One must admire your monkish habits: your devotion to a closed loop of domestic stations that lead nowhere and end at the beginning. Your legs still carry you because your body remembers what the soul has abandoned; and the body, unlike the soul, does not require reasons.
The lacquer smudged into the wood floor beside the bed in an accident you no longer remembered the circumstances of but you had once, in the early months, tried to scrape away with a butter knife before stopping midway through in a kind of dismal un-moving horror, a revulsion at your own hands, at the efficiency of how a body can remove totems she left behind.
The remaining smudge was half-removed and half-preserved and, like an argument, interrupted and never resolved - which in this case was better than resolving: you can remember, everyday, that lacquer, her favorite lacquer.
The closet was the next totem. You opened it and stood inside the frame of it - because it wasn’t luxuriant enough to be walk-in, just frame-in - and breathed. It was lavender and coffee, still. Still! It was fading, but you did the load-bearing mechanics of making sure the air outside and the air inside don’t mingle. Of course, these load-bearing mechanics were keep-sake insurances of making sure you don’t give way in the closet and weep with her fabric stippled to your face. [1]
[1] Which had happened, more than once.
She’d sold most of her clothes in secret to pay for the treatments. The remaining few hung like survivors at a reunion where most are gone. [2]
[2] Like the year-ends of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings, the remaining few with hair barely attached to their scalps. Of women and men alike; all red-eyed; sobriety takes a toll as any other substance.
In the kitchen remains her broken plates. She had broken them on the infirm day of “realizing”, “dawning”, that this wasn’t ordinary - her arms just gave way. You kept them the way you kept everything she left: totally indiscriminate. Everything in the same place as she left them; if you begin forgetting, let there be totems.
The tupperware she left in the fridge. Her last meal, the one she couldn’t finish, still inside, and you opened the fridge and looked at it every morning. No mold and no smell. You did not believe in signs but you didn’t throw it out either, and in it lies the difference: a territory of half-belief half-not so all-consuming that entire religions were founded, and you, a man who read the entire discouraging bibliography of Western Thought™ on the subject of death and its aftermath, could not place yourself with any confidence. The tupperware was simply there and that was that - to adjudicate.
Beyond totems, a coworker had recommended Vietnamese coffee on account of your comments on low energy (his recommendation goes: ‘This will fuck you up. Seriously, for cardiac events only.’ And that’s all you needed, really.)
Of course: it did nothing. You drank the bitter of it at the counter, standing and not sitting at the table for two. The whole emotional calculus of sitting on the table for two was exhausting and destructive so you opted to just stand. It would’ve made her laugh, this blunt solution.
She had a laugh that involved her whole body, a laugh that bent her forward at the waist and put her hand on whatever was nearest - your knee, your stomach, your shoulder, your forearm. And because the laugh was like that, it conscripted you - you joined her to laugh at whatever. Her laugh was the last thing you heard in your head at night. It remained itself, unlike the perfect song which eventually dis-morphs and degrades. And this was either a mercy or a cruelty that you couldn’t decide on. Her whisker-touched smile still lives in your mind endlessly.
You drove across town to see her. It was muscle memory, this track. Like it were on rails or those toy trains that you had to pull off the track just to keep them from moving in that particular way. Past the elementary school where someone had misspelled CONGRATULASHIONS on a banner that no one had removed.
And this was a fact that you and her talked extensively about. Like the ‘wicked bible’, in which the word 'not' was omitted from the seventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ The printers were fined and most copies were destroyed. She laughed about this extensively, her hand was on your belly so you laughed about it too.
Past the Presbyterian church whose sign read GOD'S LOVE IS UNCONDITIONAL but whose parking lot was gated and locked on weekdays, a contradiction you had pointed out to her once in the passenger seat and she had laughed, that laugh, bending forward, her hand on your knee, and you would give anything, anything, your hands, your degrees, the entire corpus and every footnote you'd ever written about it, for that laugh, for the fact of her diaphragm contracting, for the air that came out of her and hit the dashboard and fogged it for a half-second in January, proof of breath, proof of life.
The cemetery was simple. It had none of the Baroque funerary elements, the weeping angels and obelisks and mausoleums built on the scale of modern-age buildings, that the Europeans enjoy as architectural entitlement. Someone with a worn-down clipboard sketching his children had designated it (it was a simple flat land) for the storage of the dead, and the dead, being dead, had not objected.
In all honesty, it was a fairyland. The grass moved in a single direction, always shimmering. Just the light, the grass and the quiet.
You brushed the night dust off the stone with your palm. You rearranged some flowers the strong wind had shifted.
‘Hinton,’ you said.
The bird - a handsome blue jay - on the branch above you tweeted. It was probably experiencing zero spiritual continuity with your dead wife. It wanted seeds or it wanted a different branch.
‘He got drunk at his own birthday. Classic. John and I set up this surprise for him, collector’s editions of the board games he plays - you know Hinton, the way he is about board games, the obsessive joy - you would’ve said we spoiled him.’
You pulled up a blade of grass. Split it down the center with your thumbnail.
‘I drove him home and he went into one of his drunk rambles - he was like: “you’re the best friend ever, and I’m sorry for being such an unreliable junior. Please forgive me.” It was a whole thing…’ you showed a grin, ‘I’ll talk to him today. He’ll probably hide from me in the breakroom like last time.’
'Anyway.' You brushed the grass off your palms. 'I'm trying. You told me to move on so I'm - I don't know. I'm moving somewhere. Not sure it's somewhere good, probably more like moving around… but I'm moving.'
You touched the top of the gravestone. 'I'll come back Thursday. Same time.'
You stood, took one look at the grassland - the blades still synchronized, leaning east - and walked back to the car.
-
Work.[1]
[1] Where, among other things, you are technically required to sit in a chair that a facilities team selected from a catalog in that has never been comfortable for anyone, and where the same three people microwave the same fish every Thursday, where your manager sends emails at midnight with the subject line 'Quick thought' that are never quick and never just one thought and are torture-like-borrowed-from-Hubei-province. You survive this, and you survive managers.
After work you made the familiar turn away from home opposite your home. Toward a bar with no legible sign, or a sign so rain-damaged it had become a Rorschach test. You saw Reilly's. Hinton swore it was Kelly's. The barkeep, when asked, said:
It didn't matter.
You parked a short distance away. There was parking closer, by the trees, but you liked to walk. Taste the town air. Let the breeze move through your hair, down your back.
The bell above the door rung, the barkeep nodded, and a few regulars glanced your way, grinning, throttled by their own worries.
You ordered some beer. Grabbed a napkin to fold into disarray and disfigure.
An unfamiliar face on the stool next to you. A girl. Beautiful, but that's not what you noticed first. What you noticed was that she sat down like someone who'd been walking a long time - this tired huff of a person without energy.
'Vodka with Coke Zero,' she said to the barkeep.
Coke Zero?
Not even a real Coke with vodka? She's cutting sugar on a vodka coke. She wants to get drunk but she doesn't want the calories. Or she wants to get drunk and wants to taste nothing while she does it. Or, and this thought arrived without permission: somebody had trained her, at some point, to read everything that entered her body at the molecular level. Just a hunch.
'It's something I developed early on,' she said. Not to you exactly, to the irreverent watchers in the void.
'People give a side eye - or cant help it - when I order it.' She turned now. 'I just like to explain myself.'
'Right.' You took a sip. 'So what brings you here. This is a mid-career panicked people's gathering zone.' You offer the appeal of a bar in layman's terms.
'My career is over.' She picked up her glass when it arrived. Held it but didn't drink, more like staring into it, just a hint off the color of cola. 'I'm arguably deeper into it than you are.' A slight grin from her.
You offered one back. A smaller, more defiant one.
The ambience filled the space between you: it was quiet for a while, someone fed the jukebox, someone else laughed too loud at nothing.
'I like hearing stories,' she said.
'Hm?'
'Tell me a story. I came to this bar for a reason.'
'For stories.' You reply, unmoved.
'Yeah. You 'mid-career panicked people' (air-quotes) have the best ones.'
'What, you want me to tell you about my office life? My daily wars with the printer?'
