After the first time we went to bed, that day Athena slapped me, we continued to email each other. I've read some of these emails again, recently; it would be impossible to find any mention to our first meeting if I didn't know its exact date. “By the way, that story we discussed today was the best ever. Are there more chapters?” I wrote, after our second time. How could I write such a terrible phrase? Be so unoriginal, so crude? Yet she didn't seem to mind. “Maybe, but they haven't been written yet.” Corny as it may be, it was true; everything was yet to be written, and all writers know that the book they want to write now is better than anything they have ever written. It's putting it down into words that ruins it.
Just like life.
We arranged to meet again—a new restaurant, some place she suggested. I never kept logs of our chats, and I don't remember it anymore. I'd never been there before, and we never went back. It was close to The Hotel, however.
“The Hotel” was where we met at first—that's how we called it, just “The Hotel.” It was an old place, decayed enough to rent rooms for a couple hours, no questions asked or even glances at us, unlike the one we spent our first afternoon together. I had seen it before, often passing in front of it. Any big city has places like that.
I met Athena at the bar of Antonio's, that second time, and we had a drink. The conversation was strange, difficult, that day. “Let's go,” I said, leaving money over the counter—like in the movies, yes; waiting for the bill would have destroyed my sudden resolution. She didn't say yes or no, just following me.
A few blocks later we were at The Hotel. I used another name—not Marquis, like before at the first hotel, and not my real name. Two minutes later we were taking each other's clothes, this time slowly and looking straight into each others' eyes. Athena's eyes were of a soft tone of hazelnut, small but intense, with short eyelashes. She squinted them when she orgasmed.
The memory of that afternoon is clear in my mind. We were in no hurry; it was not the first time, there were no more excuses. We couldn't pretend that we were just out of ourselves, doing a one-time thing that we could ignore later, hiding it together with the other skeletons we had. We knew it was not the last time, we knew that we had given out to that lust, or desire, or the search for something out of ordinary had won, that we'd be seeing each other again and again. That we shared our deepest secret with each other.
It was slow, deliberate. We made no effort to prove our skills at sex; foreplay, as I remember, consisted of hands caressing bodies and seeking private parts while we kissed. It may lasted a long time—I remember it as such. But I'm a man, she may well have thought that I was too impatient. If I learned one thing in life, it is that people are seldom thinking the same thing; even lovers or siblings.
Sometimes I think about it. On rainy Sundays, for example, locked inside, watching the water falling and transforming one less day of my life into boredom and loneliness. I sit in front of the large window, a hot cup in my hands, and I think of all the people I've been close to. I wonder if they felt like I did, and I am almost sure that they didn't. I am sure that Clara didn't like me—my first love, breaking my heart so easily. I am sure that Amanda loved me—poor girl, I must have hurt her feelings so much. Friends, lovers, family. How many times I must have hurt their feelings with what I thought were harmless phrases, simple gestures, perhaps just ignoring their dreams and desires and not doing what they wanted, not saying the words they wanted to hear from me the most. Athena, who were you? Sometimes—specially in those cold days when you lay your body over mine, your face hiding in my neck, the covers protecting us from the weather, and we stayed like that in silence for a long time—I wondered if you ever were in love with me. I wondered what would you say if I asked you to never leave, to just stay with me and never go back to your like. Once or twice I got so close to actually asking it that I opened my mouth, my tongue articulating the first word, before I decided against it, because I wasn't sure if I loved you. Then, some other days, when you were happy and playful, jumping over the bed naked to play with me, tickling my feet, laughing, all your teeth showing, I almost felt a pang and thought that I was not more than a joyful ride in your life, a way to spend empty afternoons and to get distracted from the routine that you seemed not to care much for. When, in the end... ah, I shall keep the end for the ending. Before that, there is still much to tell. Before that, there was a no.
“Can you spend a night with me?” I asked her once.
“A night?”
“Yes, a night.”
“No,” she answered. That `no' made me sad, like a little child that asks their parents if he can ride the carousel.
But so much happened before I asked her that question. I can't keep my focus. Athena told me once that I was a lousy storyteller.
“Don't take this wrong,” she said, her hands doing something to her legs, half a caress, half a scratch. I adored when she was so much oblivious to her nakedness that she behaved as if she were alone and dressed. “But I don't think you could write a long story linearly.”
“I could. I just don't like to write linearly.”
