Limerence

copyright © 2012, all rights reserved

by Ricc Berra

It's been six months, fourteen days, twenty hours and forty-five minutes since we met. 

How often have you heard this story? 


A man walks into a working man's bar on a hot city night and approaches a girl seated near the door. She pretends not to notice as he rakes her up and down; her new Manolos, black pencil skirt, natural pearls, and the seal gray silk blouse unbuttoned to flaunt just a little more than enough of what she's got. He looks like he just stumbled out of a bowling alley. Her hair is freshly cut and styled. His is tousled in unruly ringlets. Her makeup shows attention to detail. His face, though handsome enough, needs a shave. She sips a Cosmo. He buys a beer. Offhandedly, he announces, "I don't mean to offend you, but you don't belong here." 

I act offended, but in truth, I'm not. I know what you mean before you do and I love you almost instantly for saying it. Still, I play coy and won't give you the satisfaction. You do not present well on first appearance. You will need to earn my trust.

"I've as much right to be here as anybody else," I address my own reflection in the bar. "And who are you to judge me?" My inflection rises convincingly toward the end, but I give it all away when my eyes flutter, pulled to yours in such a mad gravity that I blush and look away again. It's too late. You know you have me like bait on a hook.

You say "Sorry but you're so beautiful" and repeat that I seem out of place. It still sounds like a line, but when delivered with conviction, it works. I let you buy me a drink. And another, then a third and before long I'm at ease, laughing at all the right places, touching your forearm, resting three fingers on my thigh, biting my lip. All the signposts are there for you to read and interpret. You need no roadmap, no website seduction tips, you needn't bother, I've already read them all, practiced diligently in my mirror, everything from the perfect angle to avert my eyes, to the swivel in my hips as my bare knees brush yours when I turn on the barstool to face you. Everything has been planned, orchestrated, choreographed for you until you, emboldened by drink and by what you see down my blouse when I lean forward, brush my hair away from my ear and whisper a secret, how you'd like to take me home with you and what we'd do once we get there. 

There's no cab fast enough.

Even as you undo my blouse, still insisting I'm too good for the bars, I'm distracted momentarily, trying to remember your name. Did you give it? I know I told you mine. I stare out the unshaded window I have no idea how soon I'll be staring back into at you and another. Your hands are all over my breasts, unhooking my bra and pulling at the straps. Nothing's too good about me at this moment. I feel used. I like feeling this way and don't want it to stop. I laugh at how surprised you are when your hands fishing under my falling skirt find my panties wadded up in my cunt like so much wet tissue paper you don't even bother to remove, just peel aside, bend me over the nearest chair, pushed down for that fat cock of yours slithering up me, pushing so hard, pushing so long, you unhinge me, leave me creaking and groaning like a gate door left open to swing in the wind.

They say that love is blind, but we both know that's not true. Love is full-sighted. Multi-sensory. Extrasensory. My love sees everything, sees you in the shower, my love soaps your shoulders, froths the hair on your chest, splays fingers over you belly, foams the thicker wiry roost below, tickles your cock and delves between your legs.

My love is the towel that draws across your back, creates a brighter bloom on your already flushed skin. My love stands wet and naked behind you, shivering, my breasts pressed into your shoulders, hands on your hips, sliding around your waist, making you gasp as I brush down there. If you don't move, be still, I'll take it as if it were my own, my very own cock, to squeeze, make it hard and grow, curving through my fingers, shake it, jack it, stroke the soft pouch beneath until it hardens too, I'll do everything for you, make you come, be your hands, your handmaiden and when you're done, when you tense and cry out in my arms, I'll bend at your knees and lick you clean again like a mother cat washing kittens.

The pills were not my fault. I wasn't trying to do anything but sleep because always thinking of you has turned me into a vampire and when it, sleep, didn't come at midnight, I took two and when it still didn't come at one, I took two more and when it still didn't come at two, I took four. I'm not sure what happened after that, did I call you, I really don't remember, just a rumbling, dizzy, dippy roller-coaster free-fall into blackness, so fast my head spun into what I thought was sleep until the bright lights I knew were not morning sun and the acrid taste of charcoal and my own retching brought me back to a place that makes no sense without you.

So you see, the pills aren't my fault. If anything they are yours. But I will and I do forgive you. Can you just give me a little sign, something, anything, that shows you understand that what might seem like excess to you now, makes perfect sense to me?

Do you see the pictures of me on the screen now, do you like how I peel my bra down so slowly, the strap off one shoulder, then the other, now down at my belly, my breasts free, cupped and held up for you to take, free for your hands to clench and pull, for your lips to suck and your teeth to nibble? Watch how I slip my panties off, lie back to tease and spread my cunt for you, see how wet it is just thinking about you, how its bright rosiness glistens, ready, open for you. While you stare at me naked, splayed on the bed, surely you recognize that it's your room, your apartment, all your familiar objects, your nightstand, your pillows, your bedspread beneath me as I arch my back and give my cunt to the camera, but really it's to you. The date stamped in the lower righthand corner is yesterday's and that's important for I know your schedule and hers and she, once she sees what's playing on your computer, it's clear how she'll react. You may not remember giving me your keys, but you did and you'll soon see it hardly matters.

When you left me for her, at first I thought she wasn't the jealous type, all those nights spent watching through your bedroom window, the blinds never drawn, the light left on too long, but then I finally saw her close-up at that holiday party on Friday with your brother's sexy Polish girlfriend, so sloppy drunk, touching your knee, flirting and laughing at your jokes. You didn't notice her staring down your brother's date for being so forward with you, but I did and later—when you argued in the parking lot. I know there's little chance she'll want you after she sees what's on your computer. 

Placing you in the foreground, you covering me, that was a little more involved.  The photoshopping took hours.  Finding the right shot of you, matching all the tones, shadows and colors, blending the outlines pixel by pixel, till everything is as perfect as it seems, for, as I look at this final sequence, you on top of me, I have a hard time remembering that it didn't happen, so convincing is it and everything it does to me when I see it. Don't you feel it too? 

I'm not the sort to call out other girls as whores and sluts; those are horrible, demeaning labels men force on us to degrade the needs we all feel. It's understandable, other girls wanting you; it's natural that we all want something for ourselves and this is just the surest way to make what I want real. It was real. I still ache, that good delicious ache, from the way you rubbed me, rubbed me raw. There are worse aches than being rubbed raw, much worse.

Too little cuts worse than too much. Emptiness cuts like a knife, worse than a knife, the absence of you beside me in bed, your morning breath musty with sleep, tickling my scalp, your warm, familiar morning cock sliding against my butt, naked under my nightie, my underwear always off, my cunt, so wet, you can't forget how it was always ready, always open to you as you slid in with your morning hard-on, so easy to fill me, so hard now, so empty, stabbed through with emptiness, the raw red gash worse than the laughing men who took my innocence, panties already at my ankles, tits squeezed by calloused alley hands, rough voices in the dark asking over and over, do you want it, do you want it babe, while they fucked me front and back and me not brave enough, not sure enough of my desires to say yes or no. Part of me wanted it. Part of me did not. Part of me went away and never came back. There is little I do not know of my desires now for they are all you, of you, on you only in me sealing the stabbed place and if only for the moment, filling it with the completion that eases away all aches.

And you sit there, the way you sit there, with nothing to say, like you're already somewhere else. You won't even face me. You should. You really should.

My love, why are you looking at me that way?