'Come on.' She took a sip now. Finally. 'You know what I'm talking about. Drink more beer and talk to me.' She set her glass down. 'You people and your privacy. Hmph.'
You took a longer sip this time. Set the glass down. Looked at the counter, at the grain of the wood.
-
A decade ago and then some, when you were around 17, you were an intern at the local konbini, working the register. It was an old town and you needed cash to see your friends. The town was what it was: old people getting older. The days of today no different from the days of then.
You helped old people, mostly. They couldn't see a meter ahead. They moved as slow as weather.
Your manager worked the back. Drank, smoked, handled storage. He stayed out of everyone's way and everyone stayed out of his. Another clerk worked beside you, a much older man who was, from the outset, cruel. Someone who had hardened into meanness the way a bone sets wrong after a bad fracture.
Once, a boy came into the store. Clothes dirty. Hair past his ears, tangled. He went to the middle aisle, the half-priced day-old section, and picked up some food. His sleight of hand was poor. You could see his wrist dip toward his pocket.
He was stealing.
But it was out of the clerk's line of sight. And you didn't say anything. [1]
[1] You must add that this was a period of great ideological upheaval in your life. You were exposed to a greater array of people, cultures, ideas. And the idea of a small boy fending for himself by stealing out of the day-old section was the just the idea that seemed to be your way of "fighting the system".
He paid for the items outside his pocket and left (a common way of pretending you were there for those specific - barely a dollar in total - items).
This became routine, he showed up regularly, but the cash he carried seemed to thin each time. The bills more run-down. The coins fewer.
By then you'd been dating your wife for about a month. When she heard the story, her heart broke at the possibilities. A world that excluded children in need. And without needing to think much about it, she intervened.
She followed him. Found where he lived: a run-down apartment complex. Other children running in and out through a side entrance. That was all the information she could gather that day.
Then one day, one horrible day, you couldn't block the clerk's view. The boy pocketed something and the clerk saw it happen. He jumped the counter and tackled the boy. Yelling, furious, but not punching - for what it was worth.
The clerk had his arms wrenched behind his back. You don't remember the order of things. Adrenaline had eaten the sequence. Somehow you got the clerk off and took the boy.
And then the boy told you everything.
He was living with his brother and sisters in an apartment with no lighting, no heating, no anything - they weren't old enough to actually pay the utilities. Their mother had been a sex worker who got pregnant one too many times; but had changed her life, yet the reputational damage in patriarchal Japan was too deep. No employer would take the chance, she moved across the country to find work. Labor, service, anything.
For a while she sent money; envelopes, sometimes just bills folded into notebook paper. The boy used it to take care of his family. He told you he'd bought a small piano for his older sister. She'd been saving for one. A really small one.
Then the envelopes stopped coming in and the worst case scenario came to fruition: disappearance.
You thought about jail. Too many things had gone wrong in sequence. Day after day, one thing after another.
You offered help - money, groceries… even adoption - he refused.
The only thing he accepted: you'd leave food at the back door of the konbini. So that's what you did. Every shift, you told the manager you were clearing old inventory. It was almost always perfectly fine food, just a day past its label. You collected a bag and brought it to the back door. He'd be there. You set the bag down. He picked it up. Neither of you said much.
She hadn't interrupted once. Her glass was half-empty. She hadn't touched it since you'd started.
One day their entire family came into the store. You saw them through the automatic doors. A small procession, close together. The boy, his brother, his sisters. And next to him a girl, slightly older, slightly more composed. She didn't look like she lived with the rest. She had jewelry on, a heavy bag that etched its weight on to the shoulders of her clothes.
Only the boy and the girl went into the aisles. A minute later he came to the register carrying at least a dozen boxes of strawberry Pocky. The chocolate-covered kind. He set them on the counter one at a time carefully.
The girl paid. She had the money folded in her palm. She'd been holding it the whole time. You didn't understand yet.
Weeks later you pieced it together. From fragments. From neighbors in the complex. From absence:
The smallest sister had died. You never learned how. After that it was no longer possible for them to go on as they were. They would all dissolve into the orphanage system they once escaped from. An abandoned family whose only structure was proximity, whose only comfort was staying together, had been broken from the inside.
The Pocky was their final meal together. A dozen boxes of strawberry Pocky, paid for by the older girl who wasn't even in their family. [2]
[2] An artificially produced box of chocolate-covered biscuits that is a snack for most was an unfathomable luxury to them.
And that was the humble goodbye.
The apartment was empty, the nearby vicinity that you and your girlfriend spent hours carefully observing was also empty.
But he left you something. Because he couldn't read, he couldn't write a letter. What he left was a note card. Their family tree, not larger than a few lines. It traced back only to their great-grandfather. It was provided by the government. You could tell by the creases, he'd been carrying it a long time.
-
You looked at her. She hadn't moved, two thin lines ran from her eyes past her jaw, dried partway from not wiping, leaving faint salt tracks on her skin.
'That's… heartbreaking.'
You reached into your coat pocket and fished out your wallet. Some maneuvering later you slid the note card onto the bar, his family lineage in ink, names he couldn't read of people who were permanent. You had laminated it years ago but the edges had gone to that opaque whiteness that laminated things get when the plastic starts to give. Then you pulled out a small box of chocolate-almond Pocky.
'Since you extracted my best material,' you said, tapping the box, 'I'm making you eat this.'
She let out a breathless laugh with closed eyes and more water pushed to her eyelashes. She grabbed a cocktail napkin and dipped the corner to her eyes, makeup still fine, and hitched her stool a little closer and pulled a stick from the foil.
'Not the strawberry?'
'They were out today, I made do.'
You tipped a biscuit into your mouth, she ate hers in two quick bites.
'And no signs?' she asked after a while, looking at the ceiling, blinking too much. 'Nothing from them since?'
'Nothing. They vanished into the system, the place they spent their entire time running from.'
You took another sip from the beer. The chocolate and the almonds mixed with the hops - terrible combination but it grounds you.
You traced the handle of the mug. 'So, your turn, give me something.'
She sat up and started tearing the napkin into strips. 'You know what's embarrassing? You'd think I'd have a vault. I aggressively interrogate every stranger I sit next to. I'm a parasite. But my own life?' She shook her head. 'Barren.'
'I don't believe you.'
'It's true! My little sister can't stand me because I spent my sensitive years scolding her instead of being a human being. And I've been trying to fix it by buying her favorite salt bread every time I see her and she still treats me like I'm collecting a debt, which, okay, fair. I have a degree in media and communications from NYU. I buy hand creams that cost too much. That's it, that's the whole person, fully accounted for.'
'I wholly reject that.'
'Reject away. I'm twenty seven years old and my biography fits on the back of a receipt.' She sighed. 'My life hasn't happened yet.' She tilted her head and squinted at you. 'Yours clearly has. You've already gone grey.'
'I have not gone grey.'
'You have. There.' She pointed at a spot above your ear.
'That is the lighting in this bar, which, as we've established, is terrible.'
'It's not the lighting.' She pulled out her phone and flipped the camera and held it up to your face with the prosecutorial confidence of someone presenting exhibit A. 'Look at that - right there - look at it.'
You looked. There it was.
'Forensic evidence.' She said.
'You're dismantling me.'
'How old are you?'
'Thirty.'
'Thirty… huh.'
'What does huh mean.'
'It's paradoxical. You have grey hair but you're -' She put the phone away and looked at you properly. 'You're conventionally… attractive - which I realize is a weird qualifier.'
'It's a hell of a qualifier. Conventionally attractive. I haven't heard anything like that in years.'
You turned forward and leaned into the bar and took a long sip.
'Don't let that be the case,' she said.
-
'So,' Gawon said.
'So.'
'What about your wife?'
The jukebox switched tracks and the bassline rattled up through the wood of the bar into your forearms.
'She's not around.'
She stopped tracing her glass. 'I pry too much. I'm sorry.'
'She died,' you said. 'Two years ago. She was sick for a long time before that, years, and then the doctors gave her two years and she died in two years. No miraculous survival. A cruel linear fate, if you will.'
