ELLE NASH / I LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE MEN WITH MONEY WANT TO TAKE AWAY MY WIFE
He does angel dust in Brooklyn sex clubs, has a job that allows him to commute and fuck in the city. He has an array of stylish tattoos. I’m married, unemployed, and afraid to eat toast. We are the same. All my boyfriends have been influencers, but I don’t need the women I date to provide for me. Investing in people means eventually exploiting them.
Moneyboy was last active five hours ago. It’s 3:32 am. I wonder if he’s with E., which he probably is. I wonder if they’ve had sex before falling asleep. They are both fire signs. All fights in marriage just come down to power. Of course they’ve had sex.
Two weeks later I sit on the bed lotioning my legs, listening to the TV in the living room. E. is watching Law and Order. It’s her favourite show. She’s watched the series at least five times all the way through since we’ve been married. Olivia Benson murmurs on the TV, the season where they’d repeatedly found the bodies of small children hidden inside suitcases. Olivia Benson is the most unlikeable female character on TV. She says things that are flat, too hopeful. One of the bodies is a nine year old girl who’s had a nose job, a beauty pageant contestant. You can’t out-hope that. I lose myself in the slip of my hands greasing down my hairless skin, and imagine Moneyboy’s mouth against E.’s knee, his bare teeth pulling gently at her patella. He looks up at her with his tired eyes, the whites grey with sleep.
She was his wife first. The fear of monogamy is that it ends—but E. had wanted it. The security. So badly she didn’t want to compete anymore. I watched her give up her husband’s six figure income to date a poet and become a sex worker in Berlin. That she could give some man a child and it wouldn’t be enough terrified her. She had to trust the process and follow it through, believe by having a baby the man would see what she could do for him and how deep her commitment to securing his love could be. He was combative. But isn’t every man?
I thought it was something. The day he flew into Tegel she went to see him. Every friend we had knew what he was, who he was, who his family was. They welcomed him anyway. I wondered what Mariska Hargitay would say. I didn’t want to be like every other woman, sucking his dick in the hope that infamy planted itself inside them. He’d say he liked a thing (music, a hobby, a movie), and that made her want to try it more. One conflict crushes, opens another. Each word a silver tide swirling hooks through my sternum.
M.
i want the first touch we have to be
our lips. to feel my hand against your neck,
then my mouth, then my teeth against the
fabric of your shirt
E.
i’d stoop down to unlace and remove
your shoes one by one, but i’d want you
looking at me the entire time.
E.
i’d want you to see the way i bite my
lip with each item of clothing i remove,
bc it means i’m getting closer to what
i want.
M.
you can see the hunger in my eyes.
E.
a little shines.
E.
i’d unbuckle the belt of your designer khakis
with my hands. the heat of my body
between your legs as i remove them,
run my hands up your thighs.
M.
once the barrier is broken, once i put
my mouth on you, there’s really no going back.
At night I can’t sleep and in the morning I remember going through her phone again. I wake up groggy, and E. is tense. She wants me to be vulnerable but only in a language she can listen to.
E. and I take a trip around the city. The steering wheel hisses beneath her palms. The sky is more blue than I remember. I watch the sun blot shadows into the crepes of her skin. Stone monuments to the dead fence us in, and we circle, looking for a place to eat. I note an empty bank parking lot: she got into his car here once. I note an apartment complex: I’d once seen the same car parked there, too. We turn right from a crossroads, and I see him walking down the street. My head pops off like a tire-pressure gauge. He is every man wearing a black t-shirt and designer jeans. He has money so there is no end to his wanting. E. pays for our lunch and I sulk in her impersonal conversation. My love for her is like the blunt side of an axe and with each pound I find new edges to the depths of my feelings.
E. feels a pain like yearning but doesn’t show it. She can only love a person by betraying them. She is a lover I cannot have and think about all the time. All E. can think about is fucking her lover but instead she is fucking her wife. E. caresses her wife and says “oh, yes,” but she is saying it to her lover. Her wife pats her on the ass and E. smirks at her but E. is smirking at her lover. Her lover waits patiently for her inside her phone. Her lover is an unbroken thought. Her lover is an empty text box. And every day her wife interrupts each new one. She must violently flesh herself into every crevice of E.’s existence. She/I must remind her, constantly, of her/my presence. I guess this is just another one of those. One long, last beg. And all E. wants is one endless experience of what she loves. To exist in its flow, as one might stand beneath a waterfall. Neck broken by the weight of it.
Elle Nash is the author of the novel Animals Eat Each Other. Her short stories and essays appear in Guernica, Hazlitt, The Nervous Breakdown, Lit Hub, The Fanzine, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She is the founder of TEXTURES, a writing workshop, and edits fiction at Witch Craft Magazine and Hobart Pulp.
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