Heather Lewis - Notice

And when I came up from this, came up for air, I moved in a jerky, jarred way that made her grab hold of my wrist. I drew back from the sting of her hand. She realized she’d hurt me because she let me loose right away and I pulled the rest of me back from her. I curled up afraid. Wanted the covers over me, but it would mean letting go of my knees. I’d hugged them tight to my chest and wouldn’t let go.

She was trying to get me loose from myself. Did this first with words I could only hear bits of. I could only hear her saying, “sweetheart,” again and again until I couldn’t even hear that.

I felt her though. I felt her hand stroking mine, stroking the back of it, the length of my fingers. And bit by bit I let her take it in hers. And once I’d let her do that, I let go of the rest of me.

She kissed my palm and then my wrist, stayed doing this before she moved to my stomach and then my thighs, and then between them. My body wanted her, while the rest of me didn’t. My body maybe even needed her, needed what she was doing. And so this was another time it let me down.

I hadn’t come off in that whole time with Burt and the others and so I told myself I had to have what she was giving me. Tried to tell myself the whole of me had to have it.

But I couldn’t accomplish this. Even I couldn’t make this all right, make her doing this right, her doing it now. And I couldn’t stay away from what she might want or need. From what she might always have wanted and needed from me, when faced with me, with my need. From thinking that maybe this was the only way she’d known, ever, to help me.

She had to work at it but she did finally bring me off, though it happened in a dead, overdue way, not satisfying either of us. Afterwards, she seemed not to know what to do with herself, not right away, and this made me turn from her. I pulled the covers around me and drew into myself again.

I could hear her putting things away. Maybe I wanted for her to go away, but I couldn’t be sure of this, and I sure couldn’t have asked her to.

I do know that when she’d taken off her clothes and curled up behind me, I didn’t want her anywhere near me. I pulled further inside myself. Tried to get far enough in there that I couldn’t feel her arms and legs wrapped around me.

I couldn’t do this or she wouldn’t let me. And sleep wouldn’t come either. I stayed rigid in her arms with her still trying to smooth me out. And I felt wrong about this, like I was betraying her. And while I knew I had this backwards, it still didn’t feel backwards – even the thought of this, clear just a moment ago, turned unformed and gauzy, went slipping away.

I never did drift off. I didn’t even pretend it very well. And I felt her struggling, too. Unable to settle herself or her body until finally she got up and I heard her dressing. And even though it was clear she knew I was awake, she said nothing to me before she left.

Now, with her gone, all my tautness turned to heaviness. And with sleep dragging me this hard I felt afraid, not simply unwilling. I felt a tiredness so big, I feared I’d never wake up from it. I couldn’t fend it off, though. And when I went to it this time, I understood my fear. This time that black sleep was so endlessly empty it’d become the only place for me. The only place a person like me might want to stay.

I did wake up. Woke up sore and feeling drugged and wishing I really was, but having no inclination to even find my liquor. I wanted to go back to that blackness where nothing ever happened or ever had. Wanted this the way a child wants death, or the way I had as a child. A want simply to stop it.

All this swimmed in my head and sent me swimming. Maybe that was the real trouble about what had happened last night. Maybe it’d brought me too close to something I’d always longed for. Opened me again to the idea of stopping it all instead of trying to outrun it. Or run around it. And always instead running into it again, running smack hard up against it. And each time, it hurting differently and more, leaving me running out of ways and things to deaden it, dull the blow.

Beth didn’t call, not that day and not the next and not the whole week. And so I went into the next one wondering if she walked around in the same blurred dream as me, though really I wasn’t doing much walking at all.

I wondered if she was. Then decided she was going through the motions of her life in a stunned sleep. I used this as a way to explain her not calling. Tried even to use this to keep her close to me, keep us someway together.

It didn’t work very well, or very long. Really, it didn’t work much at all. I kept at it, though. Kept it up another day or so even once I knew all the gaps and holes by heart.

What I did the day after that, in the early evening, was go to her. I couldn’t not and couldn’t think much about why, about what I intended. Not even once I got there.

I found her waiting on me as if the days, weeks really, hadn’t occurred. And it was curious to me, the idea of her waiting this way every evening. It put me off balance, but when I regained my footing I found myself angry, and then knew I had been all along.

She met me at the door to her office, not the outside one. And right away I went at her. Physically, until we were clear across the room and I had her against the wall – crunched there between the wall and her desk.

I pulled and pushed at her. Got her half sitting on the desk, and then got my hand into her. I fucked her and fucked with her. I kept this up a long time. All of me pressed against her and into her, my mouth so near hers, but not kissing her.

I could hear her cries, which weren’t the kind from pain. Her taking pleasure in this felt like failure and so I had to see I’d come here to hurt her in the way I’d always known hurt.

I finished her and then she slid down the wall, wound up slumped against it. I left her this way. Stumbled out her doors, craving that blackness, craving it physically.

A tingling tiredness pulled me forward, little clusters of needles in my thighs, behind my knees, pricking the soles of my feet. And there was this other tingling taking over my chest and growing beyond it. Hatred for loving her and for letting her love me. It pounded there, mingling with the want for blackness until I had to see these two things together – as part of each other.

With each step these blurred more, and when I got myself home and into my bed I couldn’t sleep right away for knowing the relation. For seeing that I’d needed her help in the most conventional of ways. That all the rest had been about covering this. A way to try to put her where I put everyone else.

If I’d been able to do this, I wouldn’t have had to see the very thing I wanted someone to take away. This specific hunger for nothingness. And when she’d shown me it instead? I’d wanted her to take it away, or replace it. Wanted her to be what made it all stop, but in a different way – one that’d let me be still, and still stay here.

And that she couldn’t? That she hadn’t been able and that nobody would’ve? And that she’d gone about it all wrong? That all of it between us had been terribly wrong from the first? None of this changed that she was first. I’d never be able to take that from her. Whether I spent the rest of my life loving or hating her, she’d always have me that way. Be the one who’d first had me. The closest I’d come.

And maybe Beth had helped me because in the following days I found something killed my taste for it all. Not for that particular slumber, but for the little ways I’d tried to find it without admitting to it. I’d no pull to parking lots or bars, no interest it seemed.