“Isn’t it strange? I don’t even know you,” she says.

This time they’re in his kitchen. It’s late now but they’ve been occupying the room for hours, since she went in to drink water straight from the faucet and he followed and a song came on that moved her and she raised her arms high and let him circle her, always with those bent knees that allow him to be pushing his mid-section against her. And she danced on funny tiptoes away from him, leading him across the room by his hard cock, laughing. Pushing gracefully off the walls, and back-bending over counters and pausing in dramatic stop-motion poses. Until eventually the song ended and she turned her back to him and swept her arms down to the floor, hanging loosely, rag-doll style, with her tush thrust invitingly upward. And he lifted her dress (This girl! Does she not even own panties, then?) and entered her like that.

She was scarcely aware of pleasure, so invested in the choreography of her body was she by then.

In due time, they separated.

She looked at the clock above the oven. Would it be too early to leave acceptably?

She was tired, but even more had grown wan on their fading connection.

(What remains alive for her is the the creative space they so naturally occupy together. Not so the incessant talking.)

He left the room to change the music.

(It’s very much his domain; he’s good at it. Also a powerful lover.)

She pulled some pillows in from the living room couch and created a small makeshift bed on the kitchen floor, fell quickly asleep.

Upon his return, he stretched his naked Roman statue body out long next to her on the bare linoleum and stroked her hair, waking her.

“Isn’t it strange? I don’t even know you,” she says, so very sleepy, running an absent finger along his collarbone.

“That’s the third time you’ve said that,” he responds testily, exasperated by her but as yet unwilling to admit it.

Definitively, he doesn’t like the ways she searches out conflict where he doesn’t want there to be any.

“But I don’t!” she insists, adamant on this point.

She sees in him someone who could have been something to her, who still might be something to her, though the possibility grows continually more remote.

It’s in her unintentional distancing of herself that their inevitable ending looms. She can’t understand why she does that, why she can’t impede its momentum.

In moments it makes her shaky and forlorn; in others unnecessarily cruel.

But for tonight she just appreciates his face, his body. Those high cheekbones, the little lion’s curve of his nostrils.

He gets up off the floor to change the music, yet again, dissatisfied with his choice, or what he believes is her reaction to it.

Playing DJ is good for him, gives him a sense of confidence, control, allows him to narrate the scene.

It’s interesting, the places people locate themselves.

“Will you bring me my dress?” she requests, when he stands. “I should leave soon.”

He finds her dress easily, on the floor in the space where he slid it over her spine and let it fall. He walks out of the room with it, up the stairs to his bedroom, buries it deep in his middle drawer, washes her strange savage smell from his loins, and returns.

She’s fallen asleep like that again, naked, on his kitchen floor. Hips and hair and the softest skin he’s ever felt and a sudden overcoming urge to crack her stupid skull in half.

“Oh darling,” he says, instead. “You’re tired. Come up to bed.”

She sits up and stretches, luxuriating in their mutual appreciation of her long torso.

It’s difficult to determine which of these two is the bigger narcissist.

“Probably him,” she guesses.

Simply because he continually floods her with his oratory of self, but then shuts her mouth with kisses when it’s her turn to speak.

She’s long since stopped listening to stories that were at first engaging and funny, distracted now by her own fierce but ever-muted desire to be heard.

She stands and puts on his dress shirt, looks in the entryway mirror and appreciates the crescent moon of her breasts revealed in the negative space.

He’s waiting for her on the landing that leads up to his bedroom. But she returns to the kitchen and pulls on his pants.

“What are you doing?” he asks, bounding down the stairs towards her.

She has one leg in his pants when he grabs them by their waistline and ridiculously puts one of his own feet in the opposite pant leg, almost knocking her over.

Again with their odd creativity, despite its now having taken on a strangely aggressive tone.

They’re so close to being right for each other, in these moments.

She giggles wildly at their counter-actions, at the way they’re now both rapidly struggling to inhabit the same pair of pants.

It’s absurd and hilarious, some kind of dysfunctional Marx Brothers routine.

“Stop!” she squeals, pushing him out of the pants but in turn falling over herself. Before he can rebound, she quickly rolls over onto her back and slips a second foot into the pants. But within seconds he is standing over her, pulling the pants free of her body by their cuffs. She stretches her legs wide and ineffectually tries to keep them on by friction alone, he winning the battle.

“Come to bed,” he commands, as he heads upstairs, pants draped over his arm.

“In a minute,” she reassures him.

Wearing just his dress shirt, she stands on the back balcony that leads across an endless field of tall grass. She imagines herself running wild through it, feeling the cool breeze arc across her bare skin. She imagines the thrill of his chasing her, breathless, and taking her down.

~