Two Men In My Bed.

He kisses my head before he turns over to his back and instantly falls asleep. It's not a tender kiss, it's not a cruel one either, it's a kiss that tells me he feels sorry for me. I understand why, I feel sorry for myself as well. I have said so much, I have revealed so much of myself in my mindless arousal that the currents of longing that shoot up my legs aren't exhilarated anymore, they are despondent. Even my arousal is sad, so why wouldn't his kisses be pitiful? As he begins to snore, I press on his side to urge him to turn over, it will be hours before I am asleep but there is something restful about the turbulent state of somnolence I am in now. Pain never keeps me awake, I sleep like a drunk baby when everything hurts, but desperation robs me of all rest. Even when I close my eyes, I feel his fingers, traumatizing me with their gentle touch. Even when I sleep, I dream of the moment, each night, when he splays me on this bed and teases me until I begin to lose all control over my body, and my tongue.

As soon as I close my eyes, my phone begins to beep, it's the same sound it makes to intimate me of pre-scheduled commitments. I lunge to silence it and investigate the offensive sound. An unexpected message from my calendar flashes on the screen:

'*It's been two years since you spoke to S.*'

It has been two years. The last conversation we had, like every conversation we have had for the past decade after we stopped seeing each other, ended with me wondering how I would make it another two years without saying a single word to him. It's not a rule that we must only speak once every two years, but it kept happening, and once we took note of it, we enforced it a little too vigorously. It's who we are. I'd rather long for him, than speak to him. He'd rather have me believe that he doesn't care to remember me, than relieve himself by expressing that he still misses me. We both live in terror of the other changing, so even as we move forward in life, we leave our images of another in the past, disallowed from growth, barred from evolution. We are two creatures stuck in one another's history, pretending we can cease time, by ceasing our feelings in place.

I text him, immediately.

'*It's been two years.*'

He writes back, instantly.

'*And I still haven't read that book you sent me.*'

It was The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk. I sent it to him because the woman he was seeing had left him, and taken with her two trunks full of his books; ones that he painstakingly put together after years paying back the debt his father had accrued through the accident of birth that determined his caste, and subsequently, his social station. He used to ride a bicycle to work to save enough money to buy one book at a time, while still making payments on his loans for law school. The woman who had taken them from him was rich, from a family of illustrious publishers and silver-spoon births, and he was fixating on his amusement at a rich, privileged girl robbing knowledge from a poor man. I know him well enough to know he'd never buy another book again just to be able to dwell on the tragic romance of that sentiment of affront and loss.

So I sent him one.

Alongside it, a long letter, one in which I mostly discussed with myself the value and the loss of the epistolary format of writing, and one to which he never responded. He was never going to respond, I knew that even as I wrote it, and you'd think I would harbour a secret hope to receive a handwritten thank-you note in the mail, but I didn't. I lived in terror of that possibility for several months, there is a time to communicate and a time to long, and I could not bear for him to take that away from me. Like I would not be able to bear it now, if the man beside me took away this sleepless night and attacked me with his gentle fingers before I have reached the peak of my desire for them.

They could both kill me with the gentlest of intentions, with the slightest display of humanity, with the meagre glimpse of their kindness and the entirety of their cold, calculated cruelty.

And I would let them.

I would let them because they both know to let me long, to drive myself mad with want as they exist in a fantastical world I create for them, a world where they are oblivious to my suffering. The man beside me moves in our bed, turning onto his back again and letting his hand hover onto my pelvis, casually and accidentally stirring the unquenchable desire of my body, as I read the newest message the man from my past has sent to me.

'*I don't think I ever told you this but it was upon reading our interactions over the years that the last woman I loved truly exploded and decided to leave with all my books. Oddly fitting, I would say.*'

I would ask him why he thinks that is fitting, but he doesn't answer most questions I ask anyway, I've been waiting for six years to know how his sister is, he may answer someday, since he doesn't forget, either. I respond to him,

'*I am sorry.*'

He writes back,

'*Are you, really?*'

I am really only amused by how our miniscule relationship, one that refuses to die even though it is barely alive, one that he touts as inconsequential and I hold only like a broken shard of glass with maudlin value, can wreck an entire breathing, loving entity. I write back to him,

'*Not really, but I can be sorry, if you want me to be.*'

I can see his smile in the words he sends back to me on my screen,

*'Are you ever going to stop hitting on me?*'

I tell him the truth even though the question he asked was deliberately phrased to avoid asking the real question, the one about whether I would ever really stop loving him, if I would ever really stop wanting him. I tell him the truth,

'*Probably not.*'

He says,

'*Maybe we should speak more often.*'

It breaks my heart when he comes close to admitting that titillating me has something to offer to him as well, just like it breaks my heart to discover that the fingers that turn my pleasure into agony, might be pleasured by me as well. The man in my bed turns back to his side, pulling his fingers away from my body as my phone buzzes once again,

'*Maybe.'*

I breathe a sigh of relief as I smile and writhe in the darkness. They cannot give me what I want.

I am not ready to stop longing.

Just yet.