“You can't,” she grinned. “You're like an odd fiddler that can play some Paganini pieces but can't play scales. Now, don't be like that.” She pulled me to her, but I was a bit reluctant. “Look,” she said after seeing my reluctance. “I'll bet you a long, great blow job, playing with your come with my tongue and swallowing. Now, forget it and come here.”
I started writing a linear story when I arrived home that day, but it never went beyond page ten.
We got to know each other far too well.
But there's much more to that subject. After I gave up I told her so.
“My stories are linear,” I argued. “Just not in time. They are a build-up, a sequence of sometimes apparently uncorrelated facts that slowly form a picture. They have to be presented in a certain order, not to be to random or too obvious.”
“That's an excuse,” she said. “It's like an abstract painter that can't draw. He's a liar, not an artist. If you take Picasso, he could draw very well. He could have been not a cubist, but... well, he did a lot of things early in his career before verging into cubism. It makes sense. He makes a choice, not for what he is able to do, but for what he thinks is more interesting and important.”
“I know that, but it's not that straightforward. Maybe I can't write 300 pages of a linear story, but maybe I can't write a detective story either. Writers don't write everything.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“So I'll make a bet,” I said. “Write a dark, terror story. Make it at least 60 pages long.”
“No. I don't like those stories.”
The conversation didn't go much farther, both of us having proved our points. No winner was a common situation for us.
Our conversations were always the most important thing happening between us. Sometimes we didn't even get our clothes off, anxious that we were to talk about some subject that was causing long emails. We left happy and satisfied, not even noticing that we had barely touched each other. Athena could also appear with a new question, seemingly out of the blue—but I always wondered if she hadn't been pondering on it for days, throwing it to me like a ragged ball thrown to a dog.
“Who's the pervert?” Athena asked me once. “The writer or the reader?”
“Both,” I replied. “Obviously.”
“But who's the biggest?” she asked.
It was a dark afternoon. It must have been late fall, early winter, the sky heavy and grey. It was just one in the afternoon and the bedroom was eerily dark. She was sitting against the headboard, my head lying on her lap, her head so intense, foreshortened by my point of view. I remember her breasts, so free and natural, so feminine, yet not overtly sensual.
“The writer,” Athena continued, “would be the biggest, don't you think? After all, he's the creator, his mind gave birth to the tits and cocks and cunts and what they did to each other. And yet... do you remember our talks about stories writing themselves, characters that we hated and yet couldn't change because they just were like that? Am I a murderer for writing a detective novel? Did writing about the Crusades made me a Templar Knight? No, no. Then writers of sex stories don't have to be perverts. I wrote a rape scene that disgusted me so much... but then, who knows how many readers may have read it and found it arousing? They are the perverts, not me. They, jerking off while reading how that poor girl was held down and fucked by three men. They are perverts, Marquis, the big perverts. Our audience, not us. We are, at worst, like a metal company forging guns; the readers are the ones who buy them and use them for killing, for hunting, or just put it on the back of the closet because they are actually afraid of guns.”
And we were not the perverts, Athena and I, even if we met in secret, locking ourselves in an empty bedroom to have sex and talk. Does it make any sense at all? We were there, just the two of us, leaving the world to be in peace for half an afternoon. The sex was pure, inconsequential; not a statement of free love, not a escape from bad or unattractive lovers, not an outlet for our hidden desires. It was just something that felt good, what we felt to be a harmless game that was not played to win, but to pass time. A very big version of tic-tac-toe—or a small version of life. The problem wasn't our little affair, but everything else.
“We, Marquis, are pure enough to let our wishes and desires, and our fantasies and ghosts, escape to the paper; we are brave and vain and stupid enough to let them be read by others. We're dumb idiots who seek the ivory tower of a white sheet to be the idealists that we can't be in our every day life.” She paused, her gaze lost far away. A few seconds later, she turned her head towards me. “Just fuck me again, will you?” she sad, sitting over me and riding me for her life, her right hand playing strongly with her clitoris, seeking the orgasm that hid life away for that split second.
“Who did you want to fuck but never could?” she asked me one day. We were playing hand games on each other's bodies. I remember, who knows why, that I was giving a lot of attention to the skin around her pussy, but not to the actual place.
“Who?”
“Yes. You're not telling me you fucked all the women you ever desired.”
“No.”
“Then, tell me,” she said, girlishly, her hand doing a a quick jerk to my dick.
“The first grade teacher of my school.”
