Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

I did make it one year exactly. I first fucked John the day after our anniversary. I have a picture of the three of us at the Macaroni Grill. We went there because it was another Brinker concept so I could use my employee discount. Neither of us was old enough to drink. We ordered virgin daiquiris and played hangman and tic-tac-toe on the paper tablecloth. Roses are red, he wrote with the red crayon. Violets are blue, I wrote with the blue. What do you want? he wrote. I didn’t finish it because our food arrived. Our waitress took the picture. You guys are so cute, she said. He’s holding the baby and has one arm around me and we’re both smiling for real because the baby is grabbing his beard.

The next night I went to a park with John after work. There was a jogging path that went back into some woods and we walked down it until we came to a bench. We sat down and it was so dark. He put his arm around me and brushed my nipple with his fingertips but I said Wait because I knew it would make me lactate and then we made out and I felt the milk, warm and soaking into the cloth circles I wore inside my bra. He tasted like onions but he was a good kisser. He had a nice face. Gray eyes with long eyelashes and dimples when he smiled. Soft spiky black hair. He pulled me into his lap and kissed my neck and said So you want this. Yes, I said. I waited for you in the walk-in. He paused and looked at me. No one falls for that, he said.

He grew up on the streets of St. Louis, he said. He told me he never knew his dad and he was taken from his mother and put in foster care when he was seven. He smelled like amber, wood, musk, earth. He exuded sex but at no one in particular. He talked to you while he chewed and bits of lettuce fell out of his mouth, then he belched, then he offered to refill your water. If he came up behind me at a computer terminal sometimes he would stand close enough to me so I could feel his erection and once he said Meet me in the walk-in.

Come on then, he said, and stood up holding me. I put my feet on the ground and unzipped his pants. He unzipped mine and turned me around so I was facing the bench. He pulled down my pants and I knelt on the bench, bracing myself against the back of it. It wasn’t very comfortable and I had bruises on my knees the next day.

On his chest the tattooed face of a pit bull he said was the best friend he’d ever had, on his left calf a beckoning, bare-titted mermaid. Over his entire back a flaming skull, the fire burning up toward the nape of his neck and the jaw narrowing to a chin cleft at his tailbone. On his wedding finger a black band where a ring would go, on his left upper arm a cross made of scar tissue that stretched from shoulder to elbow, which he cut in with a knife in his other hand. Uncircumcised and he’d once had a Prince Albert but said it stopped him from penetrating as hard as he wanted to.

September was John, October was Luke, and November was Damon. There was some overlap which is how they all got the disease but John was unreliable and Luke felt bad about it and Damon was into me so he’s the one I started seeing regularly. John lived in a shitty efficiency and I went over there sometimes if he said I could stop by and sometimes I went without asking. Most of the time he wasn’t there, even when he’d said I could come over. He had a twin mattress on the floor of the apartment but he’d put it up in front of the bathroom when I was there and we did it on the carpet. I think he didn’t want me to get the idea that he wanted me. I remember one time he told me I looked good and one time I told him his bread was moldy.

Luke was the one I should have wanted. He was tall and too good-looking. He had a deep voice that made me wish for so many things and he had a pretty bird dog. I’ve never liked dogs but that one was fine. Eric. He was a lot like Luke. Calm and well-bred. Luke told me how they’d go for a run and Eric would suddenly flash into a bush and Luke would find him rigid, stuck in his pointer pose, staring at some prey concealed in the brush. Luke would have to pick him up and set him down somewhere else before he would release his muscles. One afternoon we were all three on Luke’s bed and Luke was lying behind me. He started rubbing my ass over and over, soft and unhurried. Petting me. I felt so contained. He was always so warm, like he had a fever. When he had rubbed my ass through my jeans for a long time he nudged me up on my knees in front of him and unbuttoned his jeans with one hand while he breathed in my ear and put his other hand up my shirt. He found my nipple and slid his thumb across it and back across it. Then he moved his hand down to my pants and unbuttoned them and pushed them down. He put his penis against my lips. I never got very wet for anyone but for him that day I was slick and he took so long to ease himself inside me. So slow. I had my head down on the bed by Eric because there was nowhere else to put it and I had a hand on his flank. He smelled clean and he was just lying there watching us. Luke pressed into me so slow that by the time he was all the way in I was massaging Eric’s flank with one hand and his shoulder with the other. Mashing on him like a cat making biscuits. I didn’t really know I was doing it but I had to put the intensity somewhere. I could feel Luke getting harder and longer and then he reached over me and pushed Eric off the bed. He took hold of one of my wrists and gathered the other wrist up in his grip so he was pulling my arms tight away from my head and pressing my wrists down into the bed. I was so much shorter than he was that he still had his other hand on the small of my back. Pushing it down firm on his cock. He held me in place like that and I kept myself taut against him almost as if I were trying to resist or get away but it was the best thing I had ever felt with a man.

Damon had smooth knotty forearms. I’d never been with a black man then. His forearms were pecan colored and his lips were superfat and perfect. I think his hair was thinning but it was kept carefully in scrawny dreads. He was adopted. He was wary and closed and seemed untethered. Not crazy. Just without anyone. When we were together he talked and I listened. He talked about what he was getting next from Best Buy or the J. Crew catalogue. He talked about making his record on CD Baby. He wanted some tropical fish. He was long-term housesitting for some friends in one of the nicer neighborhoods where professors and retirees lived. There was wisteria. The house was spacious and felt uninhabited. There was a housemate I never saw but I was loud at night so I was glad I never ran into him. There was a tree in the middle of the house. A big old magnolia. Damon said they hadn’t wanted to cut it down when they built it so they built the house around it. The house was in the shape of a square with the center cut out. That was where the tree was, and all the interior walls of the house were glass so you could see it.

He grew giant supremely nourished marijuana plants in a closet in his bedroom, but I didn’t know that until I’d been going over there for eight or nine months. The strange part was that I had never even looked in that closet, or asked what was there. I hadn’t noticed it but it was right there in the wall, a door with a knob. It was odd because I am the kind that will notice everything in a house and will peek under papers.

There were three transformations: He gave me my first orgasm. We stayed up all night listening to Ben Harper on the expensive fantastic stereo in the living room. We lay on the floor wrapped in a blanket. We kissed and then he pulled my pants off and stretched out on his belly. He held me down so firmly I couldn’t scoot away even though in the beginning it was just too much. So much. He had his arms wrapped under my legs and back over and his hands pulling back the lips and he flicked my clit so hard and pointed and precise and sweet. I couldn’t do anything but feel it. I didn’t know how to help then. He did it all. When it came it was a train, it was heavy and I couldn’t do anything but have it. I sang out — I was so loud he covered my mouth even though there was no one in the house. He said I don’t think they’ve been taking care of you have they.