The room smelled like summer. Like rain. Wet flowers. Wet trees. Flowers and trees soaked in rain. Summer. Rain.
Her bare-breasts, scintillating with sweat under the ceiling-fan’s dim light, were pressed against his chest. They had just finished making love and were lying on their sides. She was looking into his eyes. Her eyes were blue, clear blue, like dyed glass—sharp and intoxicating with truth and love and promise.
“I love you so much,” she said, her eyes becoming somewhat translucent with tears.
He sighed.
It was one o’ clock in the morning and he was tired: tired of looking at the love and sadness in her eyes, the future and dreams in her eyes, them in her eyes. Them.
“Maybe,” she said gingerly, “we can move somewhere else, get on with our lives.”
“Maybe.”
The tears, which were now accumulating in her eyes, broke through the dam of her eyelids and a deluge of salty grief sifted from them and onto the pillow beneath her head.
She had hoped, at that moment, that he’d say something to comfort her, maybe wipe the tears from her cheeks or gently place his forefinger beneath her eyes to catch the moisture before it formed ridges across her sweaty face.
He didn’t do anything. He didn’t say anything.
“If you really love me,” she said insecurely, embarrassingly, “why’d you do it?”
“Do what, Sarah?”
“Why’d you do it, Sean? Why?”
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t feel like saying anything, really. It was over with. Done with. In the past. Forgotten.
He thought it was forgotten.
Almost a year ago. Almost a fucking year ago and I still have to deal with this shit, he thought.
Her eyes were still looking into his eyes, imploring, searching for answers, like an awl, digging, looking, digging, looking.
She found no answers. His eyes were uncaring, callous.
Sean got up from the bed, grabbed a cigarette, lit it, and lay down on his back beside her. He inhaled. Exhaled. A plume of smoke formed an inverted eddy and drifted towards the ceiling-fan and disappeared throughout the room.
He felt her looking at him. He felt her eyes, blue and cutting and sharp like icicles poking at his introspection.
He remembered the night, even though it was a year ago, with such lucidity. He recollected smells—of her body, the wet-summer grass, the rubbery smell of the condom burning with friction inside her.
HER. Not Sarah, HER.
HER, who was so sexual—a slut even, having slept with, he heard, nearly forty or fifty guys—and beautiful under the stars, moaning, commanding, leading, wanting. He remembered HER on HER hands and knees, turning HER face back towards him, entreating him to push ‘harder, Harder, oh, God, fuckingHARDER.’ HER blonde hair. HER green eyes. HER small, perfect B-cupped breasts. HER puffy, almost-purple nipples in the moonlight. HER moans. Moans. Moans.
HER HER HER HER HER.
“Sean, answer me,” Sarah said, ending his reverie.
“What? WHAT?”
“Why’d you do it? Tell me.”
The composure inside of him snapped. A year of simmering accusations and inquisitions reached a boil in his head:
Who? What? Where? WHEN? FUCKING WHEN?
He wanted to break things. He wanted to break mirrors, windows, faces—people’s faces—tables, chairs, Sarah.
He wanted to break Sarah.
He wanted to break Sarah because he hated her. He hated that she loved him. He hated that she stayed with him. He hated that she wouldn’t let the past be the past. He detested Sarah. Sarah, who loved him, he detested.
She put her arm around him, brought herself closer, put her hand on his chest and her face against the bristles of hair burgeoning around his nipples.
“It’s okay, Sean, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He looked down at the back of her head idling on his chest. He felt the convulsions of her sobs while her tears formed a shallow pool on the concavity of his chest.
“I have to go,” he said.
He got up violently, indifferently, tossing her head from his body. He put his clothes on, his shoes on, and looked at her—naked on the bed, tears covering her face with a mask of humiliation. She looked beautiful, helpless and beautiful. Her eyes were glossy and abound with pain, and he, for a moment, felt remorse. For a moment, he felt horrible regret for wanting to leave her naked and forlorn. For a moment he thought of them together, with children and dogs, a house and car, children and dogs, children and dogs, children andÉ
He walked out of the room, down the light-blue carpeted stairs of her house, each step reminding him of her eyes like clear oceans and water andÉ
Éhe reached the door, opened it, and was gone.
His own name, coming from her raspy larynx was reverberating in his head: Sean? Sean? Sean? Stay. Please. Please stay, Sean.
He never went back.
He could have.
He never went back.
He got in his car, thinking of HER. Thinking of how impure and meaningless that night of sex was, how exciting it was, how he spent the last year reliving it, fantasizing about it, obsessed with it.
He thought of HER. He thought of HER.
And left.