She didn't say anything. She picked up one of the napkin strips she'd been tearing and folded it in half, then in half again, pressing the crease with her thumbnail.
'People always want to know about the end,' you said. 'Like if they know how it ended they can file it and move on. But the part that stays with you is the middle. The eighteen months where she was still walking around and eating cereal and making fun of me for how I loaded the dishwasher, except now there was this calendar behind everything.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean she did the same things but they had dates on them now. She'd hold a mug of coffee and I'd think: she's holding a mug of coffee and she has fourteen months left. She'd fall asleep on the couch with the TV on and I'd carry her to bed and I'd think the number; every time, the number was always in the room.'
Gawon had stopped folding, the strip of napkin was between her thumb and finger, half-creased.
'What was her name?' A flash went across her eyes, realizing some etiquette she'd crossed, 'Sorry, it's instinct.'
'Jiwoo. And she was sick.'
'You're very precise about it.'
'I've had practice. People ask, and you develop a version that has the most information density.'
'Is this the optimized version?'
'The long one takes two years. This one, maybe twenty words or so. True distillation.'
She laughed, then didn't, and the not-laughing was louder than the laughing. She set the napkin strips parallel to each other on the bar, a small row of them, evenly spaced.
'I had a tape recorder when I was nine. I walked around recording everything. I thought if I collected enough of the world it'd make sense to me.'
'And it never made sense,' you finish her sentence.
'I'm twenty-seven and I'm still…'
'At least you upgraded to interrogating strangers in person.'
'Lateral move at best.' She bunched up the strips and balled them together neatly.
'You're not a parasite,' you said. Because you could see her thinking it.
She blinked, 'What?'
'The self-loathing. I can smell it in the air. You sit down next to a stranger and call yourself a story vampire and probably a myriad of things less-vocalized. But you're a good listener, among other things.'
'That's -' she started.
'And you're disgustingly educated.' You pause, 'Meant to be a good thing.'
'I know.' She was turning the balled napkin around in her fingers, this tight little sphere.
Then she set the napkin ball on the bar and pushed it a few inches toward you, this little offering, and left her hand there.
You looked at the napkin ball, and then at her hand resting next to it on the wood, and then you put your hand next to hers. Close enough that the sides of your pinkies were almost touching, this near-miss of contact, and neither of you closed the gap. Her fingers were cold from holding her dead vodka for the last hour and yours were warm from the glass and you could feel the difference in temperature without touching.
She closed it - her fingers on the knuckles of your hand.
You looked at her hand on your hand and then up at her face. She had been turning toward you in degrees all evening, a few degrees after the konbini story, a few more after the Pocky, and now the rotation was complete, the full face, and the full face was the one that should've garnered millions of fans, should've been plastered across billboards and the like: the strong jaw and the enormous eyes and the honey skin and it couldn't be undone by a coat collar any more than it could be undone by an ocean.
You looked at her and she looked at you, and whatever was happening in that look went on for a period of time that you would not be able to report accurately to anyone afterward, and you thought about leaning forward, and you could see that she was thinking about the same thing.
She jerked her hand back. Some uncomfortable ring in the air, suddenly exposed.
'I'm -' she cleared her throat, suddenly hyper-aware, the men arguing behind you, the clinks of pints, blush-full. She grabbed her phone on the counter, the screen lighting up in that unforgiving white, her eyes crumpling just a tad. 'It's late. I should go. I have a… thing.'
'Right.' The cold rushed back to fill the space. You slipped your hand back into your coat pocket. 'A thing.'
'It was nice meeting you.' She was already standing, shrugging her bag onto her shoulder, tossing a crumpled twenty-dollar bill onto the bar. She didn't look you in the eye. Couldn't.
You paid the tab and tipped the barkeep with the $20 she left. You drove back home, never did your steering wheel feel so damn cold.
-
A few days pass in anticlimactic routine: the smudges and scraps left behind by your wife; the boring morning routine, without fail: scrambled eggs more rubbery than anything else, tie that pulls your collar a smudge too tight, a burgeoning rash that becomes the bane of your day; the boring drive there and fro; but there lived a single thought: her. Just her in your mind. A human mind suffering nothing tastes something and it's in a death spiral: her and her and her smudged all over your mind.
By lunch, you catch yourself rewinding a moment: the way her thin fingers held your beer mug, how it slanted just a bit due to the weight of it in her enclosed fist. You shake it off. By dinner, it's back: her big eyes staring right into you, her praline lips slightly coloring the edge of the mug. By the end of the day you're not thinking about her so much as you're failing to think about literally anything else.
A distinction that drives you delirious in-place.
But as things go, she'll become as boring as the rest of your routine - her lip smears, her eyes, her jaws, they'll all be as old as yesteryear's yesterday!
Three weeks pass like this, in this paradoxical anticipatory cluster-fuck that your life's turned into. Your eyes flit towards nooks she may reside in, crannies where she could be wandering. No luck.
The bar's on the radar now, standard Friday protocol, your life's out of balance and yet your routine never flails. You park by the tree, cram your keys in your pockets (this you never used to do, cram everything in anything and find yourself a minute or two earlier than routine.)
The bell rings and the familiar air surrounds you. You pass into the sunken floor, and sit on the cushioned seat that you adjust a few levels lower (even lowering your seat reminds you of her, how she sat a few levels higher on the chair. You sipped beer and looked at the chair for a good half-hour after she left.)
The barkeep set a beer in front of you without asking. You held it and looked at the toothpick cylinder that seemed to never finish (or be used), the steady lines ingrained into the table -
'Hey. Where's the lass?' You look up and the barkeep's looking at you, towel in hand cleaning the inside of a large mug.
'Sorry?'
Where's the lass? He repeated again - a bar's a deceivingly loud place, not a sensory deprivation tank but a sensory deprivation furnace.
'She's gone. I mean - I don't really know.'
'Pity,' he held the mug to the light, squinted, resumed wiping. 'She was a good tipper; we don't get good tippers 'round here.' He looked pointedly at your coat. 'I take a peek of your pockets and it's as if there's nothing there at all.'
You offered a laugh, 'That actually begs the question: have you seen her around here?'
'Sure did -'
'When?' The words come out rushed.
'Two weeks ago. Around that timeframe.' He set the mug down, inverted it on the rubber mat. 'I see too many faces to pin it exactly. She was here -' He pointed at the stool she'd sat on, the one next to yours, and for a second the gesture made the empty seat worse. 'Drank some beer. Left it half-full.' He put his hand on his chest. 'Now that really broke my heart, I'll tell you.'
'She left it half-full?'
'Half a perfectly good pint. Just sitting there. I nearly held a funeral.' He picked up another glass. 'And she left fifty as tip.'
'Fifty?'
'Fifty.' He said it with the quiet satisfaction of a man recounting a religious experience.
'It's what I deserve serving you tight-pocketed bastards.' He belly laughs this time.
You grin back. Then: 'how was she?'
'Looked great. Bloody supermodel, everyone's taking a look at her. Respectfully, of course.' He paused. 'Respectfully-adjacent. This is still a bar.'
'Right.'
'Funny thing.' He leaned on the counter, thick forearms plodding on the table, 'she asked about you.'
Your eyebrows jump, mouth turning into a line. 'She asked about me.'
The barkeep continued, 'I told her your routine, when you come and all the details - probably what you wanted anyway.'
'Yet you haven't seen her since?'
'Nope.' He picked up the towel, folded it - halved, halved again. 'Gone.'
He moved down the bar toward a regular whose glass had been empty long enough to warrant a grievance. You stayed on your stool, traced the mug, let the seat beside you, the one raised a few levels higher, stay in your vision.
It drives you beyond crazy.
--
Saturday. You woke up into the natural circuit: lacquer, closet, plates, then the fridge.
You opened the closet this time. The lavender was almost gone.
Reading. You leaned into the soft leather couch, just worn in enough. You held the spine of a large book, slightly giving way, crusty from the glue that didn't set properly, a certain charm you enjoyed. You flipped pages, the smell of the library through each one.
Laundry. You had a lot of dark clothing that had to be washed. Most of your wardrobe was dark; in hindsight buying clothes that you thought to be mellow has turned into an eye-sore: black on top of black.
