“Oh, love, you’re so tired,” he breathes, his voice raw from the volume of conversation, from the moans and grunts of our lovemaking.
We lay on the dampened bedspread in the wake of the hour, shaded sunlight peeking through the dingy curtains, the stolen night fading into semi-awareness as I stumble into the clothing I wore to the concert, shirt still musky from sweat and the smell of cigarettes. The iron smell of blood is pungent in my nose, the taste turning bitter in my mouth, I rub the scabs forming on my thigh and hip. His collar bone is stained red in slices from the blade and sharp bite marks dot his neck.
“Nick, love,” I plead, “I’ve got to get to class.” He’s grabbing my waist and tugging me towards his erection. I’m surprised by the pulsing mass, shocked that it’s still so eager after the spent evening. I’m sore, my muscles ache from the contortion of our rough sex, my bits red and chafed almost to the point of bleeding. I try to convince him of this but he’s ever insistent, and I’m always so pliable to his will. We fall onto the dirty bed and make love for what seems like the millionth time—for what feels like the first time—in the seedy motel room, permeated with our scent, with our desire, with our love.
This was the night of the Fox and Otter.
This was the night of youth, before everything fell apart.
The Destined Ones—Chapter One…
Nick and I first became acquainted when I was in ninth grade. At the time, he was dating my friend, and I never really desired to know him well. I’d had a bad experience with a very dear former friend and a boy she fancied—plainly stated, I seduced him, and she never really spoke to me again. What can I say, even in my youth I craved men’s attention. I didn’t want to mangle my relationship with April by doing the same, so I stayed a polite distance from Nick.
This is likely what led to his furious interest in me.
Over the next few months, Nick sought out to befriend me. He was persistent in this matter. Women were his brooding desire, and if he met one that seemed aloof, he would, without fail, seduce them. His relationship with April eventually eroded and crumbled into a dusty heap of disappointment; whether or not I was the culprit is unknown to me. As far as I know, she had difficulties at home which resulted in her acting out and alienating those who were closest to her, including me. April and I ceased speaking, all the while my bond with Nick grew like vines creeping over a brick wall, all but suffocating the material beneath. I became infatuated with him, and he with me.
Our relationship remained semi-platonic until I was in my final year of high school. Because of my erratic living situation, I came in and out of his life like an apparition; each time he assumed closeness, I’d disappear when his fingers dared grace my cheek or sought to cradle my hand. We had frequent phone conversations that left me feeling drained and alive, like word heroine coursing through my brain and veins, but also silences that reached into the very core of my being for months at a time. Nick was ever present, an ebbing throb of desire and interest. When we didn’t speak I longed for his voice which was warm and burning, aged scotch flowing past the lips.
I was seventeen when we reunited on a consistent basis. My foster father drove me to his college dorm where he was waiting on the steps I’d know well in the coming months. His body was draped in black, a turtle neck which hid his large scar and made him look like an artist, slacks which left me breathless when he turned and I noted his sculpted backside. I hadn’t seen him in so long, but I memorized his face: the dimples which belied the malevolence of his common expressions, thick dark eyebrows, eyes that lost me in the jeweled green tones. His eyes…his eyes… They were the reason I decided my favorite color is green. Nick’s smell was the only stink I have ever been able to tolerate after days of unshowered sexual activity, and when clean it was woody, like basil, but also sweet and dark. It was almost dangerous. I sipped his pheromone cocktail in fear that I’d be overwhelmed, suffocated. But I was overwhelmed, by every minute detail of his presence, no matter how shallow my inhale.
I continued on the vein of my earlier behavior and bedded him for the first time while he was dating a very damaged girl, Suzi. He left her to be with me. Much as I try, I cannot recall the details of having sex with Nick for the first time, only that it felt like relief. My mind celebrated him, and so after that day my body did each time we saw one another. Our first months were a haze of sex and anticipation. When we weren’t together, I ached for his company. While we were, my curfew loomed before me, only serving to remind me of how little independence I held.
