After Conor, I started dating a guy, a nice guy who wore lots of t-shirts and knit hats and black frame glasses, who slept curled around me and who was masterful with his tongue and who liked to read books and who made tea. We did crossword puzzles together in the mornings, sitting at the sunny kitchen table and discussing our English professors. My friends called him “sensitive” and “loving.” They crossed their legs and smiled and said, “He’s good for you, Elle.” The Nice Guy said he loved me. I said I loved him, too, but what I didn’t say was that really, I wasn’t sure. The Nice Guy was writing a novel and liked to take black and white pictures with an old manual Nikon FG. He would pull my shirt up, lightly kiss the skin of my back, snap a picture of me pulling my shirt back down and laughing in the kitchen, my hair falling over my face. He would focus the lens on my hands wrapped around a teacup, morning sun angling in, bright and clear. He would lie back, naked beneath me, and let me capture him, eyes focused on mine through the lens. The Nice Guy moved in, slept on sheets where Conor and I had slept, read in chairs where Conor and I had kissed, leaned against doorframes where Conor and I had fought, kissed me against walls where Conor and I had fucked. The Nice Guy moved in and watered the plants when I forgot and made dinner if he got home before me and cleaned the bathroom—all things Conor never did. The Nice Guy moved in and we stopped going to parties—it just wasn’t Our Style, The Nice Guy’s and mine, so we went to shows instead. The Nice Guy usually bought the tickets and the beer and then carefully kissed me to sleep afterwards when we were tired and still vibrating with music.
We were at a My Morning Jacket show a few months after The Nice Guy moved in when I fucked everything up. Beside me in the crowd, The Nice Guy rocked back and forth, nodding his head, eyes trained on the stage. The blue and red of the lights swung madly across his face, reflecting in the lenses of his glasses, turning his skin red, blue, red, redder, blue. And there, on the stage in front of us, the whole reason we were there: Jim James and his thick beard, lost and wailing over his flying-V guitar. Everyone around us rocked and writhed and crunched closer together. A girl in only leggings and a childishly iridescent bathing suit wriggled by us, her ponytail bobbing; she smelled like sweat and beer, her skin glistened with sparkles and wet. Everything was hot and close and The Nice Guy stood there, still in his sweatshirt—that fucking sweatshirt. I hated it, the way it was really too small for him, the sleeves stopping halfway down his forearms. And so red. That sweatshirt was bright damn red, with a coffee stain on the chest and when I looked over at him, my head feeling heavy in all that heat, I could see his t-shirt sticking out of the sweatshirt, wrinkled, at the collar and the waist. His hair stuck out like blonde straw from underneath his black-knit hat, still straight despite the thick heat, but his face, his beautiful, sharp-jawed face was smooth and scruff-less. He looked like he hadn’t changed clothes since he was ten and his growth spurt started, like he had just shot up without time to find new clothes. And he looked hot, roasting with that sweatshirt and hat, and I couldn’t look at him for longer than a glance or I started feeling hotter and sweatier and closer and I couldn’t stand it. Aren’t you HOT? I wanted to ask him. Because I am. I am sweaty and you are close and I am still not sure if I meant it when I said, “I love you, too.”
Finally, trying not to touch him incase his heat caught me on fire, I leaned over and yelled into his ear, “I gotta find the bathroom!” Not because I had to pee, but because everything was so crushing and close and I couldn’t handle the heat anymore.
The Nice Guy looked at me, nodded quickly, shoved his straw hair out of his eyes, then turned back to the pounding guitar riff he and his red sweatshirt were so into.
I slipped away from him, sliding through the sweaty crowd, pushing past bodies squirming and full of music. I wanted to be like them, taken up and into the music as much as The Nice Guy, but all I could think about in that heat were the things I didn’t like, the things I didn’t like about him, the reasons I shouldn’t have said, “I love you, too” and let him move in. I kept thinking about that stupid fucking sweatshirt and the smell of his breath in the morning and the way he brushed his teeth until foaming toothpaste ran looping around his wrist but he would just keep going.
And right as I wrinkled my face into a scowl at the thought of toothpaste rushing in rivers down The Nice Guy’s arm, I looked up and everything stopped, slowed down, sharpened. The sound shut off, all the lights dimmed except one, one right there ten feet from me against the brick wall at the back of the room; that light, there, brightened until the shadows were gone. Because there He was; Conor, tall and curved like a bow over the shiny bathing suit girl, his arm the arrow straight to the wall beside her head, and he was laughing and leaning and she was laughing and spilling her beer.