Outside, grass, birds. It's all routine, until you heard this pressured howl from the bathroom. The pipe under the sink, the joint where copper met the shut-off valve corroded into a hairline fracture. It was weeping, hissing water. You hadn't bothered to check because the light had given off the same mellow hiss. But it was un-ignorable now, the fracture expanded, the wood of the cabinet floor that received the drippings dark and swollen, a faint mildew marking its presence.
You twisted the rusty valve at the joint until the beading and the hissing stopped. You stood up, the cuffs of your shirt now falling slowly down the length of your arm, beads of water that gave off the scent of rotten wood dripping down your fingers.
You cleaned yourself up and drove to the hardware store. Near the same lot, close to a familiar light and tree that held that nearby lot. You told an employee you recognized, who has this misfortune of prescribing flex tape to any and all complications because the store hadn't bothered to train him. He disappeared into the back to presumably grab flex tape.
You waited in plumbing. An aisle full of copper joints, PVC elbows, rubber gaskets. Another employee came through pushing a tall ladder cart stacked with inventory boxes, the kind that fills an aisle like a wall.
You stepped to give space. You let out a sudden breath before your lips clasped shut.
She was on the other side. She wasn't looking at you, opposite in fact. She was already holding a door knob and tape. She was wearing the same coat, her hair pulled back this time.
The ladder cart passed and took the wall with it and now there was nothing between you and her except eight feet of linoleum and a shelf of reduced-price caulking guns.
The PA system was listing a sale on exterior paint, a child was screaming about something two aisles over, and a rattle of the ventilation unit that been especially worse in these microseconds.
She turned to reach for something in the shelf behind her and her swept across the aisle the way eyes do in a hardware store. [1]
[1] Beyond fathers, the hardware store is a place of mystique and mystery. A place of banality and stale nothingness. You must swipe your eyes across every shelf because some item was misplaced by some bored child that carried the drill to the caulk section.
And in this banality, she met your eyes. The door knob was in her hands, tape in the other.
How to describe the moment a face you've been assembling from fragments, disassembling them all over again - lip-smudge on a glass, knuckles on a counter, the pitch of that deep laugh - suddenly coheres into an actual person. There's no word.
'Hi,' you said. Which wasn't exactly the best thing to say, but what else? You met somebody you thought about 24/7 and she's just there. She was even prettier than before, maybe because everything else was getting fried under 7,000 lumens of commercial lighting and she was just resistant.
'What are you doing here.'
'Pipe broke under the sink, the valve area corroded into some - ' Out of words, you imitate a burst of water with your hands.
She blinked, twice, rapidly. 'Plumbing supplies?'
'I'm waiting for an employee who went into the back fifteen minutes ago and may have died there.'
The ends of her lips tipped upward. She held up the door knob. 'Mine fell off.'
'It just fell off?'
'The whole knob. It's been loose since September. I've been meaning to fix it but one day… well today… it just fell off.'
'Which door.' You ask.
'Bathroom, I've been closing it with a towel wedged under the gap. It works, but I decided that I wanted to be a person who fixes things. The evidence is not compelling, I know.' She said, with tape and a door knob in her hands.
And thus: blissful awareness, you were standing in a hardware store in the clothes you'd been doing laundry in, cuffs damp from the pipe, holding nothing, caught in the wild by the person your mind had been coring itself around for three weeks.
And the setting was PVC elbows and caulk and under square-ceiling'd bright lights that did no good for complexions.
'You - ' her eyes traced over you again, your messy clothes. 'You look like you were in the middle of something.'
'I was in the middle of a Saturday.'
And here is where a different man - a man less soldered into routine, a man whose every gesture hadn't been load-tested against the possibility of feeling something - would have said: have dinner with me, come back to the bar, sit next to me, don't leave this time. [2]
[2]A different man would've at least had dry clothes on, no matter the instance.
Instead you looked at the door knob in her hand, 'That's the wrong size.'
'What?'
'For an interior door. That's exterior hardware. The bore's too wide - it won't seat right.'
She turned it over, 'are you sure?'
'I know a lot of useless things. Knobs happen to be one of them. Well, it depends if the whole thing fell off or just the knob.'
'Just the knob.'
You stepped closer and pointed at the shelf lower than the one she was looking at. 'This one - ' You ended on a note that was higher than how you intended for it to end. Because of the simple fact that you were closer to her. Close enough to smell the citrus in her perfume, the shampoo that smelled just like honey.
She grabbed a knob that was the same color and compared them, and put back the one that was bigger. 'This one.'
And you wanted to say seventeen things and answer in a thousand ways.
She turned to face you fully. Like at the bar (when her salt-tracked eyes stared at you fully - brilliant, brilliant, brilliant…)
'Thank you,' she said. 'For the knob consultation.'
'Any time.'
'I should - '
'Yeah.' [3]
[3] What's different here: there's no alcohol. Let it be clear: the anonymity that you had at the bar was no more. You are two people who shared a beautiful evening, and have been building private mythologies around each other for three weeks… and there you are, both, in-the-flesh. Dry, physically, sure. Internally? Hell no. All of this intensity is funneled into the knob consultation. You teach her about passage sets because you cannot say what you really want to say. She listens with too much seriousness because…
She retreated to the end of the aisle. She left just like the way she did at the bar. But there wasn't a bell above the door this time, no crumpled twenty on the counter.
'Sorry about the wait.' You turned towards the voice, it was the employee. 'We had to dig through overstock.'
Strangely, he got the right item: the valve kit. You went back home and fitted the new valve, tightened it until the beading and hissing stopped. You washed your hands, you ate something you wouldn't remember eating, laid back into the couch to read a book whose spine was giving way.
You read until you were drowsy and headed to bed. But you were woken up by a late message:
-
[number redacted] 1:09 AM:
I keep starting this wrong. I wrote four versions and deleted them, and I'm now writing about deleting them - which is 100% worse. This sort of meta-writing has always been a chore for me - I watch, I am invisible, it's hard to write about myself. But just because I'm invisible doesn't mean I don't exist, but still, there is no valid way to test it. Is there?
Because my life goes like so: I fall asleep on the train home from "work" but I get home anyway. I close my eyes and nothing happens. I close my eyes every now and then, just to test the waters, and find I'm still moving, being moved, walking through the turnstile with my eyes closed, held up and carried along by the routine. Am I invisible?
The lights flicker and the wheels clack. No one on the train can tell who's driving, so I let go of the imaginary wheel. I lean back in my plastic seat and let my shoulders drop. In the seat across from me, a man is reading something on his phone. His hands look familiar. And the woman standing by the automatic doors - her jaw, the set of her jaw strikes something deep inside me. Look at the grey at the temples of the guy in the coat two seats over! I know that grey! I've seen that grey on somebody else's head! All these parts trying to assemble themselves in front of me, as if to say let me in, I'm still here, hello hello, you know me, you know - I spent my life without making a mark - and then you sat next to me and looked at me, and now i can't ride a train without seeing you everywhere, which means I was seen, which means I exist in someone else's story, which means I'm not invisible anymore.
So here's the deal: I'm not invisible. You are proof of it.
Here I am in my apartment with the blue tape on every wall and nothing painted, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I'm writing to everyone - assume a middle distance and transcend myself - but I'm writing to you and you know it.
There was one time, we were at the bar then, and you had just gone somewhere inside your head - I could see it happen, the departure, mid-sentence - and I almost said where did you just go? but I didn't because I was already somewhere too. It doesn't always matter where we are but here I am and I say hello, sitting next to you this time, just pretend I'm sitting next to you this time, please. You would like it here. Maybe you would like it here. I think that maybe you would like it here. There's painter's tape on the light switch and the spackle's the wrong grade and… and all these books have been slant-wise because I had been meaning to give you that one book that held the structural stability of an entire shelves worth of books… but you would like it here.
I work my jobs, I take my trains. Button the coat and go to work, unbutton the coat and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I collect. I get out the napkin and start writing down the things that affix the meaning to the evening, the inner life to the barstool, the names to the faces. I float too much to settle in the actual world. I envy your routine but that's the deal - you're a Friday and I'm a bar and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story -
my own story… isn't that crazy?