She stopped, and her voice was up one octave.
“You wanted to fuck your first grade teacher?”
“No, not my first grade teacher. I was what, thirteen, fourteen. I think she must have been nineteen, twenty, she taught at the first grade. She was fuel to my dreams.”
“Did you ever talk to her?” Athena asked me.
“No,” I answered, closing my eyes and thinking about her. “I don't know if I can actually remember her face, not very well, at least. It's been ages since I last thought of her. Funny she was the first one to pop into my head when you asked me. Okay, your turn now.”
“Was she blond?”
“No, she was... Her hair was light, but not blond. Come on, your turn.”
“Did you jack off to her?”
“Yeah, I did. What do you think thirteen year old boys do?”
“Gross!”
“Now you're behaving like a thirteen year old girl. Why, you didn't jack off?”
“No,” she said.
“No way.”
“No, I didn't. I thought it was dirty. Wrong, somehow. I only started later. You know, boys do it a lot. Girls, they do, but not so much.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don't know, they just think it's dirty, or whatever. Women don't do that as much as men, you know it.”
“Odd. Anyway, who'd you like to fuck?”
“Lord Byron.”
“What?” I asked, startled.
“Lord Byron!” she answered again.
“The poet?”
“Yeah.”
“Why him?”
“I'm not sure. His verses, his life... I think he must have been a hell of a lover.”
“So, no film stars in you dreams?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, thinking for a moment. “Why? You can see them whenever you want, you can watch them pretend to fuck on the silver screen, larger than life, perfect lighting, make-up, everything retouched by computers. They're dolls. Yes, they are dolls. Dolls, to me, aren't sexy. I've grown up.”
Sometimes I wished I could enter her mind and experience it first hand. Then I dreaded it.
She asked me about my work once.
“You don't like it.”
“Most people hate their jobs. It says a lot about our society, I guess, that we just go on doing them.”
“Why, then? It's not like you didn't have a choice. Was it?”
“Well... life happened. Plans became dreams, dreams were dismissed as impossible, and the daily mediocrity caught up with me.” It did. Life just keeps going, relentless, while we try to build our little castles of cards. “Do you know what beats you?”
“What?” She asked.
“When you see that there are people younger than you, trying to get your job, your position. You're not the plankton anymore, you're food for someone younger, faster, less tired than yourself.”
“Just like you were.”
“Yes, just like you were. Working is dying, a slow and often painful death; we spend most of our lives doing it, and... it's just worthless. Nothing matters. And everybody does it.
“I don't know why,” I continued, “but I just now remembered the other day, when I was eating at the restaurant with my friend, and I saw this woman arriving and sitting on her table, when we were half way through the meal, and I thought, `she's sad.' But you know me, Tina, I like to pretend that I read minds, that I'm a deep knower of human soul, and I thought I was just guessing, seeing what was not there. She sat right in my field of view, eating alone, and her eyes got redder and redder as time passed. If I were alone I think I'd have gone to talk to her; tell her that, if someone had made her cry, she was worth much more than that person and thus should not be sad; or, if she was sad because something bad had happened, well, life sucks sometimes, it's as difficult as hell and we have to go on, enjoying the most simple things, drawing a smile from a phrase uttered by a stranger or from the sight of a happy child playing, still ignorant of the bad things to come and the struggle of everyday. I'd have told her that, if she wanted to talk to somebody, I was there, even though I was a stranger and it is not wise to talk to strangers. And that, above all, she should not let those tears ruin her day, and should always remember that getting a simple smile from her would make the day of somebody like me.
“But my friend could not see her from where he was sitting and was oblivious to all that, and I did not stand up or talked to her, even when she stood up and, sniffing and drying her red eyes with the back of her hand, walked back to life and to whatever was hurting her. She left, I stayed. Work is in someway like that. You walk in, see someone shitty and needing your help, and you just keep eating your meal.”
“Life is like that too,” Athena concluded.
It amazes me to some degree that music has mattered so little in our relationship. As much as I can remember, there was not a single time when music was present to one of our meetings. I find that strange, now, specially because it was many times a subjects of our conversations. Athena told me she used to play the piano when she was a kid—I never played anything in my life—but we both shared similar tastes for music. Perhaps this is the reason: we didn't have to play the music we liked for each other to know it, understand it; we didn't have to point out why our favorite bands were good.
