Without being arrogant

I think this is some of my better writing.


She reached in the open window without asking, popped the old-school lock, got in. Then before either one of them could speak, she turned and covered his mouth with hers.

They drove to a secluded spot near the Berkeley Marina. There, with the sound of waves lapping against rocks and homeless men stirring against sleeping bags, they slid hands into clothes, fingers past lips to eager tongues, waiting. When he moved his body against hers she wanted to cry, but instead she just cried out. Fuck me she said, and he did. He did it without a condom, risky and stupid and utterly frenzied, moving in and out of her at a pace too rapid to be rhythmic. She cried out again, this time without words, and put her nails into his skin, her teeth into his shoulder.

When she came she cried for real.

She did it silently, her face turned away from him, tears sliding into her ears. The tears were not of guilt. They were born of relief, of the knowledge that something must have changed, though she had no idea or intuition as to what. He, lying on his side next to her, buried his face in the nape of her neck, unaware. He said something. It could have been I love you. She was trying not to listen.

Yes, it was relief. It had to be. She’d waited to cross that line; she’d skirted the edge so much that she’d grown tired of its rubbery taste on her tongue. She’d paced it alone, in the grocery store, walking down the path to pick up her son, alone in her brain on fallow Thursday afternoons. She’d traced it so long that she knew its every crook, every bend. She knew the parts that would hurt the worst, and to those she surrendered every element of herself.