But you are my stranger and I think about you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to cast it out in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you. You and your stool and your lager and your coat pockets that apparently contain nothing, if the bartender is to be believed.
I asked him for your number. I told him not to tell you, which is childish, and I'm sure he hasn't told you. It's been in my phone for eleven days, unsaved, filed under cowardice. (You alone can make eleven days feel like a year or two. I used to sleep eleven days! [1]) I've been rereading the evening. I think it's about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that's okay. We dream and dream of being known and then finally someone sits next to us and listens and we bolt. We leave a twenty on the bar and bolt. Anyway: story received, story kept. You looked at me long enough to see something underneath the prying. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
[1] subject to hyperbole. i dont sleep that much. im sure you know it's sarcastic but just in case, just in case.
So here we are: me being here and you being off the map and me sending this across the wires and hoping to be received. You're making me work for this and that's okay too. I was pushing too hard, asking too much, and you let me anyway, and yes, this has been the shape of it all along: a place for the story to land, the airport of someone else's listening.
The question I keep asking myself is do you have a real reason to send this and can you prove it? And of course there is no definitive answer. A sensible person would do the math. A sensible person would weigh the facts and arrive at a conclusion. People, they make it up as they go along. They find connections between things where there aren't any. They get strange about it, they refuse to call, they take it deep inside themselves and fold it into something unrecognizable and then they set it down on the table. Or they send it as a text to an unsaved number at one in the morning.
I had a tape recorder when I was nine. I walked around recording everything - the kettle, my sister fighting with the remote, traffic from the window. I thought if I collected enough of the world I could play it back and it would make sense. It never made sense.
That's what I do. I sit next to strangers and I press record and I leave. The leaving is the easy part. The part after the leaving - where the tape keeps playing even though you've pressed stop - I have no practice in.
Of course, I wonder if you think about it too, which is, really, beside the point. I don't do this to be thought about, I do it because the evening keeps getting bigger in my memory - really, unmovable - and that's just what happens.
So here we are again, words on a screen, the voice that wants to be a hand, the bridge with no opposite side. You're the only one. Sure, we invent each other. We agreed to that somewhere between the Pocky and the lager. Stranger and bartender's regular, Friday and the rest of the week. We do what we do and what I do is put the words on the screen and stare at them.
So here you are, reading this, expecting something. A reason perhaps, or an apology for bolting. You're ready and I'm ready too. Have you been waiting long? I've put it together for you, bundled it all up, because it's nice to put yourself inside someone's phone at one in the morning, like origami cranes and family trees and fifty-dollar tips. Here is a place for it to happen. A place where I can say it:
I'm not invisible. You are proof of it.
If you want, we could sit somewhere again. I'm good at sitting somewhere. You seem to be too. [2]
PS: the bartender gave me the exact times you come into the bar. I waited on a Friday where you were supposedly there. I sat in the car for about 20 minutes before bolting back home. Then I did it again. Your routines are rubbing off on me.
-
[2] I really had to add a Richard Siken reference into this fic. I bundled it up and made it specific to this story but I highly recommend reading the original. Here it is[https://web.archive.org/web/20211127225334/http://sporkpress.com/2_1/Pieces/Siken.htm]. Tears and more tears.
-
How many read-throughs did it take? Gawon sent you a thousand-word-and-then-some letter that held everything she ever held in these meek eleven days which held years for her. Years!
You can already imagine Gawon in the kitchen - or her voice ringing from the kitchen, spreading jam on that slighty burnt toast (because of course your charmful toaster is a little old-fashioned and selective with its burning) - and you're in your boxers and a t-shirt that has her perfume all over it. It's a living thing at this hour.
Utterly enthralled. A way to put it.
Then:
[number redacted] 1:21 AM: apt 4F at hannam residences
She sent her address.
You put on pants that were on the couch, your renovation pants. Paint-struck and everything else on it. Who gives a fuck. She's in the kitchen and you're in your boxers.
You picked up your keys and forgot your jacket. The November air hit like feathers. You drove fourteen minutes or a few seconds. You brain had read the letter, processed it and resigned then and there - what remained was a man in a car following the GPS voice.
It was a gated community. A slight drive up a hill. The gate opened anyway and there was nowhere to scrutinize where you were going with renovation clothes. There was no signage: only sleek limestone and tall windows that somehow had obscured the inside fo the apartments.
You parked your car in some discrete corner and moved across the units. The inside emanated that same sleek-style. Single orchid on a table that looked more expensive than it should've. You walked past the unmanned concierge desk, into the elevator that moved without a sound. Onto the fourth floor.
The hallway carpet ate your footsteps, must've been deeper than the sole of your shoes. 4A, 4B, 4C, all between large expanses of abstract art - what looked like Egon Schiele dupes but very well might've been the real pieces. You stopped at 4F. The door had a brass knob, just something you noticed.
You knocked.
There was airtight silence, nothing. It took longer -
the lock turned and the door swung inward and she was standing there in a t-shirt that ended just above the top of her thighs, barefoot on dark hardwood, hair down, holding her phone in one hand with the screen still lit - your conversation still open, that selection to delete the message still there.
She looked at you. At the jeans with the drywall dust and pain. The absence of a jacket. At the fact of you, standing in her hallway - routine man, never missed an hour out of routine - twenty-two minutes after she'd pressed send, hours after when you usually sleep.
'Hi,' you said.
'No'
'No?'
'No, you're not - you can't be here. That's not - I just sent that.'
'I know. I read it.'
'You read it and you drove here?'
'You put the address in the text.'
'The address was a - that was decorative! That was for ambiance! You were supposed to save it and think about it for several days and then maybe - we go our separate ways.'
'Your theory of mind needs work,' you joke, 'you sent the message and then the address. How can I not come?'
'Because one in the morning is when coward send things! That's the whole point of one in the morning! You send the thing and you go to sleep and you build your defenses in the daylight like a normal person!'
You looked at her, then to yourself. Pointing with your whole hand at what you're wearing - what pants were available, painted, maybe ripped, everything in between.
She stared at you, bit the inside of her cheek, looked at the ceiling as if there was a teleprompter there.
'Those are…' She stepped into the door, one hand on the frame; pulling your wrist, 'come in before one of my neighbors calls someone.'
You stepped inside. She was right in front of you - undone at one in the morning - and behind her was lengths of painter's tape that had their edges peel off from not being used. And on the bathroom door, the correct knob lay seated - almost flush - a degree or two off, someone watched a tutorial and gotten close enough.
'You installed it,' you said.
She followed your eyes to the bathroom door. 'It took me forty minutes and a youtube video. The man kept referring to the screwdriver with its government name - phillips something something.'
She continued, 'it's crooked but it closes. I don't need it to be level, I need it to not fall off again while I'm in the shower, which is the bare minimum I'm asking of the objects in my life right now.' She walked past you to the kitchen - an open thing, marble island, fridge with its own weather system - and she picked up a glass that had been sitting there, which meant she'd been standing in this kitchen holding water before you knocked.
'Do you want something? I have water. I have some lager - the same lager.'
'The same lager?'
'I believe I made it clear, very clear, in a thousand-word-and-then-some letter at one in the morning, that I collected everything from our evening.' She opened the fridge, reached in. The inside was clean, organized. A whole pack of lager, unopened was the outlier. She'd bought it and never touched it.
She slipped you a bottle and a bottle for herself.
You sipped. It had, somehow, tasted better. Everything tasted better, the air, the beer, the residual citrus. Something more lucid to it, maybe it was the night, maybe it was Gawon.
'Verdict?'
'Better than the bar's.'
She grinned at that.
You looked at the taped wall. 'I was thinking about that door knob. But it seems you resolved that on your own. When did you do all this?' You point.
'July.'
'July.'
'Yes. The manifestation of procrastination. In my defence, though, I bought the tape. I bought the primer, I bought a roller and one of those little trays and I even bought the weird angled brush for the corners, because the woman at the store said corners are where amateurs fail, and I thought, right, I am not going to fail at corners. I was very precise with how I taped and then looked at all the tape and never touched the primer.'
