Christopher Conlon - Savaging the Dark

But it’s not over, not really. I see him every day, after all, in class. I call on him and help him and grade his work. Our eyes meet, filled with things that can’t be spoken. Every day at lunchtime Connor reads with Kylie outside and laughs with her and on Saturdays he visits her with her mom present—Kylie tells me this—but he knows, I know he knows, that there’s an emptiness to it, a childishness. He can’t get from her what he gets from me. And so I’m not really that surprised when, a few weeks later, Connor sheepishly approaches me at my desk when the other students have stepped out and asks quietly, “Mona, could we go to a motel later?”

“I thought you wanted to end it, Connor. That’s what you told me.”

“I know, I—but I didn’t mean forever.”

“I thought you did.”

“I just meant—I don’t want to do it so much anymore. So often.”

“ Is that what you meant, Connor?”

He stands nervously, hands in his pockets, moving restlessly from foot to foot. I can see the bulge in his jeans. “Please, Mona?”

I study him, feel the power in the relationship surging back to me. “Sure, Connor. We can go.”

And for an hour or two it’s as it was, reanimated, rekindled, we’re wild with each other in bed, laughing and squealing and tickling each other and the bed banging against the wall and making love again and again. I’m amazed anew at his resilience, his incredible physical intensity. I can tell from his eyes, wide, rolling back in his head as he comes, that he’s amazed with me, with what we do, a universe away from the milk and cookies and cartoons he shares with Kylie McCloud. For this one time there’s no friction, no disappointment, no boredom, there’s just Connor and me as we once were, ravished, ravishing, passionate, loving, in love.

And yet the next day he’s short with me, seemingly annoyed, he doesn’t make eye contact, he spends all his time with Kylie and ignores me completely in class except when I actually call on him. Even then he looks away, says, “I don’t know, Ms. Straw, I forgot to study,” and returns to his silence. For days he acts as if I’m his worst teacher, as if he can’t stand my class and is just going through the motions of reading and writing because he has to. I have to repeatedly shush him from talking to Kylie. But I sense that some of this is a performance on Connor’s part. I’ve never had trouble with him in class, not even when he became friends with Kylie. He’s a polite, well-mannered boy. He knows how to behave in my class. He’s doing it on purpose, I realize. He’s showing me how much she means to him, how little I do.

But after what happened the other day I know it won’t last, and it doesn’t. A week or two later he approaches me again, sheepish expression on his face, bulge in his pants.

“Can we, Mona?”

I frown. “You haven’t been very nice to me, Connor.”

“I’m sorry. But can we?”

The truth is that I can’t resist him any more than he can me, and he knows it. But I say, “Connor, I’m not a service station, you know. To just be there whenever you need a fill up. I’m a person. I have feelings.”

“I said I was sorry. Can we?”

And of course we do. But this time I know what he meant before, about feeling dirty. I’ve never felt that way with Connor, but this time I do. He hardly talks, just starts taking off his clothes the second the motel room door is shut, strokes his erection. “C’mon, Mona, hurry up,” he says, scowling at me. I obediently take off my things. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t say Wow or Oh my God or tell me how beautiful I am.

Instead he says: “I want you to suck my dick.”

I flush with embarrassment. “Connor!”

“Please,” he adds, his tone unmistakably sarcastic.

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what? I said please.”

“Don’t use words like that. That kind of language.”

“You mean ‘suck my dick’?”

“Yes.”

He scoffs. “You’ve done it before. Lots of times.”

“Connor—that’s not how to talk about that stuff. With your girlfriend. Your lover. It’s disrespectful.”

“What do you know about respect?”

This feels wrong, terribly wrong, the two of us standing in this room that smells of roach spray looking at each other’s nakedness and arguing. I find myself sitting down, crossing my legs, folding my arms over my breasts. But I don’t move to put my clothes on.

“Connor,” I say, holding my voice as steady as I can, “you have to be nice to someone who’s nice to you. Who makes you feel good. You shouldn’t make her feel bad.”

“Do you have feelings, Mona?”

“I—what does that mean?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I just want you to suck my dick. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

“If you want me to do that then you need to be nice to me.”

“I think I’m pretty nice. I haven’t told the principal or my dad yet. I haven’t called the police.”

“What do you mean, ‘yet’?”

He shrugs again.

“Connor, we’ve talked about all this before. You ended our relationship and then you started it up again. I didn’t, you did. You love me, even if you don’t want to admit it.”

“So?”

“So would you talk to Kylie this way? Would you demand something instead of asking politely for it…?”

“I wouldn’t ask her for this.”

“Not this. Just something. Would you demand that she kiss you on the cheek at the same time you told her that she didn’t have feelings and wasn’t respectful and threatened to call the police on her?”

“I didn’t threaten.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I just want you to suck on it, that’s all.”

He stands there, eyes cold. Finally I unfold my arms, my legs, I slink to my knees on the dirty carpet. He doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t smooth my hair, doesn’t reach down to stroke my cheek, doesn’t say how good it feels. He just stands there with his hands on his hips looking— glaring —down at me. I notice the little blonde pubic hairs starting to sprout from his skin. After a while he comes quietly, dispassionately. I fight back revulsion, the sudden impulse to spit it all out on the motel room carpet. I swallow. It makes my throat dry. I want a glass of water but I just stay there on my knees, not meeting Connor’s awful look, embarrassed, humiliated for the first time, the very first time with him. Then he delivers the hammer blow.

He says, “You’re a slut.”

He turns and begins putting on his clothes again. I don’t move, don’t breathe. All I want to do at this exact moment in time is die, just die. I think: Die. Die now. I try to kill myself using my mind, force my heart to slow and stop. Die. Die.

But I don’t die, and in a minute Connor says impatiently, “C’mon, put your clothes on. I want to go home.”

My dreams are strange, uneasy, unearthly. I’m in an empty house calling for my parents, I’m a little girl, calling and calling but no one answers. I’m with Connor in a motel room and I’m covered with bruises, he’s hitting me, slapping me in the face, pulling me by the hair and shoving my head into the toilet and calling me a slut. Gracie stands there watching, saying nothing, drinking from her sippy cup. Bill’s there too, behind her, dressed in his old hippie gear, shaking his head. I’m on a moor somewhere, mud, craggy cliffs, it’s windy, rain in the air, Connor is with me, we’re handcuffed tightly together, my wrist is chafed, bleeding, something is chasing us in the glowering dark and I’m telling him that we can get out of this if we stick together but he’s pulling away, trying to get out of the cuffs, trying to run from me. I’m in front of a mirror, I’m twelve years old and there’s only half of me, I’m standing on one leg, I have only one arm, half my head, one eye, a half-set of lips, I realize suddenly I’ll never be any different than this, I’m trapped in this body, this half-body, and I try to scream but my half-mouth doesn’t work, it won’t open, I don’t even have that escape, that release. I’m at school, in front of the class talking about verb tenses and I’m dressed soberly and professionally but they’re naked, all of them, Lauren Holloway and Richard Broad and Kevin Simmons and Douglas Peterson and Cheryl Minton and Andrew Harrington and Kylie and Connor and all the rest and I look at their pale little undeveloped bodies in embarrassment, ask them why they’re naked and tell them to put on their clothes and Kylie says, We can’t, Ms. Straw, you took our clothes.