More than just the music, this happened to everything. We never turned on the television in the Hotel; we never brought magazines or books, we never even gave books to each other. We never shared anything in real life besides our bodies and a few meals which, if remarkable, were not for the food, but for the talking.
“Why do you write?” she asked me once.
“I like it.”
“No, I want the full answer.” Some days Athena was deeper. She was looking for something more than a fuck, more than just the harmless conversation that, on other days, she seemed to welcome so much, delicately changing the subject when it tended to more intellectual subjects.
“What full answer?”
“There's a reason. People don't do things for no reason.”
“Actually, my pretty, they do.”
She cocked her head, the way she did when she gave up a point that she didn't care for. “Not writing, though. People don't write for no reason.”
“It gives me pleasure. I like to create worlds, to make characters, to build situations. Who knows, maybe it's the child in me.”
“Isn't it an escape?”
“Yes, maybe, as well. But I don't use it to escape reality. Do you?”
She was pensive for a few moments.
“Yes, I do.” Her gaze, lost away, hinted the thoughts she was having, too shy to be said out loud. “Kinda hard not to, don't you think? When you are writing, being the character, thinking about that situation, how can you keep yourself away? It is a escape.”
“Is it a escape to tell a story that you lived? Or that someone else told you? The movie you watched last night?”
She considered my words.
“Is that what writing is to you? A telling?”
“Yes.”
She grinned, her eyes still lost in the infinite.
“It must be boring to death.”
Writing was a constant topic of conversation for us. I remember another of these conversations.
“Do you occasionally have blocks?”
“Not quite,” I answered. “I sometimes don't want to write, which is different. Do you?”
“Yes. I sometimes want to write, but I end up just reading things I have wrote, reviewing them, although I hardly ever fix anything. I sometimes spend hours reading my old stories. Sometimes reading the unfinished ones, trying to understand what I was writing, remembering why I decided to write them.”
“Do you take much of what you write from your life?”
“Yeah, I always have gang bangs in my place with my husband.”
“Awesome. You should invite me, one of these days.”
“You moron,” she said.
“But I don't mean that. Not the sex. The stories.”
“No.”
“Really?” I asked.
“I don't think so, do you?”
I thought for a moment.
“Yes, I think I do. Most of what I write comes, in one way or another, from my life. I read somewhere that all writers are autobiographers; it's something like that. How can you write something that has no relation with you?”
“Like mystery novels?”
“Even them. So you're not a detective or a serial killer, yet the way you perceive them is imprinted in your work. How your main character is shaped. Haven't you noticed how hard it is to make your main character flawed, and not like yourself?”
“I see what you mean”, Athena said. “Yet... I don't know. Do you write your fantasies? Or do you write things that you wouldn't ever do?”
“Both,” I replied. “or neither. I think I write the most about what interests me.”
“You know, almost all sex writers write about their fantasies.”
“I know, we're exceptions” I said. “It must be hard to jack off while typing. Don't you think?”
But Athena only smiled, and never answered me.
I've kept her emails. All of them. They're there, hidden in some magnetic way in my computer, hidden from the world. I sometimes think that I should delete them, but I can't. Would I behave the same if they were handwritten letters, stored in yellowing sheets that scream their age and the times long gone? Would I hide them in a shoe box, deep in the darkest closet of my house? Or perhaps even get a safe deposit box? I almost printed all those emails once, to store them in the vaults of a bank. Maybe the drawer above would contain a gun, the one below a diamond necklace, perhaps besides another set of letters whose owner could not bear the thought of losing them for ever.
I sometimes read them. I pick one at random. Sometimes they are so dumb, little jokes and puns, comments of comments of comments, the kind of thing that emails make so easy to write. Letters must have been so more dangerous and deep, without emoticons and quick replies; the paper waiting for days and not allowing a quick cut and paste, or erasing thoughts that easily. Thoughts coming in full, long paragraphs that had make sense together.
I don't like to read them. Yes, I feel good for a moment, I smile, I laugh, I'm surprised by things she said I had long forgotten about, I'm surprised by things I said, either for their sheer stupidity or by their sudden smartness. As I read them, however, I remember that they are skeletons, dead, lying there only because I could not find courage to press a little button. I remember all that has happened, and it makes me blue, sad, lonely.
Funny world, this one we live in these days. Our biggest decisions are whether to push a little button or not.
More often than not, we don't.
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Copyright Antheros (c) 2008. All rights to this story are reserved.