She said this all in one breath.
'Your letter,' you said.
'We could also not.'
'The train part.'
'I described you as a composite corpse assembled from the body parts of subway passengers. I remember. Like organ harvesting. But I think there's relevant context before I -'
'You're not insane. Far from it. It made sense.'
'Made sense how?'
'I'd rather not say.'
'You fragment me into a composite corpse as well?'
'That's one way of putting it.'
'Which parts?' A grin appeared on her. Relieved, perhaps.
'Your fingers on the beer. The glass tilted because your hand's too weak for the mug.'
'That mug could house a family of four. It's a war crime.' Her hair fell forward over one shoulder, this dark curtain.'
'You should know,' she said, 'that I almost didn't send it. I wrote it in the Notes app. Which is where things go to die. I have forty-seven notes in that app and not a single one has become anything; grocery lists that I forget to consult the moment I enter the supermarket; ideas for prose; a pros-and-cons list about cutting my hair that I consulted for three months before making a decision I immediately regretted.'
She picked up the water glass. 'The point is, the app is a graveyard. The letter should've stayed there.'
'It didn't.'
'Because at twelve-fifty in the morning I moved it from the Notes app into the text field and the text field had this energy to it, I felt compelled to press it, it was like a jump pad. Once I pressed it, I tried my damned-est to delete it instantly. I caught my breath by reading it over and over and then you showed up before I went through with it.'
She continued, 'you coming was not part of the decision tree. The branches are: you text back something kind in the morning and we have a polite exchange and then slowly, tastefully, never speak again. And one where you don't reply and I delete everything and learn a valuable lesson about the Notes app being the correct final destination for my feelings.' She paused. 'There was no branch where you show up.'
'And yet.'
'You came.'
'You know why.'
'I want to hear a reason that isn't the letter. The letter is a thousand words of me being -' she waved her hand, 'unwell. Give me a reason that has nothing to do with the letter.'
You looked at the tape on her walls. The edges curling where the adhesive had given way a few months ago.
'The door knob,' you said.
'What?'
'At the hardware store. You were holding the wrong knob and I told you it was exterior hardware and you grabbed the right one and left. And I stood there in an empty aisle holding nothing and I thought: she's going to go home and install that by herself. She's going to watch a tutorial and get it a degree or two off and it's going to close but not perfectly and she's going to decide that's good enough.' You looked at the bathroom door, the knob seated almost flush. 'And I wanted to be there for that. Which is a stupid thing to want.'
She stared at you.
'That's your reason.'
'That's a reason.'
'That's -' she pressed her lips together. Looked at the ceiling. Blinked more than once. 'That's a really good answer and I need a second.'
'Take your time.'
'I'm going to stand here and be furious that you out-answered me in my own apartment after I wrote you the most embarrassing letter in the history of digital communication and you show up and say "door knob" and it's better than everything I wrote. That's -' She came around the island. Stood on your side now. 'That's not fair.'
She was close enough to see the goosebumps on your forearms where the cuffs were rolled. The strand of hair had fallen across her face again, the same one that had been refusing to stay put, and you reached across and pushed it off her face, finally, this stupid strand, and tucked it behind her ear and your thumb stayed on her cheekbone and she closed her eyes.
'You must've been cold,' she said.
'Yes.'
'It's November.'
'I know what month it is.'
She opened her eyes. She was looking at your arms, at the small hairs standing from the cold, and you were looking at her looking at your arms, and neither of you was looking at each other's face.
She kissed you first. The sequence is unreliable because what actually happened was she got closer to touch your arm to measure the frozen of your arm and then the glass of water got knocked by someone's elbow and when you tried to catch it your arm wrapped around her waist and the glass rolled off the counter and hit the floor and didn't break because of course she owned the kind of glasses that don't break, and the water spread across the hardwood.
She tasted like the beer, the faintest trace of toothpaste, that weird all-encompassing perfume that swallows you whole. Your hand went to her jaw - that jaw, the one you've been eyeing at the bar table - it was warm and sharp and -
She pulled back. Enough to speak.
'Your hands are freezing.' She smiled, 'is there anything you did bring?'
'Myself.'
'Insufficient.' She kissed you again. Her fingers in the collar of your t-shirt, grasp-tight, like she'd been thinking about this for years, she pulled back again. 'This is a terrible shirt.'
'Because you sent me a sincere letter that turned my brain into mush; I did not have the mind for a wardrobe. Can we stop reviewing my outfit?'
'It's just cute how you chase my lips.' She blows at your lips, a grin.
You kissed her to shut her up, which didn't work, because she laughed into it - this full sound that vibrated against your lips and accidentally filled both your cheeks with air so you had to let go just a bit.
Your hand went from her jaw to the back of her head, the split between hair and skin in the back.
'Couch,' she said.
'Where.' You make a breathy inquiry into her mouth.
'Behind you. The - just move back a little, just reverse straight.' The geometry of the maneuver was stupid and graceless and at one point your calf hit the coffee table and something on it - book, books, whatever - slid and toppled and then the backs of your knees hit the couch and she was above you, one knee on either side, the oversized shirt tenting around you both.
She looked down at you. You looked up at her. Her hair fell forward and curtained the sides of your face and the whole apartment disappeared. Her face in the frame of dark hair, her moles, her nose, her everything - god, she's just too beautiful.
'Hi,' she said.
'Hi.'
You put your hands on her waist. The shirt was thin and through it you could feel the heat of her, the ribs, the expansion of her breathing. Just a little shaking.
'Okay,' she said. 'Now take off the pipe pants. They're ruining my couch.'
You did. Standing there, in her apartment, at one-something in the morning, stepping out of painted jeans in front of the woman you mythologized.
Gawon looked at your boxers, looked at them for a long time.
'Plaid boxers,' she said. 'You drove across town, in November, without a jacket, to see a woman who wrote you a love letter, and you're wearing plaid boxers.'
'They were on top of the pile.'
'The audacity.' But she was grinning. She pushed you gently back onto the couch. Knees on either side of your lap, her face level with yours. 'I believe you now - about the rushing.'
Her breathing had changed to a slower register.
'What else do you do,' she said. 'I sent you a thousand-word letter about trains and the interior of my psyche. You know everything about me. Well, except for the fact that I used to be an idol.' She paused, trying to gauge what you were thinking.
'It's a shame you've short-circuited me down to my last two brain cells, otherwise I'd be more interested in that idol story of yours.' Your face got closer, until your noses were touching and you leaned just part-way, this slotting way, to kiss her again. And again. And again.
'Did I tell you that I read?' You add between the kisses.
'What book?'
'It doesn't matter what book. It's a page issue. I'm stuck on a page. Was.'
'Mhm.'
'I'm past that book now.'
She nodded during one of the kisses, 'That's progress.' In this serious, adorable way.
'It was a long book.'
'You're a slow reader.' She put more emphasis into her grasp around your neck. 'I'll wait.'
You kissed her harder. She leaned into it, her weight shifting. You ran your hand along her spine, each vertebra viscerally real under your fingers.
'Bed,' she said.
'The couch.' You insisted back.
'The couch was fine before.' She extended her hand. 'Get up.'
You took her hand. She pulled you up, stronger than she looked, and led you down the hallway past the books and the blue tape.
Every door in her apartment was slightly open, every one. The front door had been open when you arrived. The bathroom a crack open. And the bedroom door at the end of the hallway, not enough to see inside but enough to say I didn't close this, I left it for you, I left every door tonight slightly open. She really put her all into this.
You pushed it open. The bedroom was enormous. More windows, floor-to-ceiling, more city. The bed was wide and low and white and half-unmade, as if she inhabited just a part of it and that was the only unmade part. The way light pooled across made it look like art.
She stood in the doorway behind you.
'I wasn't expecting you to come. By the way.'
'We've done this bit.'
'We'll keep doing it. It's a good bit, it's unbelievable, really.' She replied back with a grin.