Everything about him was like a favorite book I knew by heart but couldn’t stop turning the pages anyway; the slope of his back and his wide shoulders under the worn flannel of his shirt, the angle of his hips in his old jeans, the mess of his dark hair, grown out but still short enough that I could see the knobs of his spine pushing against the skin of his neck.
Conor and The Nice Guy were like negative images of each other, the same but different. The Nice Guy’s blonde straw hair, Conor’s dark curls, both eternally disheveled, the mess helped along by my fingers frequently finding their way along the scalp, tangling locks around my knuckles. The Nice Guy’s novel, Conor’s biology papers, both of their backs bent over the computer for hours, fingers clicking keys while I buried my nose in books behind them. The Nice Guy’s early rising, Conor’s sleepless nights, both of them interrupting my own sleep cycle to tangle our bodies in the sheets, naked and full up of each other. The Nice Guy’s soft touch, gentle kisses, Conor’s roughness. Conor’s shoving and pushing and Conor’s scratching and squeezing, grabbing and holding and Conor’s pressing mouth and firm grip on my wrists and Conor’s everything that lit me up like a building burning.
I needed to walk past him, needed him not to be there at all, but he saw me and stopped laughing; arm still extended, palm still flat against the wall, he looked at me over his wrinkled sleeve while the shiny bathing suit girl giggled at the beer she’d just sloshed onto the floor. And I looked back. I shouldn’t have, but I did and my eyes were stuck on his, neither of us blinking or moving or breathing, everything slow and impossibly quiet.
But then, thank god, someone drunk and sloppy bumped into me and the music snapped back in my ears and everything moved like normal and I took a huge, gasping breath and looked away from him, bolted not for the bathroom, but for any way out of this hot box full of too many people. In the flashing lights, blues and reds purpling on the walls, EXIT glowed bright in neon and I made straight for it, weaving in and out, avoiding carelessly waved beers or flailing limbs, but as I pushed through the door, I felt Conor behind me, his big hand splayed firm across the small of my back, following me. I could feel the pressure of each of his fingers holding my t-shirt against my skin, boring heat and electricity through my muscles and down deep into my bones. The motion sensor light outside of the door clicked on as we burst outside, dimly illuminating dark shapes and empty boxes against the walls. The music faded slowly as the door swung shut behind us.
I stood quaking and electric in the fall air, not facing him, staring at the pavement under my feet and he stood there behind me, close but without touching. We were frozen, standing still for…hours? Days? Everything seemed silent like winter snow, like it was hiding from us, from me. It had been so long since either of us moved that the motion sensor light switched off and we were in the dark again. I could hear him breathing, feel his breath curving around the back of my ear.
He took a step closer to me and the light flashed on, circling us, cutting us out of the blackness. I jerked away from him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. My voice puffed out, misty, into the dark around us.
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” He growled, his breath in my hair, so close I could smell him, soap and smoke.
His voice sunk into my skin, shooting waves of electricity through my muscles, raising tiny hairs all over my body. I felt myself swinging back toward him like a wrecking ball, rolling my shoulders into his chest, aligning my spine with his sternum, tilting my head so his mouth could close around my earlobe.
He pulled me into the darkness, outside the sharp edge of the light, trapped me between his body and the wall. The brick scraped my shoulder blades through my t-shirt, his mouth opened against mine, with a traitorous reflexivity my fingers pushed his shirt up his stomach, curled around his belt buckle, pulled his hips toward mine, both of us gasping. He lifted me, I wrapped my legs around his waist, felt the rough bricks tear through my t-shirt. I wound my fingers in his hair, dug them into his shoulders, bit his lower lip. He pressed into me, squeezing my right leg tight in his hand. The bricks rubbed his right hand raw.
We were silent but for our gasping; frantic breaths growing faster and faster, mine becoming louder and open-mouthed, Conor’s rushing angry in my ear through clenched teeth. The veins in his neck hardened and streamlined, full of pulsing blood, reddened skin laying tight over them. I pressed my hand against his heated skin, feeling muscles move, and when I took it away, buried it in his hair again, glowing imprints of my fingers stayed, white and cool.
And then my back was arching away from the wall, spine curving me toward him. I tore my right hand from his hair. With eyes wide open, staring at him staring at me, I slapped him across the face, letting my nails catch in the skin of his scruffy cheek. He roared, his voice exploding from his throat angrily but at the same time full of something else, something curling and writhing and liking it. He shoved me back into the wall, pinned my right hand against the brick with his left, used his right hand, clenching my ass, to pull me closer to him, to pull himself deeper. I tightened my legs around him, looked right at him as he leaned toward me and then I was looking past him, through his dark curls, and he was whispering, “Fuck you,” and we came together, pulling and pushing and sweating.
