She says: You think you’re never going to have anything, and then you have it. And then you think you’re never going to lose it and then you lose it. And life just keeps going on like that in long succession, and I just don’t know how anyone can bear it.
You look at her, and you nod. And it’s not just because you want to fuck her. It’s the luminosity coming off her words, her lips, and maybe it is because you just want to see that long stretch of skin broken only at the ankle by the black dress pooled there, but it’s more than that too.
I know what you mean, you say. And she looks at you and she knows that you don’t. And she knows that you see a long rope of white skin winding from neck to tail to toe and a quiet vibration and that’s all. But she breathes and she continues, not because she wants to fuck you, but because she wants to see the glow of her own words twist in rivulets down your neck.
It is not the losing, but the space between the having and the not, that makes us wish to die, she says and she stares out the window into the dark because it doesn’t matter and the night is black.
And you want to slide up between her knees, between the black cave of the dress, you can’t pretend you don’t, you can’t pretend that thought isn’t there, that that movie isn’t playing in your head, right next to the one of her biting her lip and looking at the sky. But also you want to put your mouth on hers and stop all the holes tearing through the world.
Make it all disappear and her tongue slides against your teeth all the having and the having not and her nails dig against your neck and it glows from your esophagus and from hers and pools in the bed between you and you lick it up, and in the morning she is gone.
Photograph: David Lynch Couch Series #1
Courtney Morgan is the founder and managing editor of The Thought Erotic. She also writes about sex, culture and all things literary at TTE and Vannevar. Her writing has appeared in Pleiades, The Red Anthology and American Book Review. She is a recipient of the Thompson Award for Western American Writing and was shortlisted for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Fiction.
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