Claire Browne

FOR YOU

We met in a pub in an unimaginative part of the city.

I remember being early and feeling smug and beautiful and thinking about the months before that moment; how I had not thought very deeply about sex, despite being there for it that night. I thought it was the base force that drove everything – some simple but wild current I had managed to slip inside. It gave the sensation of being at the centre of a web that would tilt as I moved, that the world would yield to me as I put it into motion. Everything was small. Everyone was small. I could touch whomever I wanted.

Then you rushed in, all smiles and apologies with a face like setting sunlight. Any superiority I felt soon melted away. You brought a hunger and a gentleness to my kisses, and that kind of pleasure was a sadness I had never felt before. I wanted to eat it. Feel skin turn to pulp in my mouth and forget the whole thing, but every touch of that evening bloomed and bruised and filled me with the hot dissolving blossoms of something new.

They were so vivid, those moments – remembered as though my fingers had stored the memory of your shape, and in the gluey minutes of the morning after I thought I would never let you leave. But I grew hideous. I soon wanted you for the sheer thrill of having flesh under my fingernails and acknowledging the thought would make me knuckle my eyelids until I saw red waves and fizzy static.

Each time I smelt you on my skin it would remind me of something I had read about the most attractive perfumes having their base in something disgusting, like whale fat.

Who are you to me now?

And how am I to tell you that since you confessed that you slept with someone else it’s all I can think about, fantasise about? That you crept into me by way of masochism —

and that I fucking love it?

          –  Claire Brown