What It's Like in Words: A Novel

by Eliza Moss

That’s weird, right? It’s probably a bad sign that it doesn’t feel … effortless?

Just stay fun. I smiled brightly, and told him that I wasn’t trying to rush anything.

And yet I couldn’t feel anything but disappointment that I had let him down. I needed to see that spark in his eye. I needed him to smile at me like we had robbed a bank.

He just pulled me closer and broke my body into pieces that floated up to join the Milky Way.

didn’t think about my pleasure because it wasn’t my pleasure I was addicted to.

We hung up the phone. Or he did.

I was trading my body for the hope of his heart, and he was saying yes to a cup of tea that he

didn’t really want because someone else was making

I had wanted this so badly. His body. His hands. His smell. But what was it that I actually wanted? Because the sex was never good, was it? It was just a period of time where I had him. It was addictive. It was control. But he didn’t want me and he wasn’t even pretending to.

Call you later. Love you. Love you.

We form a connection with someone at a writers’ event or in a hedge fund café, and over time that connection gets replaced by its memory, and so we edit and rewrite and delete in an effort to recapture what we felt. Maybe the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is just different drafts of the same story. Virinder was just tonight’s mistake, that’s all.

I was looking at Virinder the way that I used to be looked at. And still, it was Virinder that I blamed. I wanted to take his love and beat it out of him.

took off my coat, and Virinder pointed out a coffee stain like it was adorable. I wondered how adorable he would think it was if I threw coffee on his shirt.

I put my hands on her shoulders and assured her that there would never be a man who knew me better than she did.