Chapter 3

After the first time we went to bed, that day Athena slapped me, we continued to email each other. I've read some of these emails again, recently; it would be impossible to find any mention to our first meeting if I didn't know its exact date. "By the way, that story we discussed today was the best ever. Are there more chapters?" I wrote, after our second time. How could I write such a terrible phrase? Be so unoriginal, so crude? Yet she didn't seem to mind. "Maybe, but they haven't been written yet." Corny as it may be, it was true; everything was yet to be written, and all writers know that the book they want to write now is better than anything they have ever written. It's putting it down into words that ruins it.

Just like life.

We arranged to meet again—a new restaurant, some place she suggested. I never kept logs of our chats, and I don't remember it anymore. I'd never been there before, and we never went back. It was close to The Hotel, however.

"The Hotel" was where we met at first—that's how we called it, just "The Hotel." It was an old place, decayed enough to rent rooms for a couple hours, no questions asked or even glances at us, unlike the one we spent our first afternoon together. I had seen it before, often passing in front of it. Any big city has places like that.

I met Athena at the bar of Antonio's, that second time, and we had a drink. The conversation was strange, difficult, that day. "Let's go," I said, leaving money over the counter—like in the movies, yes; waiting for the bill would have destroyed my sudden resolution. She didn't say yes or no, just following me.

A few blocks later we were at The Hotel. I used another name—not Marquis, like before at the first hotel, and not my real name. Two minutes later we were taking each other's clothes, this time slowly and looking straight into each others' eyes. Athena's eyes were of a soft tone of hazelnut, small but intense, with short eyelashes. She squinted them when she orgasmed.

The memory of that afternoon is clear in my mind. We were in no hurry; it was not the first time, there were no more excuses. We couldn't pretend that we were just out of ourselves, doing a one-time thing that we could ignore later, hiding it together with the other skeletons we had. We knew it was not the last time, we knew that we had given out to that lust, or desire, or the search for something out of ordinary had won, that we'd be seeing each other again and again. That we shared our deepest secret with each other.

It was slow, deliberate. We made no effort to prove our skills at sex; foreplay, as I remember, consisted of hands caressing bodies and seeking private parts while we kissed. It may lasted a long time—I remember it as such. But I'm a man, she may well have thought that I was too impatient. If I learned one thing in life, it is that people are seldom thinking the same thing; even lovers or siblings.

Sometimes I think about it. On rainy Sundays, for example, locked inside, watching the water falling and transforming one less day of my life into boredom and loneliness. I sit in front of the large window, a hot cup in my hands, and I think of all the people I've been close to. I wonder if they felt like I did, and I am almost sure that they didn't. I am sure that Clara didn't like me—my first love, breaking my heart so easily. I am sure that Amanda loved me—poor girl, I must have hurt her feelings so much. Friends, lovers, family. How many times I must have hurt their feelings with what I thought were harmless phrases, simple gestures, perhaps just ignoring their dreams and desires and not doing what they wanted, not saying the words they wanted to hear from me the most. Athena, who were you? Sometimes—specially in those cold days when you lay your body over mine, your face hiding in my neck, the covers protecting us from the weather, and we stayed like that in silence for a long time—I wondered if you ever were in love with me. I wondered what would you say if I asked you to never leave, to just stay with me and never go back to your like. Once or twice I got so close to actually asking it that I opened my mouth, my tongue articulating the first word, before I decided against it, because I wasn't sure if I loved you. Then, some other days, when you were happy and playful, jumping over the bed naked to play with me, tickling my feet, laughing, all your teeth showing, I almost felt a pang and thought that I was not more than a joyful ride in your life, a way to spend empty afternoons and to get distracted from the routine that you seemed not to care much for. When, in the end ... ah, I shall keep the end for the ending. Before that, there is still much to tell. Before that, there was a no.

"Can you spend a night with me?" I asked her once.

"A night?"

"Yes, a night."

"No," she answered. That 'no' made me sad, like a little child that asks their parents if he can ride the carousel.

But so much happened before I asked her that question. I can't keep my focus. Athena told me once that I was a lousy storyteller.

"Don't take this wrong," she said, her hands doing something to her legs, half a caress, half a scratch. I adored when she was so much oblivious to her nakedness that she behaved as if she were alone and dressed. "But I don't think you could write a long story linearly."

"I could. I just don't like to write linearly."

