They say women defend themselves by attacking, but I’m no longer sure of it. So choose your own metaphor: either she blinked first or put her foot down. Nevertheless, uneasy days were going by, and Esther did come round to have it out.

“I don’t understand,” she said, “you’re the one who started calling me ‘girlfriend’ and shit. You said you wanted to get real. You don’t call, you answer my texts in monosyllables, you have nothing to ask me. Why are you even here, still?”

“Why do you assume we want the same things at the same time? You had me going through the mall the other day like it was a shared experience and you were just picking out underwear. You’re the one who told me you understand I’m a whole other person. We’re supposed to make the most of our differences.”

Went back and forth like this; questions answered with questions, promises untold or misremembered. Things we said stretched and twisted, or refashioned to suit our purposes, affections returned as ire. Demands and forced concessions, the ground bartered by the inch.

Once we winded down and sat facing each other, me on the bed and she on the borrowed wooden chair. Weary from the diplomacy, our eyes were set beyond. I felt a suffocating boredom, like we were acting from a dog-eared book. I just wanted her to go away.

Eventually: “What do you want?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you want me to stay or go?”

I shrugged. The room pressed down hard, and I felt I could just laugh it off and move on, but didn’t. “Stay,” I said, though it sounded more like “Why not?”

She weighed that, her eyes looking for mine. Then she made her way and climbed onto the bed.

Once the clothes were off and we were good to go, I tried turning her round but she stopped me, hand on my chest. She gave me a lick, then took me in her hand. 

She made it slow and steady.

I went for turning her around again, she stopped me. I went for her tits, she stopped me. She stood in the same motion, looking me in the eye, giving me a lick now and then to keep it smooth.

On and on. Looking me in the eye, lips parted, lips bitten, a tribulation.

This wasn’t the hasty job of the office stall and it wasn’t the morose thrill-begging of the web browser. It wasn’t the sleepy workout of morning wood or the dreamlike excursion in the dark. It was here and now, skin alert, eyes focused, no control.

When I came, I did have a flash. I found myself in a bittersweet disco, a dancefloor half-lit and half full where all those I knew and loved for their easy manner and shallow sadnesses partook in the mix, and the mix was a little silly but beautiful and happy. It wasn’t that the girls were after me, or I was after the girls, or the boys for that matter, it was that romance was in the air, that everyone could be stealing glances and preening gently with ambiguous phrasing, that all the meanness and lack that high school was made of had melted away and all that was left was this, this second and better youth.

It was a good place, a place where you could be well dressed and a little drunk, sometimes take part and play your best self, start surprise group hugs and offer humour to console, sometimes dance and sometimes admire those who know how to swirl with vigor, how to mix in a little salsa and back-and-forth like only lovers should — a show you adore with a faint longing for the ever fleeting, that which we still have but which is always going, always fading, yet maybe, just maybe, if we stay here it will never really run out.

She put something on and went to the bathroom to clean up. It was her period. 

When she came back, she took out her sleeping pills, broke off a container, and left it on the desk.

We snuggled up and she fell asleep on the first episode of a drama. I folded the laptop, gently, the room’s last light gone. In creeped shadow. In the dark, her arching shape, the gentle swell of her breathing, and me wide awake with terror, like the sleeper was a giant spider.