AM Hartnett - Bleeding Heart

The first hiccup came even before she opened her eyes. Snuggled beneath the duvet, she was roused by a repetitive sound.

Squink!

Squink!

Squinksqui‌nksquinksquink!

She pushed up onto her forearms and cocked her head to listen.

‘Look, right there. Get it.’ Squink! ‘My turn. I said, my turn. Ow–ow! No biting, you little fucker.’

It took her a moment to recognise the deep voice.

Hot landlord.

Still, his hotness did not negate the fact that he had torn a hole in her perfect Saturday morning. She slipped from the bed and grabbed her robe from the footboard, then knelt on the bench beneath the window. She couldn’t see anything, so as quietly as she could she removed the screen and poked her head out.

She could barely see him through all the iron of the fire escape, but through a crack she caught just enough. Sitting in his window with a slinky black cat between his legs, he held what looked like a small tablet computer between his big hands.

Though the screen was fuzzy from so high above, April could see something scuttling across the surface. The cat leaped at it with both paws, then again and again as Seth laughed.

‘You missed. My turn,’ he said, and held his hand over the screen. The cat pounced, and Seth hissed as he shook free. ‘Next time I’m going to bite you back.’

April bit down to keep from laughing.

So, her gorgeous and somewhat terrifying landlord liked to play iPad games with his cat. She supposed that, on a scale of weird, this wasn’t even midway – as long as she didn’t find out he dressed the cat in Renaissance garb on Saturday nights.

The cat leaped as a trill rang out. So did Seth, and, as he cursed and tapped at the screen, April guessed that it wasn’t a tablet at all he held but a phone – one he had no idea how to use.

‘How the fuck – shit – how do I answer this goddamn thing?’

She thought about calling down but didn’t want to give away that she had been spying. Instead she clapped her hand over her mouth to keep her giggles in as she watched him try and fail to answer the phone.

‘Damn it. Christ. How the –’ He held the phone to his ear, then hissed again as he looked back at it. ‘Where the hell did the numbers go? Jesus. ’

The fire escape rattled as he got up to go inside. April did the same. She remembered that, when they’d done the walkthrough, Seth had an old-school flip-phone holstered at his waist, and as he’d taken a call she wondered how those thick fingers could possibly navigate the number pad without mashing all the keys at once.

It was a little surprising that he had gotten an upgrade. When she’d spoken to the previous tenant, Ryan, outside on moving day, he’d indicated that Seth was fairly set in his ways and owned the same brick-like laptop that had been his late wife’s.

That’ll be me in ten years, she thought as she went to her counter. She was already known as the curmudgeonly one amongst their friends, nit-picking and price-checking, ordering the same thing off the menu each time and making sure she put her 10 per cent into a savings account on payday. She went shopping with a strict list, whether groceries or the cosmetics counter.

Give me a decade, and I’ll be the nosy neighbour demanding others re-sort their recyclables.

‘Aaaaah,’ she said upon opening the cupboard. Four tiny handmade espresso mugs awaited her selection for her virgin apartment’s first cup of coffee. She wouldn’t be having espresso, but a cup from beans that were ground the night before.

I should call Mom.

She shook the thought right out of her head. She wasn’t going to think of her mother and how depressed she had sounded on the phone the previous afternoon.

She’d stayed home long enough. She could afford it now that she was working.

It had been the end of the world when she announced she was moving out. April had explained to her mother that she was a big girl, that she wasn’t going to get murdered in her bed, and that she wasn’t going to get an STD.

April made her coffee and took it, along with her tablet computer, back to her big bed. She made a wall of comfort with the oodles of throw pillows she had bought, then settled in, wiggling her butt until she had that sweet spot, and clicked her way to the opening pages of her book.

Yet she couldn’t concentrate. Barely four pages in, she set the tablet aside and looked around.

Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom had come cheap and to her exact desires. She’d taken nothing from her old bedroom. Not that she had wanted the white canopy bed and matching storage her mother had picked out when April was ten. She had gone with a sleek chocolate-brown with red and white accents. There was nothing new about the contents of her closet, but the narrow dresser in the corner was filled with her other splurge of lingerie. Nothing too kinky, just some sheer undies and colourful bras, and a garter belt and stockings she didn’t have to hide from her mother’s disapproving eyes.

And then there was the basket underneath the new bed.

She was looking forward to breaking that queen bed’s cherry with someone, using the contents of that basket. She’d had enough unpleasant experiences of screwing on unwashed sheets with the sound of rowdy roommates playing videos games just outside the bedroom door, and that was only when she’d had boyfriends who weren’t in the same boat as she was.

She could have gotten by with her old double mattress, but she’d wanted a bed made as much for sex as it was for sleeping.

And there was the new vibrator.

It cost almost as much as her security deposit and she could have better spent her money elsewhere, perhaps getting a coffee-maker that had more bells and whistles, but after taking her masturbatory sessions in thirty-minute windows when her family home was actually empty, she felt she had earned her stylish vibrator.

As soon as the caffeine had kicked in, she rolled onto her side and slid the basket out.

Hello, Miss Scarlett.

It was a top-of-the-line rabbit, with words like ‘ergonomic’ and ‘dually stimulating’ and ‘supple’ in the description, and she’d almost talked herself out of it, given the number of less expensive toys she should have bought, but the reviews had enticed her.

Two orgasms in five minutes.

Never came before I used this.

Almost passed out.

April flopped on her back and closed her eyes, then turned the vibrator on.

She gave herself just a bit of pressure through her panties. The little rounded ears of the rabbit hummed, and for a second April listened for movement. Realising she was alone, that no one was sleeping across the hall, nor would they come knocking at her door for some silly reason, she relaxed and increased the power by one setting.

Good, but not not great. She was definitely feeling the effects of the toy, but there was something missing.

The mindfuck.

Her fantasies weren’t usually about real people. She made them up in her head, like she was the J. R. R. Tolkien of masturbatory fantasies.

She’d never admit it, but her fantasies would have been perfectly at home in a paperback romance: meeting the bad boy at midnight on a lonely stretch of beach or burning off sexual tension in an office hate-fuck.

She scrolled through the chapters of her sexual anthology, but it was the blank pages at the end that caught her attention.

Big arms. A crooked grin. Intense blue eyes.

Viking? Too cheesy. Biker? Maybe. Construction worker? Getting warmer.

A late-night panic. A smoke alarm that won’t go off. A knock at the door. Getting wet watching him stretch to reset the alarm. Realising her nightgown was too low cut and too high up on her thighs. A lingering ‘good night’ at the door. A longer ‘good night’ up against the door with her back pressed to the surface and her leg wrapped around his waist.