In Stranger's Houses

I packed my toothbrush, but no underwear and no other clothes. Outside his van, the trees on the mountain blazed red or were bare. 

It was November now; it felt like forever since we last made this trek. He lifted his hand from the steering wheel and put it on my knee. I worshiped his calloused hands. I realized I was relieved. 

~~~

My man was a landscaper and a carpenter. He did work for the elderly in the small town where I went to college. We fucked in their houses. He smelled like sweat and his hands were still browned by the earth when he would lay me across their floral sheets. 

I had spent the last weeks of summer at his place, over the mountain. We fucked in his bed, on the sofa, the armchair, once on nothing at all – he held me up, naked, in the center of the room. My hands were wet from the sweat on his back as I gripped his shoulders. 

We only left his apartment to get sandwiches at the deli up the block. I like fucking you was the only thing we admitted to each other. I was twenty-two years old and felt this was what I needed.

When I lost my virginity, the boy had thrusted his penis directly at my vagina like he was stabbing me. We loved each other, like nineteen year olds who don’t know anything. 

But I wanted more than his awkward penetration. He didn’t know how to touch my breasts in a way that was pleasurable. He thought eating pussy was disgusting and only held me down, once, when he forced himself into my ass after I said no. 

My man’s first words to me were an apology. He had sneezed on me, a stranger in line in front of him at the coffee shop. 

I didn’t like beards the way some girls do, but he was handsome. My eyes lingered on his black leather belt, and his fist balled into the pocket of his trousers.  

For the first time, in those waning summer weeks, I was satisfied. I was sexy – smooth to the touch, but with edges that splintered. I was hot if you touched too quickly.

Fall brought duties other than endless fucking. My man and I saw each other less, but we were always on. The old ladies’ dogs stared at us as we fucked. When my man’s belt was wrapped around my neck, I wondered if it looked familiar to the dog. We got sores on the inside of our mouths. 

When he wasn’t planting shrubs for old ladies a block from campus, my man worked tirelessly on his side of the mountain. I was cast in the school play and was obsessed with it.

I had a crush on an actress. Our exercises required us to pair up and observe each other. Her face made me want to cry. She was tiny and had shiny hair and high cheekbones and looked exactly like a doll. I wondered what I looked like, if she could see my ebbing undercurrent of raw sexuality.

~~~

I told him I’m cold. Without taking his eyes off the road, he rubs my thigh so furiously that I laugh. 

The courtship of the girl was slow; I didn’t think she wanted a relationship with a woman. I wasn’t sleeping well. I spent a lot of time reading about school massacres, research for the play. I had nightmares about school shootings, and ran from campus every time class let out.  

“I wish I could protect you,” my man had said. His tenderness wasn’t unwelcome, but it was a surprise.

As the seasons changed, we ventured out into the world more frequently, and he held my hand. He kissed me goodbye on the sidewalk. He’d playfully grab my ass and I’d giggle. It was a sweet marker of ownership, unlike the ones that turned green, purple under my jeans. Once before bed, he read to me. It looked like people falling in love, I think. When he slept next to me, once four nights in a row, he radiated like my own personal space heater. 

