Work Text:
That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways. [...] This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.
- Fight Club
Listen. I’m not stupid, and I’m not delusional. I am aware that my behaviour over the past several months has been what one might term “erratic.” But it’s not my fault. This is the direct result of L waltzing into my life and doing a whimsical salt-and-burn of every component of the existence I had built for myself.
Which was not easy, by the way. The construction of my life, that is. I have — or at least I had — a nice apartment, and a pleasant job. Not the job I wanted, sure, but a respectable one, something with coworkers I could tolerate and a pension down the road. I had vacation time. I had a meal kit subscription, and I made myself very delicious and nutritionally balanced farm-fresh dinners every single night. I ate them alone, but I ate them in front of a big flat-screen TV which I’d set up on an oak television table I bought for 25% off.
I was happy. Or I was content. Or I was productive. Does it matter?
Okay, sure. Fine. Fuck it. I was bored out of my skull.
But people liked me, not like now where they’re kind of disturbed by the things which I allow to leave my mouth and my somewhat fucked-up face with the bruises and the hole in the cheek, and I didn’t have my mother calling my brand-new shithole place of residence every single fucking weekend to imply that I’m having some sort of psychotic breakdown which, by the way, I am not. My mind has never been more clear.
“Light,” she’s saying to me, her voice gentle, like you’d talk to an animal that’s backed into a corner pissing all over itself and trying to bite off your fingers while you’re attempting to bring it to the vet to be dewormed. “Your father and I were wondering if you might want to come for dinner this Sunday. If you don’t have work.” I quit my job three weeks ago. She knows this. “I think Sayu really misses you.”
Four months ago, this would have worked on me. Four months ago I would have dropped everything for my little sister.
But right now I’m standing ankle-deep in what I’m pretty sure is sewer water related to the backed-up toilet upstairs, and I’m watching L watching me from where he’s sitting on our coffee table. He’s folding an origami rose out of an old takeout receipt. We eat a lot of takeout, L and I. This is because the electricity only works occasionally, so it’s difficult to store much in the way of food in our fridge or heat any of it up if you happen to pick it up while you’re out. I have cancelled my meal kit subscription.
He catches my eye across the room, and mouths, Hang up.
I don’t hang up. I’m talking to my mother, who I love. Whatever he would like me to think, he is not the sole priority in in my life.
My pants are soaked up to the calves from the probable sewer water. I would move to a part of the house which is less underwater except all we have is a landline, on account of L being paranoid about the cellphone companies monitoring us and various other insane conspiracy theories besides. He made me destroy my personal cellphone by setting it on fire the day I moved into the condemned rathole which we share. He wouldn’t do it himself. He stood behind me, saying completely inane things about the government tracking our movements and advertisers pillaging our brains and wouldn’t it be nice if you weren’t shackled to every single opinion every idiot on the planet has every single second of the day. He has this idea that the complete and utter annihilation of my former life has to be done by me or else it doesn’t count.
“I can’t,” I tell her. “I have a lot of reports to finish. I’m working over the weekend. You know how it is.”
She pauses. She could bring it up, the fact that she knows I no longer have anything in the way of employment and the fact that I know she knows, but she does not. This is because — as I have become increasingly aware — people are, on the whole, terrified of poking holes in the pleasant things we sew for one another.
I know this because I was like this, until I met L. L insists that I am still like this, and maybe he’s right, but I think he should shut his mouth and be happy with what he’s got. God knows I’m too good for him. He looks like something that crawled out of a trash receptacle, and he stares.
“Maybe,” she says, carefully, “you could take a little time away. From your work.”
L mimes taking the phone away from my ear and setting it down on the hook. I ignore him. I don’t look away, but I ignore him. He’s got very big black eyes which look like something you’d normally see during sleep paralysis.
“I really can’t,” I say. “There’s so much work. There’s paperwork everywhere.” There are bits of trash floating through our basement.
Apparently this interaction displeases L, because he tosses the rose into the dirty water and climbs off of the table. He wades through the water towards me, wet sewage splashing all over his jeans, his shoulders hunched, his black hair falling all over his face, then comes to stand right exactly in my personal space. I can feel the heat of his body near mine, and I can smell his breath. It smells like sugar, and the same mint toothpaste I use. We share a tube. There’s no reason not to. What’s his is mine, and vice versa.
I look at him, and he looks at me, and then he plunges his palm straight down the front of my pants.
I hiss and yank it out. He only does this when he wants something.
This elicits exactly nothing from him except a birdlike tip of the head and the widening of his black eyes. Who, me? I could punch him. I’d put his hand back except I’m on the phone with my mother.
“Light?” she says, and I realize she’s been talking this whole time.
He traces a finger along my throat and I slap it away. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “There’s static on the line.”
He steps even closer. His leg is against my leg. His groin is against my groin. I want to shove him backwards and also possibly hold him face-down in the sewage until he gurgles and drowns, but I don’t. When I exhale my ribs touch his.
He leans forward and mouths something against my neck. It’s come with me, I think. It disturbs me that I can read his lips by their touch. I am also disgusted by the double-entendre.
He won’t fuck me. I know this. He never does. He touches me and he teases me and then he leaves me there on the bed or the floor or pressed up against the wall of our kitchen, gasping, cold, aching for him. He never laughs but I can see it in his mouth anyway, curling behind it.
I hate him so, so much.
He likes it this way, I think. To fuck me would be to give me power and he’ll never do that. He needs to hold all of me in his fist; he needs to know that he can whisper in my ear and make me do whatever he wants. I know this. I like to delude myself into thinking that this isn’t true but I know that it is.
But don’t think that this isn’t an equal partnership. Yes, he has everything and I have nearly nothing but nearly is the key because something does remain, and it’s me.
I don’t mean this as an inspirational statement. It’s not some saccharine bullshit about self-worth. I mean it like this — I could take myself away at any time. Both of us are aware of this. It is the knifepoint we dance around. And then where would he be? Probably he had a life before me but he won’t have one after. Not now that that he’s tasted me.
Who could compare? He owns me but I ruined him.
So, listen. My eyes are open. My hands are shaking, I know this, but I also know exactly what I am doing. Every single move I make is made of my own volition. I am tying my fate to his and I am letting him take and take and take and I am making myself a shiny little thing he can spin between his fingers, but I am doing it because I want to. Do you understand? Do you trust me? Will you believe me when we get to the inevitable conclusion, which is to say: his gun inside my mouth, the metal cold against the inside of my cheek, the buildings below collapsing in pretty golden explosions and the look in his black eyes so absent, so void of anything like love or lust or want, staring straight through me as though I were an old coke bottle emptied out but not yet tossed aside?
I say, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’d love to, but I’m just so busy.”
I’m not listening to what she says next. I’m hanging up the phone. I’m putting his hands back where they belong, by which I mean, inside my clothes, against my skin, wrapped around me— I’m pulling him close and I am letting him hear all the mortifying little sounds which, before him, were only ever meant for myself. I am belonging. I am letting myself belong. He is snarling against my throat and I am getting, I think, every single piece of him that I want.