She walked past you to the far side of the bed. Her side. Looked up at you across the white expanse of sheets. In the window-light from the city her skin held a blue tint, a coolness, and the shadows found the hollows of her collarbones and the ridges of her shoulders and the way she demurely held her forearm to barely - just barely - cover her nipples and the line where her underwear met her hip and you stood there in plaid boxers at the foot of a stranger's bed in a building you'd never been in, in a neighborhood you'd never visited, and the feeling was vertiginous, the feeling was standing at an altitude you hadn't expected.
You got on the bed. Crossed it on your knees. She just sat there on the edge, and when you reached her you put your hand on the side of her face, thumb on her cheekbone, fingers in her hair, and tilted her face up toward yours.
You caught her lips gently.
'I was invisible - ' you kissed her again. Seeing her lips unspooled, accelerating, each clause folding itself into each velvety note - it's unendurable.
She grabbed the back of your neck with both hands and pulled you down and you went. Onto the white sheets, into her side, her body warm and real and breathing hard against your mouth. Legs wrapped around and her heels pressed into the backs of your thighs and it was totality: every square inch that could touch was touching, and through the thin two fabrics that were quickly becoming redundant - touching, rubbing, all-wet.
'You're a fast reader all of a sudden.'
'I found a good book.'
She laughed into the kiss. Her hands went to the waistband of your bxoers and yours went to her hips and the last of the fabric came off in this artless, graceless way where your boxers got stuck on your thighs and she had to stop kissing to stare down for a visual indicator of how 'off' your boxers were, and you did the same, less gracefully, maybe fully ripping her panties off, it didn't matter: two people are just trying to get to each other and cotton is in the way. That way. It's all-becoming.
It was all skin. On these white sheets, you pressed into the honey of her body, her neck, her wetness gathered the underside of your shaft. You pressed deeper and Gawon groaned with pleasure, she bit the skin of her index finger as you pressed deeper - not yet penetrating; shifting your hips into languid strokes that teetered on her wet folds; this perfect muffled sigh of wet flesh. And her pelvis began moving, just so, just so - her velvety folds molding on the underside of your shaft.
'Condom.' You groan, you barely get out. Her pussy's choking you - choking every nerve of yours that even a bundle of syllables becomes harder than everything to get out…
' - don't have - ungh.'
And this is where the moral calculus begins: you're inside of her home, you didn't bring anything except yourself - she's partial to how you are you and that got you in her bed, rubbing your cock against her pussy - and now you haven't the grace to even have a condom on you. Shame, shame!
Gawon held the back of your neck again, and whispered, as low as her fucked-up nerves allowed: 'it doesnt matter, it doesnt matter, i dont even care if you come inside.'
And so this is the dilemma: what is the point of this moral calculus if she doesn't care about anything but you? You are you and you can fuck me like that. That you're gonna enter her with no barrier, that you might even come and paint her cervix and she'll allow that?
The lips of her sex, plump now, parted and glid against the rigid length of you again. Smooth, soft, some silky resistance. with each grind the delicate hood of her clitoris would catch - just a bit - and tug against the base of you, drawing a sharp gasp from that was swallowed by your mouth. [1]
[1] To the unimaginative mind, she's saying every word in the dictionary to deal with her own orgasm on the precipice, you're bringing her over the edge, then pulling her off that cliff and then dropping her lower. Sadistic!
She was so wet, a slick dew that gathered and spread. Your own flesh pressed and straining upward - schlick schlick and some oh fucks - into the slick groove of her. The crown of your shaft, would catch the edge of her opening with each roll, nudging, spreading her apart, breaking her apart - that cliff she's barely an ankle above the falling line. And the only sound is this moist squelch of two sets meeting and parting, meeting and parting, the sticky-softness of condensation building between bodies making parting from skin harder - colder.
Her hands tightened on your shoulders, and she said. 'Fuck me. Please'
'But'
'I don't care, I'll carry your baby.'
You entered her. Her breath caught halfway, the arch of her back that was processing just the tip. You listened to the arch calm down. Pressed forward in increments. Felt her open around you in degrees, accompanied by these desperate mewls against your collarbone. You kissed her ears and entered deeper into her.
She shook and vibrated and lost her voice when you were fully inside her. You held still, forehead to forehead, and her mouth was slightly open, breathing in - something that had nothing to do with lungs.
'Okay?' you said.
She opened her eyes, they were glassy and enormous and so close you could see yourself in them.
She pulled on your shoulders, and gave a wavering kiss that broke when you pulled out inch-by-inch. You moved and her hips, tilted just a little, meeting you part-way. Her hands slid from your shoulders down to your back, fingernails digging deeper - it was pain for another morning.
You hit her deeper and faster, into her slick-strung insides that grasped and clung and slid. And she was speechless, she tried - opening her mouth to let out words that didn't form. You repeated these thrusts, her hands went back around her pillow, breasts jumping in-parallel your thrusts, her neck-line taut and catching the blue night.
She got louder, these girlish moans that grew more frequent, closer together, overlapping. But her hips moved faster - and at one point you had to catch up to her! - and the bed frame creaked luxuriously - aristocratically, this creak of expensive joinery under unexpected strain. And she said, of all things, 'the bed's recording this too' and you laughed into her mouth.
You felt her intensify in the particulars - the way her eyebrows strained and the muscle of her arm strained as she grasped the pillow tighter than before, you caught one nipple in your mouth between the thrusts - now obscenely automatic - you kissed the curve of her top breast, the upper-top of it, then even higher, and she giggled: 'you're gross'. So you bit down just a tad, another girlish yelp before you went straight back to her mouth.
'Don't stop,' she said. Barely audible. 'Don't - '
'I'm - '
The orgasm ripped through her entire body. First at the hips: light spasms that halted the moment the orgasm travelled up her spine, then the reality of it: her mouth let out the syllables 'I'm cumming' as if wasn't the most obvious little thing. And she let out this fractured exhale, all-ragged, breaking, on something - could've been your name.
Her legs shook again. Her folds squeezed and you could feel it around your cock. Her thighs were tight around your waist.
'Keep going.' She said.
'I should - ' Well you should stop. Anything more and you'll -
Her heels pressed deeper into the small of your back.
You buried your mouth in hers, tonguing at her before you entered all the way to the hilt, kissing her cervix. Your bodies were damp now, hints of citrus, coffee by the bedside, the smell of sex and orgasms in the air. You moved faster and she was mouthing these fragments - yes and there and I've got you and stay. and that's what you did, thrusting into her, grasping at her breasts, fucking into her pussy, bruising her cervix, crushing her like she wanted you to.
Then you felt it, the ultimate urge to let loose. You pulled out as quickly as you could, the slick of her pussy connected the head of your cock by a strand and you fisted your cock until you blasted all over her belly. Drops of your cum had landed on her folds, glazed, pink and white and honey.
It was an emergency obviously, and yet, she pressed her fingers into her pussy, bringing her fingers up, testing the elasticity of the fluid and pressing it on her tongue - tasting it - before pushing the rest into her folds.
for fuck's sake this woman is gonna end you. You fell to her side, breathing hard as she was, ribcages expanding in and out in this atmosphere of heat and sex.
'Still there?' Her fingers traced the area where your heart was.
'Still there.'
'Good. I need you alive.'
'That's the bar? Alive?'
'For you, sure, that's the only requirement - everything else is a bonus.' Her finger traced a circle on your chest. 'Some bonuses are more generous than others.'
'Are you grading right now?'
'It's a… holistic evaluation.'
'And?'
'Above average.'
'Above average. I swear you were crying from pleasure.'
She slapped you lightly on the shoulder, 'Better than average. Statistically anomalous, even. I'd need a larger sample size to confirm but the preliminary data is -' she rolled over to your side, thigh on top of your thigh, a kiss on your shoulder, 'substantial.'
'You're making dick jokes in bed.'
'It was intended to be statistical. The phallic interpretation is entirely yours. I can't control where your mind goes.' She kissed your collarbone. 'But yes.'
You laughed and she turned it into a kiss on your lips. And she settled deeper, burrowing, pressing into you the way she pressed open books into damage.
'I'm not leaving, just so you know,' she said.
'I can tell.' You tried to move a leg and she tightened her grasp.
