I didn't intend on writing so much more, but it's helped me immensely to focus on this, and to have something else to look forward to instead of my grief for my friend. Thank you for reading.
Part 4
Despite my lingering lustiness, I fell back asleep after Damian's late night phone call. I sleep in until 8:00 am, then find myself trying to patiently wait to see if he will contact me. We didn't exactly say we'd see each other today, and he did just see me yesterday. Normally, I would not expect a man to see me again after we'd just seen each other, or just spent the night together. But everything about this burgeoning relationship did not start normally. It started off as my experiment, then it became a compulsion, and then it became...this.
I know this is reciprocal now; I know that Damian wants me. The flowers say he wants me to know that he wants me. I like him, he likes me. Yet, I feel uneasy. A different uneasiness than the one I had before he came to my apartment that first night. I feel hungry for him, and then I feel this unsteadiness that doesn't know how to contain the hunger. Worried that my hunger is all-consuming, that it's consuming for the sake of consuming. Because I have been hungry for a long time. A hunger that didn't know I was starving until it tasted something that I'd been missing all these years.
My brain wants this to be practical and straightforward; the experiment. But my heart knows I've created trouble. I've created variables upon variables. The variable that cries when he leaves my apartment. The variable that feels a panic to consider what would happen if he hopped on his motorcycle and never came back, if he decided he didn't want me.
I water my flowers and try to talk myself through my anxiety. He'll text me, or he'll call. I know it because I know it in my heart. The irony that my logic must be supported by the least reliable data that is my emotional evidence.
My patience, and my logic, runs out at exactly 12:06 pm. I will text him a simple good morning. I debate the cloying and overused device of an emoji. Smiley faces are too cute, the winking face is too...obvious. I settle on the little white chef's hat.
Good morning + chef's hat.
12:08 pm he replies:
Good morning + pancake emoji. Are you hungry?
I smile so much my face hurts.
YES ;)
He shows up within the hour. The sun is shining brightly today, it feels like it might get above 60 degrees for a change. My lusty eagerness is changing its mind; it's thinking about doing something outside instead, something we can do together.
When he shows up on his shiny bike, I'm waiting outside sitting on the steps to my building. I'm wearing white capri leggings and a light gray tank top, covered with an unbuttoned long sleeved blouse in pale yellow. I've braided my straight, dark hair into one long plait to contain it in the wind. I wait till he's taken off his helmet, watch the confident sweep of his hand through his hair, and give him my most innocent smile.
"Can we go for a ride?"
He's just grinning at me as he extends a hand out, pulling me towards him. A quick but scorching kiss.
"I thought you were hungry?" he asks.
"I am," I answer, keeping my lips close to his. "But I can wait to eat. If you can?"
His eyes narrow, a twinkling mischief in his clear blue. "My appetite can wait, if you can wait for me to feed you something proper?"
Every word has another meaning so filthy that I hope my white leggings will not show how he affected me. I nod my head, biting my lip.
"I'll eat whatever you give me."
He squeezes me into him, a threatening fury as we kiss. I giggle as he groans with exaggeration, as if I am making him crazy. I love doing this so much, I love how he teases me and I get to tease back. I love how he stares at me, visually undressing me, but also with this sort of awe. And I feel the clutch in my chest again. But I try to ignore it, I try not to let it ruin my fun.
We make a trip to a store just south of downtown because he insists that I need my own helmet, which I do because his sleek black helmet is too big for me. The salesperson is a woman covered in tattoos, and he greets her in another language. She's older than me, but pretty in a hardened way with steely eyes that assess me skeptically. I smile at her and wonder how she knows Damian, if she was ever possibly a customer of his, and immediately try to push the nauseating thought out of my mind.
I pick out a smaller helmet in a shimmering midnight blue because it reminds of his dark blue shirt that he wore on the night he first kissed me. He insists on paying for the helmet which is just shy of $200 dollars. I try to offer to split the cost, but he won't hear of it. The saleswoman cracks a joke about him taking money from women, and Damian laughs heartily, but it makes me angry. She knows what he does. I don't like it and feel insanely jealous. A type of jealousy I've never felt before, the kind where you want to yank a woman's hair out by the roots and scratch her face up with your fingernails.