Luster

by Raven Leilani

The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed,

Eric is sensitive about his age and about mine, and he makes a considerable effort to manage the twenty-three-year discrepancy.

wasn't expecting it to be that big

The age discrepancy doesn’t bother me. Beyond the fact of older men having more stable finances and a different understanding of the clitoris, there is the potent drug of a keen power imbalance. Of being caught in the excruciating limbo between their disinterest and expertise. Their panic at the world’s growing indifference. Their rage and adult failure, funneled into the reduction of your body into gleaming, elastic parts.

want us to fight in public. And when we fight in private, I want him to maybe accidentally punch me.

—I

There is the possibility that she might be cool. She might truly be fine with her husband going out on a date with a girl who has sixteen times more viable eggs.

“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.

“Are you dating anyone else?” he asks. “No. Does that make you want me less?” “No, does me being married make you want me less?” “It makes me want you more,”

He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth.

“Also, if I don’t make you come, I want you to tell me,” he says, motioning for the check. “So we’re going to have sex? This is going well?” “Don’t you think so?”

He has this smile as he does it that gives me the impression he is aware of himself, and it makes me want to sit on his face.

“I want you to suck my fingers,” he says. “Okay,” I say, and take one finger into my mouth. And then two. And then three. And then suddenly, he hooks his fingers and pulls me toward him by the bottom row of my teeth. “You fucking slut,” he says, and then releases me. “Come up.” “Not tonight. Let me take you out on Thursday.”

blue balled omggg

As I climb the stairs to my apartment, I have already resolved to call out of work tomorrow and spend all night furiously masturbating to Top Chef.

Unfortunately, my vibrator is dead.

I try to use my fingers, but a roach crawls across the ceiling wh...

It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.

On Thursday morning the hot water isn’t running and there is a new mouse caught in the trap. My roommate and I have been supporting a family of mice for six months.

I almost lose a seat to a woman who gets on at Union Square, but luckily her pregnancy slows her down.

😭😭😭

She still rearranges herself, waiting to be chosen. And she will be. Because it is an art—to be Black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.

Joe from true crime who doesn’t read at all and who comes loud and quick and calls me nigger and then mommy.

excuse me??

I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

He showed me a panel of a cunnilingual octopus, and the care he had taken to render this piece knocked me right over and onto his cock.

Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve.

“I’d like to lay my cards on the table,” he says, withdrawing his hand. “My life is established. I have been married to the same woman for thirteen years and our graves are right next to each other.”

So I eat half a chocolate cake and arrive at the club in cutoffs and sneakers, so ready to fuck that when someone brushes up against me on the train I make a scary, involuntary noise.

Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany

and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch

so it is not my fault that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car home and says take care of yourself like, please go,

And now I know where he lives so ten days after having fucked him in the bed he shares with his wife I go right up to the door and find it unlocked, and no one is home, so I walk around the house and pick up these cold lemons on the counter and roll them around in my hands, and I open the fridge and take a drink of milk and carry the carton up to the bedroom where a door opens to a closet with a collection of women’s clothes and I gather the silk and wool and cashmere in my hands and then there is a voice, and I turn and standing in the doorway of the attached bathroom in yellow rubber gloves and a T-shirt that says Yale is his wife.

she cray cray

During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice.

This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

There are times I interact with kids and recall my abortion fondly, moments like this when I cross paths with a child who is clearly a drag.

“What are you doing in my house?” “Congratulations on the anniversary.” “What is the matter with you?” “Everything is the matter,”

“I feel like I want to hurt you,” he says suddenly, thumbing the collar of the dress. “What do you mean?” “I mean I’d like to hit you.” “Okay.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, okay,”

There were plenty of reasons to be worried about my grandfather. The most pressing of which being the devastating charm of the Classic Trinidadian Man. The lore slants a little differently depending on the island, but the conventional wisdom holds that there is no man more equipped to ruin a woman’s life.

burying him with the other men who evaporate after pulverizing my cervix,

where I listen to my roommate and her feminist boyfriend having very sweet communicative sex.

I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a Black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit.

remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life.

“Imagine living life so carefully that there are no signs you lived at all,”

I remember Rebecca asking me to return her husband, and now that I have slept more than four hours, I feel less inclined to honor this request.

“No one likes Superman,”

I like superman 🧍🏿‍♀️

When I take the knife, a thought comes to me fully rendered, complete with texture and aftermath: I could, in the right state of mind, murder her and carry on with my life. Really it would be her fault, for inviting a stranger into her house and providing the knife.

I start to tell her that when I fuck her husband, I’m the one who does the fucking.

When I imagine it, she is indifferent, her vagina defying all etymology, not a pussy or a twat but an abstract violence, like a Rorschach or a xenomorph. For me, I’ve had little choice. The moment I left Clay’s house, my vagina was a cunt.

his refusal to acknowledge me one of the many reminders that I am, in the grand scheme of things, an extremely brief addendum to their mortgage, to their marital bathrobes, to the two cars parked side by side.

“Okay,” I say, and she unpauses the show. It is a subtitled anime, the animation limber and bright, all the characters living in a vaguely Eastern European village that is under siege by nude giants. Everyone is screaming. A giant bounds into the village and puts his foot through a levee. A cavalry made entirely of teenagers takes the offensive, and then a second giant appears and drops a horse down his throat, the whinnying paired with a dramatic upskirt of a female colonel who is suddenly airborne with her double-hilted claymore, the arteries in the giant’s neck spraying the upturned faces of the blacksmith and candlestick maker as I close my eyes.

Attack on titan

The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact. They were dying inside their own bodies, and now all these dead components are my inheritance.

And the truth is that when the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die.