'I happen to want to be exactly here where I want, so I'm not moving. I'm a barnacle.'
'How romantic.'
'Really, I'm a romantic person. I write letters about imagining a cut-up version of you on trains; that's the Gawon experience, you signed up for this.'
You wrapped your arms around her, the whole ridiculous barnacle arrangement, her legs knotted in yours, her arms cinched around your ribs, her face buried in your chest.
'You're mine,' she said. 'I don't care that it's been an hour and a letter and two beers. You're mine. I'm keeping you.'
'Obviously.' She tightened her grip. A full-body squeeze, every limb. 'And now I'm fused to your chest in my own bed at two in the morning and you're inside me and I'm on earth. I'm on the ground. I'm so on the ground right now.'
'I'm floating. Just a little. Not too much.' You reply.
She held you, her heartbeat on your ribs. Your hand in her hair. Her breath on your skin in a rhythm that was calming. Gentle inhales and exhales.
'For the record,' she murmured, eyes closed now, words going soft, 'the preliminary data really is exceptional. The sample size issue stands. We'll need to replicate. Repeatedly. For scientific integrity.'
'How repeatedly.'
'Extensively.' A pause. Her voice almost gone. 'Longitudinally.'
'That's another -'
'Go to sleep.'
She fell asleep on top of you, on you; the full weight of her, which was not much, which was less than you expected, but which pressed you into the mattress with a force that had nothing to do with mass and everything to do with the fact that she was here and real and breathing gently into your chest. Her cold feet pressed against your shins. Still cold, even now, even after everything, as if her feet existed in a separate climate zone and no amount of anything could fix it.
A/N: So I'm back! I've actually been doing great. I know absence is a bit of a bad sign but honestly this year has been shaping up to be my best ever (my prime!!!). I have a lot of time in my hands and it turns out that the stress (from other factors) was actually fueling my output last year. So this year: low cortisol poasting... thanks to everyone that waited!!
About the work: this is part 1 of a 30k. I decided that the second part needed a lot of work. I might upload it a few weeks later or months later... we'll see.
Also apologies for the wonky formatting. Obsidian markdown does not translate well to a direct copy-and-paste it seems. I might edit it in the future but i wanna get this stinking mess out already!!!
Janice, your girlfriend, lives in a HDB estate which is notorious for its perverts. Over the years, that estate has had molesters, voyeurs, flashers etc. Despite knowing that, your girlfriend still chooses to not heed your advice. You’ve repeatedly told her to not go home late and if she has to go home late, walk in the brightly lit path instead of the shortcut through the car park. You’ve advised her to always wear safety shorts, not wear revealing clothes if she’s alone and to be aware of her surroundings and not to loiter around. However, your advice has fallen on deaf ears. You’re girlfriend is about to realize that she should have taken your words to heart.
It was a Friday night and Janice was finally on the way home after a long night out with her friends. She’s had a few drinks and was slightly intoxicated. She took a grab home and decided to take a vape break before she went into the house. As she was walking slowly towards her block and casually vaping, she was unaware that a group of YPs were following her from behind.
You see, these group of YPs have noticed Janice for the longest time. They’ve stalked her and have seen her in revealing clothes for quite sometime. They’ve always wanted to get a piece of her but have never really had the opportunity to do so. Until tonight when they saw Janice unable to walk properly and totally oblivious to her surroundings. As she was about to reach the staircase landing of the HDB flat, the group of YPs took action.
The main guy of the group, Aaron, grabbed her from behind, covering her mouth and quickly dragged her to a secluded corner of the HDB car park. Janice, unable to react properly, was helpless as she was carried away. She tried struggling even though she was intoxicated but was helpless against 5 guys. Aaron ordered his guys to arm lock her as he wanted to get a good view of her and take a few compromising photos of her. As she was arm locked, the guy covered her mouth to prevent her from screaming.
Aaron used this opportunity to caress her body all over and took videos and pictures of her, even upskirting her.
“Wah guys, looks like we are gonna have fun. Finally can be inside this slut. Should be shiok. I hope she’s tight and wet.” Aaron commented as he ignored Janice’s struggles and cries.
With that, he proceeded to finger Janice with her underwear on, making it soaking wet. As she tried to break free from the arm lock, Aaron kept fingering her with greater intensity. At that point, he made his guys video the whole ordeal down. Aaron soon removed her underwear which was soaking wet and kept it in his pocket.
“Mmhm, I’m going to be using your underwear for a long time. And you’re going to let us take you whenever we want to. You’re our common street whore now.” Aaron said menacingly as he fingered her with more intensity. Soon, he moved onto her breasts. He groped them, licked them and left bite marks all over her two glorious tits. Which Aaron took very nice pictures of. He then forced her to kneel down and open her mouth.
“Scream for help and we will physically hurt you and beat you up before help can even arrive.” Aaron snarled at her, revealing his penknife to show Janice that he means business.
Sobbing and having no choice but to obey him, Janice knelt down. The moment she opened her mouth, Aaron’s thick cock rammed into it. As he started roughly face fucking Janice, the other guys began to unzip and some guys started filming it down.
“Ugh, this is good. Keep up the good work.” Aaron grunted in pleasure as he was face fucking Janice. Soon, all the 4 other guys have had a turn face fucking Janice. With each guy, a different cock size and different styles of fucking, Janice could not keep up. Her makeup was totally ruined with pre cum and saliva and at that point, she didn’t know whose dick she was sucking off.
Now that the guys have had a lubricated dick, Aaron decided to take her pussy first. He bent her over, and spit roasted her with the other guys. As his cock penetrated Janice’s wet pussy for the first time, he groaned in pleasure.
“Ugh fuck. You’re so wet and tight. Fuck, this is good.” Aaron moaned in pleasure as he was thrusting in and out of Janice, whilst she had her mouth full of someone else’s cock. Aaron then made sure to take videos and pictures of himself ramming his cock mercilessly into a helpless Janice. The harder he thrusted into her, the more Janice could not take it. It was her first time being treated so roughly and she didn’t like it. It’s totally not the type of sex she has with you and it scares her. But for Aaron, he was having the time of his life. With each thrust, he groaned in pleasure and was trying to keep himself from finishing too fast. He spread her butt cheeks and continuously rammed into her harder and harder. The other 4 guys swapped places to get their share of her mouth. The more the fucked her mouth, the more saliva dripped everywhere. One of the guys couldn’t take the pleasure and actually unleashed his load all over her face, turning on the guys even more.
Soon, Aaron was about to orgasm and could not hold it in. He casually asked, “Should I cum in you or on your face?”
Janice, with her mouth full of cock, hurriedly pushed the cock out of her mouth and gasped, “Please, not in me. Please, I have a boyfriend. Don’t cum in me please.”
As she begged Aaron not to, Aaron got more turned on and decided to not listen to her. He gave her a few more hard thrusts and unleashed a huge hot load of cum inside her. As he pulled out of her, he made sure to video her pulsating pussy with cum oozing out of it.
Now that he was done, he signaled the rest of his guys to have fun raping Janice whilst he recovered from the pleasure and continued videoing it down. At any one point, a cock was ravaging her pussy whilst her mouth would be fucked and her tits would be groped hard.
Throughout the outdoor gangbang session, Janice was passed around like a fleshlight and fucked by each of the guys at least twice. With each of them emptying their load into her for the first two rounds, Janice’s pussy was so loaded with cum that she didn’t know whose cum was in her at any moment.
On the last round, the guys emptied their considerably lesser load onto her face, ruining her make up. Throughout the whole gangbang session, Janice turned from struggling to actually enjoying it and as the guys mercilessly thrusted into her, she grew to enjoy the rough gangbang session and even orgasmed a few times.
As the lot of them finished using her for their own pleasure, they left her lying on the floor covered in cum and reeling in from the shock of getting gang raped. Her underwear and bra were taken by Aaron as it was his idea to rape her.
“You little whore. Every time one of my guys see you alone, you are expected to let them use you in any way they see fit. And you must present your bra and underwear to them as a souvenir. In return, we will not publish your videos and pictures online and we will protect you from other guys or anyone who bullies you.” Aaron said as he took one last picture of her.
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