"You can't," she grinned. "You're like an odd fiddler that can play some Paganini pieces but can't play scales. Now, don't be like that." She pulled me to her, but I was a bit reluctant. "Look," she said after seeing my reluctance. "I'll bet you a long, great blow job, playing with your come with my tongue and swallowing. Now, forget it and come here."

I started writing a linear story when I arrived home that day, but it never went beyond page ten.

We got to know each other far too well.

But there's much more to that subject. After I gave up I told her so.

"My stories are linear," I argued. "Just not in time. They are a build-up, a sequence of sometimes apparently uncorrelated facts that slowly form a picture. They have to be presented in a certain order, not to be to random or too obvious."

"That's an excuse," she said. "It's like an abstract painter that can't draw. He's a liar, not an artist. If you take Picasso, he could draw very well. He could have been not a cubist, but ... well, he did a lot of things early in his career before verging into cubism. It makes sense. He makes a choice, not for what he is able to do, but for what he thinks is more interesting and important."

"I know that, but it's not that straightforward. Maybe I can't write 300 pages of a linear story, but maybe I can't write a detective story either. Writers don't write everything."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

"So I'll make a bet," I said. "Write a dark, terror story. Make it at least 60 pages long."

"No. I don't like those stories."

The conversation didn't go much farther, both of us having proved our points. No winner was a common situation for us.

Our conversations were always the most important thing happening between us. Sometimes we didn't even get our clothes off, anxious that we were to talk about some subject that was causing long emails. We left happy and satisfied, not even noticing that we had barely touched each other. Athena could also appear with a new question, seemingly out of the blue—but I always wondered if she hadn't been pondering on it for days, throwing it to me like a ragged ball thrown to a dog.

"Who's the pervert?" Athena asked me once. "The writer or the reader?"

"Both," I replied. "Obviously."

"But who's the biggest?" she asked.

It was a dark afternoon. It must have been late fall, early winter, the sky heavy and grey. It was just one in the afternoon and the bedroom was eerily dark. She was sitting against the headboard, my head lying on her lap, her head so intense, foreshortened by my point of view. I remember her breasts, so free and natural, so feminine, yet not overtly sensual.

"The writer," Athena continued, "would be the biggest, don't you think? After all, he's the creator, his mind gave birth to the tits and cocks and cunts and what they did to each other. And yet ... do you remember our talks about stories writing themselves, characters that we hated and yet couldn't change because they just were like that? Am I a murderer for writing a detective novel? Did writing about the Crusades made me a Templar Knight? No, no. Then writers of sex stories don't have to be perverts. I wrote a rape scene that disgusted me so much ... but then, who knows how many readers may have read it and found it arousing? They are the perverts, not me. They, jerking off while reading how that poor girl was held down and fucked by three men. They are perverts, Marquis, the big perverts. Our audience, not us. We are, at worst, like a metal company forging guns; the readers are the ones who buy them and use them for killing, for hunting, or just put it on the back of the closet because they are actually afraid of guns."

And we were not the perverts, Athena and I, even if we met in secret, locking ourselves in an empty bedroom to have sex and talk. Does it make any sense at all? We were there, just the two of us, leaving the world to be in peace for half an afternoon. The sex was pure, inconsequential; not a statement of free love, not a escape from bad or unattractive lovers, not an outlet for our hidden desires. It was just something that felt good, what we felt to be a harmless game that was not played to win, but to pass time. A very big version of tic-tac-toe—or a small version of life. The problem wasn't our little affair, but everything else.

"We, Marquis, are pure enough to let our wishes and desires, and our fantasies and ghosts, escape to the paper; we are brave and vain and stupid enough to let them be read by others. We're dumb idiots who seek the ivory tower of a white sheet to be the idealists that we can't be in our every day life." She paused, her gaze lost far away. A few seconds later, she turned her head towards me. "Just fuck me again, will you?" she sad, sitting over me and riding me for her life, her right hand playing strongly with her clitoris, seeking the orgasm that hid life away for that split second.

"Who did you want to fuck but never could?" she asked me one day. We were playing hand games on each other's bodies. I remember, who knows why, that I was giving a lot of attention to the skin around her pussy, but not to the actual place.

"Who?"

"Yes. You're not telling me you fucked all the women you ever desired."

"No."

"Then, tell me," she said, girlishly, her hand doing a a quick jerk to my dick.