“I need to talk to you,” my foster mother said angrily. She led me into the study where a computer tab was displayed with my online banking information. One particular entry was highlighted. The imagine on the screen made my heart flutter nervously. I was caught in a very big lie. I was an idiot. I used my debit card to rent the hotel room knowing full well she had access to the purchases, and upon seeing it to account for my monthly balance had done some investigative work. She called the hotel. She knew I was with Nick that night instead of with a friend. Thus ended our physical encounters; that, and the night he told me he was still sleeping with Suzi.
The Betrayals—Chapter Two…
Nick and I could no longer speak in person. Our conversations were limited to the late-night phone calls I was forced to sneak in my room after my parents slept, hushed whispers of sorrow and promises to see one another, no matter the obstacle. We hadn’t been together in weeks. His restlessness and general deviousness grew sharp as the blade that gutted me and he could no longer contain his compassion for me or the guilt after, when he felt forced to admit his wrongdoing.
It was early in the evening. The dimming sun filtered through the drapes in the study. The chains of having been grounded had been released little by little as I had finally convinced my parents that the motel incident was an adolescent mistake not to be made again, and I was able to converse with Nick openly. He seemed off, distant. I assumed it was due to his medication being altered just a few days prior. He instructed me to read a post he’d submitted to the now defunct Myspace site but wouldn’t explain why. I began scanning the page while still speaking to him but the second paragraph encouraged me to hang up the phone and begin sobbing. I finished and closed the program, walked slowly to my room making odd high and wet sounds from a mouth draped in sorrow. He had sex with Suzi. In the times he couldn’t answer the phone, he was cradled in her body. He was sorry, but wanted to be with Suzi again. He didn’t know how else to tell me than in his overly-loquacious poetry. He didn’t have the decency to tell me over the phone.
After crying inconsolably for a few hours I went outside to pace the driveway. It was very late, and the sky was astoundingly clear. I could always see the stars from my parent’s house, but that night in particular it was if they were more abundant as if to comfort me, or perhaps make me feel more isolated and small. My grief seemed endless. It reached into my days and clawed my dreamscapes, shredded any optimism I’d begun to carry when we first started dating. I didn’t know what I did wrong, I was unsure and insecure. The gloom affected my friendships and slowly my desire to communicate with everyone ebbed away until I was as physically alone as I was internally. I finished my first college semester in the summer, choking on the heat of August while I drove home, a blush of contentment finally seeping into my days as I recovered from the heartbreak.
I didn’t see Nick until I moved into the dorm; it was a cruel twist of fate that I occupied the same building in which we first consummated our love. In an even crueler joke, he’d relocated into the adjacent building.
Orientation passed without incident, as did the next week. My roommate seemed friendly, the sudden quiet freedom liberating. I looked forward to my classes.
Students began to fill the campus as time drew closer to the first day of school. I’d been cleaning my room and organizing my things. The box I carried to the dumpster across the street was too heavy and unwielding to notice him sitting amongst a group of smokers, clouds of tar concealing his features. The instant he recognized me I could see his lungs filling in acknowledgment, but I rushed too quickly into the building, my heart stampeding to the same tempo as my feet up the stairs.
I was furious. For over two months his requests to speak to me went ignored. Finally I relented after seeing a mutual friend draped in his lap. It was clear that they’d fucked, and for him to have paraded that in my face after everything he’d already done was too much for me to bear.
“Come here,” I blurted. He slid from the steps like a cat, exaggerating his motions.
“Yes?” he asked casually, as if he hadn’t been pleading with me the past while. His comrades were observing us carefully, and ever the over-actor, he was providing amusement.
“Firstly, I’m doing this for myself, not because of you. I’m not finally talking to you because you’ve broken me. You haven’t. You hurt me once, and I’m not willing to let you do so again. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” he smirked.
We walked and I spoke, words spilling from my mouth like vomit. He took the vitriol, my confessions, gracefully and quietly, responding in honesty only whenever I asked a question. I was exhausted and my voice like sandpaper. He offered himself for an embrace, and I took it. The smell, the way his skin felt, it eroded my sense of self-worth and I gave in. We went back to my room and had sex. The familiar sense of relief, which would become a staple in my definition of us, washed over me and I forgave him.