I started to remember everything about him. I am good at remembering things about those whose measurements, touch, and durability I knew intimately. I remember his order that day in the coffee shop (a vanilla cappuccino - silly, I thought), all his aspirations that led to carpentry, the name of the girl he lost his virginity to. I was building his stories into a structure that maybe I wanted to live in. 

~~~

We decided to eat first – a switch from the usual way we devoured each other. In a restaurant swankier than the deli, I was self-conscious of my frayed scarf, my messy hair. The place was empty, save for a middle aged trio at the bar. I wondered if they thought my man and I were a couple. 

His stature, beard, and permanently flushed cheeks somehow suggested he belonged with a sweet girl. A girl with long hair, who enjoyed hiking or baking, or something else non-threatening. Someone like the girls he had been with previously, who I would search on Facebook after he mentioned them offhand. 

I was deviant from those who came before me. 

“I’ve never fucked a girl with short hair before,” he had said, tousling my hair, pulling it. It was the first time. From behind, this man put his hands all over me. He was fascinated by the metal bar through my nipple, something he had never seen in real life. He bent me over in front of the window, wondering out loud who outside could see me like this. I let my breath fog over the glass, me and this stranger, and behind, the bright windows of houses to raise families in.

I had seen us once together. It was our reflection in a full length mirror at an old lady’s house, where he had been hired to housesit. We were naked, and he spun me around.

“Look at that,” he remarked, holding his palm over the broken skin, hand shaped, on my ass. 

There isn’t a single picture of us together. I hadn’t minded, or noticed, even when I suggested, only half-joking, that we should do porn. 

One night, my man accidentally scrolled past a picture of himself with a girl I didn’t recognize. He is kissing her on the cheek, his hand moving her long hair out of her face. She is slightly blurred as she laughs. 

I cried and, in the middle of the night, I crawled on top of him and we both came. 

He wasn’t mine, but I didn’t want someone trespassing. 

I was decorating the inside of a home I didn’t know I wanted to stay in. I collected his things and arranged them: jobs, clothes, kinks, quirks, hobbies, and no pictures. 

I took inventory of the things I knew. I wondered what was missing from the sun bleached spots on the shelves of his shoulders. What goes there? Will my palm fit just fine? Will my head rest comfortably in that spot, like nothing else was ever even there?

~~~

That night at dinner, he held my hand over the white tablecloth. I was not so hungry because we hadn’t expended our energy by fucking wildly.

We talked about more than our usual repertoire. We were listening, actively responding, only pausing thoughtfully, or to eat. I was alarmingly aware of this shift. For the first time, he told me about his parents’ divorce, ten years ago. 

I wondered what had changed and when, why. Maybe on our way over the mountain, at the hairpin turn that never failed to scare me?

I was used to divorce stories from friends that occurred when they were too little to understand, small enough to hide in tree houses or blanket forts. My man was old enough to drive away, to draw his own blueprint of the dismantling of man and wife. 

I thought about the bleached spots of the missing trinkets of my man’s existence. He was giving them to me. Why was I so afraid?

His hands waved, but I was looking at his mouth, watching the words spit and fall out, crash. My man and his sisters were played as pawns by his mother. She tried to take ownership. She was a tyrant. She bulldozed, he all but said. 

“I don’t want you to think that I hate my mother,” he amended. But that is what I saw, mapped out so clearly on the table in the space between us. 

I had my suspicions. In the throes of intimacy, he said things that scandalized me, made me want to strip myself to a layer that hadn’t endured his words. He was immature; he was quick to get upset, like the opposite of the man I had grown to salivate at the thought of. 

In my man’s mind, some girls were good girls. I presumed that meant girls who were feminine and liked vanilla sex and acquired the affections of men effortlessly. And then there were bad girls, whores, and I knew who they were, because I could hear it in his voice when we talked about girls like that. I could just make it out over the sounds of my own sighs, ringing in my ears.

I grappled constantly with whether I was going to excuse this and more in the name of the best sex I had ever had, and I had always thought yes. The names he called me turned me red, on my cheeks when I blushed, between my legs where I swelled. But they lingered, long after we finished, when I was still sticky but had to redress and go about my day. 

I had kissed the actress. At a Halloween party she put her tiny hands on my face and we made out in the bathroom. When I told my man he was not jealous. The next morning he told me he dreamt we had a threesome. I wondered what she looked like in his mind.

~~~

My toes turned purple as I padded barefoot across the cold hardwood floors of his apartment. I remembered the summer, when my body heat would leave footprints of condensation. I craved our ritual, our box built on lust, imagination, closeness only in our bodies slamming together.

We ended up in the spare bedroom off the living room. It was musty and windowless, not one of our usual spots. I begged him to say dirty things to me. I wrapped my limbs around him, grabbing for something familiar. 

Light leaked through the door frame, casting unfamiliar shadows on his face. I looked for him — my man who uses me, my man who I have built up, created space for.

“What’s wrong?”

“You don’t look like yourself,” I confessed.

He got off of me and opened the door, letting more light in. 

There was a mirror on the wall and I saw myself. I recognized that person. She is skinny, she has short hair, her right nipple is pierced, she has brown eyes. Sometimes I felt like I had transformed into a different person but that girl I have known my whole life. A man returned to me. Neither of us came.