I have brought it to this point. This love point, where she is experiencing that thing that the commoners think they’ve achieved, like a pinnacle, the place where now they begin to contemplate the possibility of ever-higher peaks, partnership for all of eternity. Good for them.
For me, this is the beginning of the end. What I must do now is prepare everything for the break-up, so as to ensure a more beautiful, a more meaningful, a more complete work of art.
But meanwhile, I am not so unlike a man – if anything I am so much more so than most – that I cannot enjoy the spoils of this surrender. There is a cooing fruitbasket of earthly delights lying across my lap holding a basin of spirits to my lips, fanning me with humid, airey affection.
Yes, please. And I feel the fire in my belly and this time, like an AA having a drink for New Years, like a vegetarian dutifully doing turkey on Thanksgiving, like smoking because some devastation justifies the peace of a poisoned inhalation, I do not push it away.
“Look, I’ll do it for you,” I say, putting my hand around the thick, grooved bottleneck and she reaches upwards and over, running her own along my cheek like butter melding into bristle.
Yes, please. This is fun. Really. Even those gnawed little fingertips look like a bowlful of cherries tonight. Just for tonight.
“I’ve been waiting for tonight,” I allow myself to tell her.
“Really?” she coos. “I thought you were hinting at wanting this.” She looks so pleased with herself, the flushed security in the temporary surety that her charms have gotten her what she wanted. “I feel like we’re a J.Lo song right now,” she giggles, trilling Waiting for tonight, oh, oh, oh, oh in a little falsetto.
It’s ok to add a smear of cheesy hot pink to the canvas, just now. Black slashes will layer and obscure it soon enough.
It’s a process.
And there’s nothing more fulfilling in intelligent conversation than a double-meaning that your victim can recall later, in stupefied wonder and reluctant admiration at your own structured, sculpting genius.
Women don’t want to admit it but they want a half-devil. Oh Jolene, you’re welcome, Jolene. You will remember this forever, your own drama, your own romantic epic fall from grace that most can only watch or imagine, sitting snug and monotonous in a broken-springs couch behind a screen of cowardly voyeurism.
You deserve so much more, so much more my adventurous, dumpster-flipping, nail-biting sweet Joleen, so much more and that is why I’m taking the time to give this to you.
Do you know how fucking
cool you’re gonna be after this?