Our bodies cradled, his answer to my question, were the only things that existed. I went to class, then came back to my dorm and fucked. I awoke to study, then we fucked. There was speech, too, and love, but mostly sex filled our silences.
One night Nick vanished. He wouldn’t respond to my calls, he wasn’t in his room. I waited twelve hours for the stutter of knocks at my door, finally asleep after exhaustion took my consciousness. Seven a.m. struck and there he was, looking sore and as tired as I was. I invited him in to sleep with me, and so we did. We awoke together cramped from the too-small mattress, my eyes grains of sand and his voice hushed. He asked for a massage and took off his shirt, revealing deep and angry scratches in a pattern that spelled infidelity. My hands shook as I asked him who caused them; his head hung and he sighed.
“Suzi. I was with Suzi last night.” The explanation caused me to shudder. My sleep addled gaze began to moisten and I sat on the bed, defeated. He apologized profusely, explained that she was unstable and needed him. He wove a maze with his confession which mesmerized me, hypnotized the reason in my thoughts. I gave him my body and cried after. Relieved. Relieved that he was with me still.
Thrice more he revealed his evils, three more forgiven transgressions. He fucked my best friend, but that was pardoned because it was before we bonded. He fucked her roommate. He returned from a convention with bite marks across his chest and neck, which he confessed weeks later were not, in fact, from a friend, but from a lady he met there named Marta. Marta the Kitty. That was the deepest hurt, Marta was, because I found emails which displayed their fondness for one another. He spun words in endearment, phrases in love. Sex, I thought, was one thing. Love was another matter. That destroyed my trust in him, yet I stayed.
Months later I married him, and in doing so, lost my foster family.
He held me while I cried for my mothers in the deep of night, tripped with me on drugs, bathed with me in our first apartment and encouraged me to finish school, which I eventually left because he failed and I wanted to be with him.
We moved to Florida, where we endured homelessness for months. Our bond was forged in stress. Nick and I survived some of the most horrible situations which I’ve encountered to date. We needed each other, whether it was for the money we’d make so we could shower in a hotel room instead of a sink in a White’s bathroom stall, or because we needed an outlet to vent, or to sob; because we needed to be held when we gave up on life, encouraged just one more day—it’ll be better tomorrow—or to fight and blame our situation on one another.
We found a home states away with his friend where we stabilized. Finally we could just be. But I wasn’t happy. Our life had become boring, our jobs the same drudge, coming home to a foot massage and television, microwaved meals. We were going nowhere. I was going nowhere.
Nick entered the bedroom one night while I was looking up divorce lawyers. That is how I told him I was leaving him. It was more than that, though, because I didn’t want to leave him, necessarily, but our life. I couldn’t leave our life, we had no way out of it. Neither of us were making any progress and our money dictated only that we afford bills. I spent the next week in his arms on the blow-up mattress on the floor, next to the stink of cat shit from the litter box in the dining room. I broke down each night in his embrace because I could not imagine being without him. But I had a destiny, and it was clear then that my existence with him was not the life I wished to have. I wanted to go back to school. My foster mother offered me reprieve if I came home, which I did.
Nick and I did not speak much after that. We entertained conversations about practical things such as our divorce, and argued arbitrarily because I was angry. I drove two hours to see him, confused and lonely, only to have him kick me out in the middle of sex because his lover wanted to come over.
One might wonder why I still feel tenderness towards Nick. In fact, after writing this and seeing it plainly stated instead of fractioned memories, I wonder the same thing. That is not to say that our relationship was entirely bad or that he is a bad person. It wasn’t, and he isn’t. But one tends to recall even the shallowest cuts more vividly than times when a knife wasn’t even in sight, much less wielded by the one you adore.
Nick and I will always be connected in some way, perhaps because we are the Destined Ones, a name he gave us long ago, whether we were meant to be lovers or fading friends. He will always find a kind place in my heart, and he will forever be in my thoughts, if only to remind me that I felt great love once, and like everything else in existence, was neither absolutely good or absolutely bad.
