Luster

by Raven Leilani

the worst part of meeting a man in broad daylight, the part where you see him seeing you, deciding in this split second whether any future cunnilingus will be enthusiastic or perfunctory.

the potent drug of a keen power imbalance.

caught in the excruciating limbo between their disinterest and expertise.

A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild.

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

is almost.

Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.

Having already been in the process of filing him away, burying him with the other men who evaporate after pulverizing my cervix,

I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things—factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean.

He gives me three hundred dollars and asks me to take off my shoes, and I pocket the money and do what I have to do. And what I have to do is crush tomatoes and raw eggs with my feet while he listens to Arvo Pärt. He sends me on my way with a seaweed face cream, and in the grand scheme of things this is not even close to the worst thing I’ve done for money, but it makes me feel out of sorts all the same.

I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.

in the morning I stumble to the bathroom and take the pregnancy test. I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.

If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.