She takes a deep breath.

Because she’s going to have a “proper conversation” with him on Monday.

His words. Mingling with hers.

And the scheduling of this event sent a shiny cocktail fork careening into her beautiful adult female wiring.

Which is just her way of saying she’s grossly unprepared.

Thus the deep breath.

Because breathing seems very ordinary and normal and like it might be a good place to start. Or at least like it can’t screw things up too very badly.

She takes a furtive look around. What else?

Notices her speakers but resists the urge.

That thrash dancing she does to heavy bass beats?

That is secretly her just losing her shit.

Some more.

She nods to herself.

A good option in a different situation.

An effective strategy in the great battle to exhaust her physical body so completely that she paralyzes her emotional self.

But not what she is going for at the moment.

At the moment, rather, she is being faced with the odd request to compile her lopsided thoughts. By Monday. For him.

She’s known him a long time now, and her thoughts have never been much of a topic because…

She’s not really sure why.

She just hasn’t taken much stock of herself as a human being in a human relationship with him in that way.

Other aspects of their synergy having taken priority.

Early on, she remembers his being upset with her about something–she can’t recall what–and her playfully suggesting he take it out on her in the bedroom.

And that seems to have pretty blissfully filled the last six or nine months.

And while a certain argument could be made for how well they’ve grown to know each other in that time, she supposes an argument could also be made for how little they know each other, too.

Well, in fact, that argument was made.

It’s an interesting dichotomy. One they are ostensibly going to broach.

She takes another deep breath. Looks involuntarily at the speakers again. Pulls her hair to the side to stop herself from doing that.

The very worst possibility is that they are not going to like each other at all.

Which, considering the sex, is going to be, yes, devastating, and she would almost rather not take the risk.

But he seems to have crossed this threshold of wanting to get to know her, and as much as she’d like to sit by and say, “There’s nothing to get!” that doesn’t seem to fly anymore.

She plops herself down in a purple kitchen chair and picks up a pencil, writes down the title:

Thoughts I Have

Then she twists the cocktail fork a bit in order to smell her own burning flesh.

Come Monday, she is really so screwed.

Deep breath. The kind where her cheeks puff out when she lets it go.

1.)

She looks down at her pencil, admires how sharp it is. Considers, for the briefest moment, its viability as a weapon. Then slips off her left combat boot and scrunches up her face to write.

1.) I’m not that hot on your putting the pillow over my face when we have sex. Your hands around my neck are good–I love your warm hands on my neck–but the pillow actually does not suffocate me at all. I just sit there beneath it, knowing that you think I can’t breathe, but actually breathing just fine. And it feels strange, hanging out there, underneath that pillow.

She reads what she’s written. Chews on the missing eraser. Looks up and to the left.

Recall.

Then adds,

Also? I think you do that because you get freaked out about my looking at you. And I get a little freaked out by that too. Because what we’re doing together is so ridiculously intimate that it would sometimes be easier if the other person weren’t there, right? 

She stops writing, as she has the feeling they’ve already discussed this.

But then realizes that no, she’s never discussed anything with him, so they wouldn’t have done.

“I must have just thought it to myself,” she muses.

Which actually feels kind of good, knowing that his participation was not required for the evolution of this thought. That she experienced it all by herself. That, despite finding him highly intelligent, she never even sought his validation on it.

2.) Relationships. I’m not good at them. The reason I’m not good at them is because I don’t like getting sucked up inside of men’s heads as if by a shop vac.

She rereads the lines. Notices there’s a questionable double negative happening there.

“Just say it in the positive,” she tells herself. “You can do this. Just be real.”

2.) Relationships. I’m not good at them. The reason I’m not good at them is because I don’t like getting sucked up inside of men’s heads as if by a shop vac. I like being inside my own head.

She looks at number two, and realizes that two says it all. Everything that she ever needed anyone in the world to know about her. Everything she ever needed to know about herself. Her whole life’s experience, compiled in silly number two, with the aforementioned shop vac.

She smiles. Doesn’t breathe at all.