words what that difference specifically is. Body and heart, perhaps, definitions that differ between disparate anatomical parts or levels of deniability.
Nothing either of you have ever been able to put into words when lust and love aren’t things you can even say out loud for the shame of them, even if they exist within said same anatomy.
You come together, the season passed, the separation passed but still kept at hand for the next time the closeness becomes too much.
“Tell me again,” she says, and this time he remembers what she’s asking for.
“I fucking missed you, baby. Missed this pussy.” Because he can’t say it’s her heart he missed. Because Joel Miller does not have honesty in his arsenal.
He spreads you wide, knee to shoulder so it hurts and pulls, so it’ll be sore and reminding tomorrow. The slap of his pelvis against the back of your thighs is obscene, wet and lewd, a string of girl cum keeping you connected, such togetherness, curve of your ass to the root of his cock—the two of you are together again.
You know what I thought, when I tried to go away, you say. He doesn’t want to know, but he doesn't tell you so either, only slides in again, the mouth of your womb right there, threatening. I’m never going to feel like this again, and I hate how certainly I know that. He wonders if the unsaid part is that he’s the recipient of that feeling, the hate.
He wonders if the pinch inside him is hurt. He wonders if the throb is love.
All he says because he can’t say the rest is, I missed you, I missed you , and if he could look himself in the mirror—something that’s twenty years past lost—he’d ask: are you alright? Just tell me you’re okay . And it sounds in your own voice and with your own care and the feel of your own warmth. Is there anything I can do?
Other times, he sees himself through your own eyes, and then he knows for certain that the throb is love
So he makes up for lost time, hard—and if it was a thing he knew how to be— loving. Mouth to cunt first, primed and soft and begging, making you come again and then another once more, then inside of you. Slow, splitting you open, red cunt like a wound, balls slapping wet, pulling out to watch the gape of the space he’s carved for himself. His cock is so hard and missing you something desperate. And he’s reminded of what it is to really miss something in a way he hadn’t been in twenty years of apocalypse, he’s forced to realized that it’s been so long since he’d had something to love that he’d not realized the feeling of missing that long past someone had gone away, only faint memory remained.
Violent, is what this makes him after that realization—thrusts turning hard and punishing. How dare you give yourself to me? How dare you then take yourself away? You come around him again, the gift of your orgasm. How dare you not be able to accept the little I’m able to give when I’m trying so desperately fucking hard to give you even just this?
He fucks you mean, he fucks you in the way of a man who doesnt know how to say the things he needs to say, in a way that’s confusing, that could make a less discerning woman feel only the hurt.
But then again, you know him.
Fucks you in a way that is a little bit like love.
And so, amidst all of it, there is an honesty amongst the lies. A truth unspoken that they both know—I’ll come back because I need you, because you’re the only one who can give me the things I'm not strong enough to ask for out loud.
You’re not sure which of the two of you is the one saying it.