Fireworks vs Shrapnel in OD OG

“You’re so easy.”

I hate that he says that to me…but, ironically, it’s the way he’s gotten me undressed the fastest. A crack of a cap gun at the start of the race. A bugle call for the sun coming up. The conductor’s baton, poised.

I meet him at 4 at the hotel, a different one from the usual one he rents a suite at…He takes my bag and then sits on the couch, smirking at me, at my race to get to him. I collapse theatrically on the bed in a trust fall…down, down, down into a place I trust the least. He contemplates my listless figure on the bed for a minute before making his way over, crawling up to me. I whisper that I just need to snuggle for a minute and lay my head on his chest, my arm around his belly…clinging to him like I’m barbed wire hooked into his skin. He caresses my neck, musses my hair affectionately. He realizes his fly is down and says that he swears it was not any kind of perverted tactic, just oversight. I laugh and start to take my arm off of him so he can zip up. I can almost hear the scratch of Velcro detaching, as I pull my arm off. However, he thinks I’m making a move and begins to nuzzle my neck, make those throaty noises as he kisses me.

“Mmm…What are you doing?”
-“I saw you reaching for it.”
“Uh, no.”
-“You’re so easy.”

He is tugging at my belt, my jeans. Easy. Easy. Once the clothes are off & ditched bedside, my body is a white canvas… Only I’m not sure what he wants to paint me as.

“Did you just call me easy?”
-“You’ve said it yourself. You’re a whore.”
“A whore?”
-“It’s not a big deal. So you’re a whore. Well, so’m I.”

For some reason, I am both completely humiliated and turned on more than I’ve ever been turned on in my life. He bites me a couple times with his too-perfect, probably once-upon-a-time brace-ridden teeth… At one point, he grips me roughly by the hair, fingers wrapped up in it, wearing brass knuckles made out of my scarlet hair…he turns my head so he can kiss my neck, like I’m some kind of posable baby doll. But he retreats after showing aggression each time…hermit crabs away from me, back to some hallowed ground within himself. Safe from my rocky shored desires. Still, it’s the first time during sex that I have felt myself actually getting close to something big & explosive. Bottle rocket. Roman candle. Catherine wheel.

Never been this close to fireworks–before him…

Later we go out & he drinks too much. I drink just as much but my body recognizes what I’m doing, shrugs at the alcohol. He buys a bottle of wine for me & we go back to the hotel & drink wine out of inappropriately large glasses he finds in the kitchen of our suite. We get sucked into Gilda on PBS, loving the darkness of the dialogue… the fuck-you looks she gives Johnny as she tortures him by dancing with other men. J. is drawn to Rita Hayworth. I tell him she had a tragic life, which he researches, as we watch the movie. He reads what I already knew—that her father sexually abused her from a young age. As a grown woman she struggles with relationships…and later is quoted as saying, “Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me.” He reads to me about how she struggled with an inferiority complex, a constant magnet pull to mean men and her own destruction through alcoholism… He poses a question, “Do you think that is because of… you know? I wonder how many women become alcoholics because of that kind of thing…just destroyed by it, ya know?” In the dark, I swallow a large mouthful of wine to keep from laughing at his disconnect. The way he puts it: it’s like there are those women & then there’s me. But I AM one of those women. He doesn’t even know he’s in bed with a live grenade…that my uncle pulled the pin years ago…and the fragments embed themselves in anyone who gets close enough to me to care every time I self-destruct.

Before I can even begin to answer what I truly think about the question he asked, he passes out….the big drunk spoon, breath sour with wine. I lie awake…pinned under his arm…thinking.

*You called me easy. You called me a whore.

And I hate that I loved it.*

Later, when I’m scared and I am still pinned under his arm, I think about how shrapnel and fireworks really aren’t so different after all. Isn’t shrapnel really just a firework made out of pain, a beautiful & terrible light show of agony, blooming within our bodies?

Written in 2019