Romantic Interludes.

We were eating raspberries in bed. I had a candle lit in the corner of my room, which was burning hazily and without conviction because one of my windows had a kink and didn’t shut all the way. I’d been meaning to fix it for a long time but it was just one of those things which never seem important enough during the day.

Anyway, the effect of the candle was rather prehistoric. With all that flickering, it was impossible to tell where light ceased and shadows began. The walls and the ceiling throbbed and pulsed like the insides of some living thing. I fancied that this was how Adam and Eve might have felt, huddled together inside a cave and trying to keep a fire alive, realizing for the first time the precariousness which comes with being simply human. I turned and asked if you thought we might be the only two people still awake in the city. You said you didn’t think so, since my roommate was still watching the TV in the living room.

We were winding down from one of those well-intentioned but intimately inadequate conversations about love, how it makes us so insecure, how it makes us so happy and miserable at the same time, and how irreconcilable being loved seems with our perceptions of self. As we split the last of the raspberries between us and began fondling each other, I said I didn’t want you sleeping with others. You said you’d stop, all you wanted was me, but by then my cock was already inside you, and I wasn’t sure if you meant it.

At some point during sex, you asked me to choke you. I obliged, and felt the rush of blood to my cock as your breathing became sparse. I was hard as fuck and my head was spinning. You wrapped your legs around my waist and whispered you were sorry. I asked you if this was how you liked to be fucked. You said yes, yes, you loved being fuck like this, this is how you wanted to be fucked all the time. Then you came. Your ass was sucking and pushing my cock as though its life depended on it and as I came, too, inside, I called you a bitch and a whore.

I was so ashamed, heartbroken. As you lay there catching your breath, I got up and left the room and locked myself in the bathroom. I was crying. I felt bitter. The tears stung.

When you came out of the room to get me I could hear my roommate ask if something was wrong. There was more curiosity than concern in his voice. You said no, nothing’s wrong, we just had a little argument. He pried further but instead of answering you knocked on the door and asked if you could be let in. I let you in.

I was sitting on the toilet with the seat down and wordlessly you pressed my face against your chest, stroking my hair. Your heartbeat was steady and soft. You smelled like sweat and sex under my shirt. You said it was okay, you were unhurt by what I’d said, I shouldn’t feel guilty. I told you I had meant those things, that I had been angry inside you, and that I didn’t like it. You said that was fine too, you said that you’ve been selfish and that was why you’d said sorry.

Once back in bed, we kissed and cuddled, fell asleep, touching each other. I had a strange dream about caves filled with vermilion glow and prehistoric paintings of all things now extinct.

By the time we woke up, there was a distinct hand-shaped bruise around your neck. You winced when I placed my hand on it, gingerly, like a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard. Can you choke me gentler next time, you said, and we both laughed.