One night, I text my boyfriend, Next time we have sex, I want you to hit me and tell me I’m worthless.
He doesn’t respond to it. In the morning, I drink black coffee and don’t eat. He texts me between my classes, Come over later, and so in the evening, I sit on his couch and watch him watch sports. It’s a different one for each season and I can never keep track when one starts and another begins – it doesn’t follow logic, that the Super Bowl is in February and they’re still in these same thin jerseys that they wore before the summer heat broke, but I make it a point not to say all this. I read The Applicant and send him a link to the Poetry Foundation website, he says he doesn’t get all the fuss, “She’s the one who stuck her head in the oven?”
The holidays approach. He will spend them with his wife. Apparently, she is supposed to know about me, “It’s all above board,” he told me when we first started, “and we don’t have a sexual relationship.”
They are living separate for the moment. She is across the country, for what I’m not sure, I didn’t ask too many questions when I found out. Instead, I gave him just three rules: don’t talk about her, no one else but me, no one in my life gets to know. His were all implied by the arrangement. But it’s getting hard. I don’t ever shut up about him and so people are asking questions like, “So when do we get to meet him?” and “Do you think he’s the one?” Our first weekend together, his mother called, and I joked to tell her I said hi, to which he grew tense and gave a curt nod.
One night, after the whole affair first began, he confessed, “I’m not even sure that I’m really polyamorous, I’ve never felt this way about someone before,” while I was still slick with silicone lubricant. This is what keeps me coming back.
I wonder at times what their rules must be, him and his wife. She must have had demands. Something like: don’t talk about her, no one else, you can only tell her you love her during sex. Save the real shit for her.
I found her online once, on a website that notifies you when someone new views your profile, so I only looked at her profile the one time. She is not very pretty. He tells me I am the most beautiful woman he has ever been with. I tell him this is the best sex of my life, and he says the same. What a way to learn that this doesn’t matter, that my youth and my beauty cannot carry me anywhere besides to my own bed. He bites at my stomach, leaves dark hickeys down to my thighs, tells me how much he loves my body. Our first month together I lost thirty pounds, and now the skin beneath my belly button is loose with unattractive lumps.
I feel stupid all the time.
When the game is over, he begins to kiss me, and my body does not respond at first. Is this what I really want? When his hand touches my waist, I know the answer is yes. He leads me to the bed and tells me to take off my shirt.
It wasn’t supposed to be anything more than this. When we met, I told myself I didn’t want anything, I was biding my time until I finished school and my real life could begin. Why get invested? Now he tells me it’s casual and I call him a coward. Once, when he was drunk, he told me, “I wish I had waited for you,” and I thought he was going to cry until he kissed me. “You have really nice hips,” he said, before he took me to bed.
“I want you to choke me,” I tell him. He places his thumb on the base of my neck and stares at me. Sometimes I think I can read his mind when we’re like this. The first time he was inside me, I looked in his eyes and could already tell that he loved me. Sometimes I wonder if this is what I really like.
The first time we met, when it really was still casual, he told me all these kinks he had. Choking, spanking, consensual non-consent, “If you have an ex-boyfriend, I’d love to fuck you while he watches.” I want your wife to watch, I think now, not because it turns me on but because I want her to see what it looks like when you’re really in love. He is always gentle with me. I worry it is a disappointment, that he will grow bored and just find someone else, and what use will I be to him then?
He slips his hand to the side of my neck and strokes my jaw. I close my eyes and picture him beating me senseless. Each week, I watch the bruises from his lips fade until he comes back for more. I open my eyes and he stares at me with that same dumb look. Show me how you really feel, I try to tell him with my eyes, show me what I’m worth to you.