He re-threaded his belt, buckle clinking, long fingers flicking in and out of shadow as I leaned against the wall, panting. I bent to retrieve my underwear, trying not to smell him even though he was everywhere, standing so close to me.
“Your back,” he said softly, his voice rumbling above me. “It’s bleeding.”
I balled my cotton panties in my hand, used them to wipe his come from my thighs as I said, “I know.” I could feel the sweat trickling into the scrapes, stinging, and the night air sliding across my skin through the rips in my t-shirt. “Bet your hands are, too.”
I glanced up to see him, studying his palms in the semidarkness, raising an eyebrow. “Huh. Didn’t even feel that.” The light by the back door illuminated half of him, half of his dark hair hanging in half of his face—the left side, short red lines on his cheek from my nails, and half of his neck, already bruising in the shape of my mouth, and half of him turning toward me as I stood up, adjusted my skirt, half of him watching me erase the evidence of all of him.
“You’re here with that guy, aren’t you?”
“You already knew that. He lives with me.”
“In our apartment.”
“Conor, don’t do this right now.”
“What? All I’m saying is my name’s on that lease, too.”
“Not anymore. I renewed it. In only my name. It’s my apartment, now.”
“Wow. It’s been that long since we lived together, huh?” He sighed, looked away, tugged on his shirt, ran his fingers over the buttons to make sure they were still aligned correctly. I noticed a hole in the fabric a few inches below his armpit—not a big one, but large enough to see the smooth pale of his skin, maybe the suggestion of a rib or two.
“You know, he loves me,” I told the hole in his shirt, told his skin and bones.
“And you don’t love him.” It wasn’t a question. He knew. Because he had known me for so long, because we had gone through every single fucking moment of our lives in the same place—even, most of the time, in the same house, Conor knew what I hadn’t even been able to admit to myself: I didn’t love The Nice Guy, but I would pretend I did. Because he was nice and I liked the idea of him and his novel and his tea and his glasses, I would pretend I loved him until he left. It would take him realizing I didn’t mean it and leaving me to stop the charade. And Conor knew this.
And I hated him for it.
“I love him,” I lied. “I do.”
Conor shook his head. “Elle, you suck at lying.”
“Fuck you.”
“You already did.”
I shoved him, angrily, against the wall. He laughed, grabbing my arm, holding me there against him. “You don’t love him and you know I know.”
I wrenched my arm away from him; he let go easily—too easily, and I stumbled backward, catching myself against a stack of wooden crates. He leaned, smirking, in the shadows, faded flannel arms folded over his chest, ankles crossed to match. “Careful there,” he sneered, using a tone I remembered from grade school, it was so deeply embedded in him.
“Asshole,” I hissed, and stomped away from him, yanking the side door open. Music exploded, rumbling and wailing, out the door—I could almost feel the gust of it hit my face, slide across my skin, blow my hair back from my face. I slipped into the room, pulling the door shut behind me, leaving Conor in the darkness by himself.
“Rough time?” The Nice Guy asked when I finally came back to him, still wet, still weak in the knees, even though I’d tried to clean up a little in the bathroom, tried to get the smell of Conor off of my skin, out of my hair, out of my blood.
“What?!!?”I shouted, heart pounding with panic.
“Rough time in the bathroom?” He shouted over the music, leaning closer, handing me the jacket he’d been holding for me.
“Oh,” I nodded. “Oh yeah. Long line.” I slipped my jacket on quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed the rips in my t-shirt, the red scrapes showing through.
The Nice Guy put his arm around my shoulders, pulled me against him, kissed my forehead. “Wanna get out of here?” he asked, keeping his mouth close to my ear, letting his lips brush against my skin. His eyes were heavy, clouded, the way they looked in the morning when he woke me up to have sex.
When you’re in love, you say yes to that kind of stuff, right? You say yes to leaving in the middle of a good show, even if it’s one of your favorite bands, and you go home and have really great, amazing sex because you’re in love and you love him, and he loves you and isn’t it so great? When you’re in love, you say yes.
So I said, “Yeah, let’s go,” because I wanted to love him and I grabbed his hand and pulled him through the crowd. Near the door, I saw Conor, leaning alone against the wall, the light catching three red lines on his left cheek. The corner of his mouth curled into a gloating half-smile as we passed and I swore I could hear him laughing, even when I moved between the sheets with The Nice Guy, pushing and gasping until he came quietly with his face pressed in my hair.
