Chapter 7: Ten Minutes and a Speech That Misses Its Bus

I woke up to bacon and coffee, which is a kinder alarm than most of the ones I set for myself.

For a few seconds I was only a body in a warm bed that did not belong to me, and the smell was enough to make the rest of it feel like a good decision. Then I sat up, and the good decision announced itself as a problem.

I had slept with the plug in.

The walk to his bathroom was a careful, bowlegged negotiation with last night. I sat down to pee and reached back, expecting the familiar jeweled give, but instead got a dry, hot drag that made my mouth open on a sound I was glad he wasn’t in the room to hear. The lube in my ass had gone wherever lube goes at three in the morning. What was left was a dry hot stretch without mercy, a burning pull that felt bigger than the thing causing it. I breathed through it the way I breathed through IVs that would not sit, and then it was out, shiny and accusing in my hand, and I was sitting on his toilet with my eyes watering for a reason that had nothing to do with feelings.

When I peed, I felt him. Not the idea of him, but the remains of what he had deposited in me during the evening activities, slipping out of me with the rest of the night. Tyler’s cum, still in me because he had asked me to stay that way and I had fallen asleep agreeing. The intimacy of it hit first, then the mess. Then the inventory I could not stop running: fire-pit, Gary’s window, a bath, his mouth on the back of my neck, three words whispered at a man who had not been awake to collect them.

I stood up and looked at myself in his mirror because the mirror was there and I had developed a terrible relationship with glass over the last month and a half.

I looked at my naked body. The marks from his hands had gone faint, the Sharpie on my breasts having faded to dirty ghosts. “Tyler’s Slut.” You could still read them if you knew they were there. I knew they were there. I touched the letters with two fingers as if they might smear into a different sentence.

Then I remembered the last words I had spoken, the words he could not hear that I had whispered to him as he slept; I had said into his sleep.

I love you.

I had repeated the words three times, like I was trying on a dress to see how it fit. They had fit. That was the part that I could not ignore. They had fit, and I hadn’t said them where he could answer, and I didn’t know what that admission did to the life I still kept calling mine when I was with Mike, when I was in his house, making the girls lunch. Loving Tyler in the dark did not un-love Mike in the daylight. I felt like I was holding two heavy glass vases filled with flowers that would break if I dropped them, but every surface in my life was cluttered and full, and I had no clean place to put either of them down safely.

The talk was supposed to happen this morning. I had planned to put an end to the doorways, the gates, the eyes, and the permission to cum. What I had thought started as kinky play I had quickly realized was training and conditioning, and I had sworn on Monday while I stared at Mike’s ceiling that I would handle this before it went any farther.

I went to my overnight bag and pulled out my fleece bottoms, an old T-shirt I sometimes slept in, and socks, because Tyler’s hardwood was cold and I was not going to have this conversation with frozen feet. I washed my face and dressed.

I still felt groggy, a little thick-headed, like the night had not finished metabolizing yet, but I was set in my plan and was going to do this. I had to do this. I left Tyler’s bedroom and walked toward the smell.