More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The longer his voicemail grows stale, the more he’ll needle later. His statement, I love you, will assume different punctuation. I love you?
An undeniable pleasure blooms. This man lusts for me and being objectified is an intoxicating little feeling I’ve missed terribly.
“Why not? I intuit his. I speak his body language. What he’s feeling and when he’s feeling it, and there’s just this inevitability. This tension—”
Older stings when it lands, but perhaps she’s correct about that last bit. After all, how many relationships subsist in these gray areas? The ambivalence-soaked air of relationship purgatory is stifling, bordering on painful—
“Dartmouth.
Not for the first time in my life, the bruises on my throat gather into the unmistakable shape of human fingers.
When it comes to lying, there’s a golden rule: tell as much truth as you can. The truth is, after all, the easiest to remember. It’s the most consistent with inarguable fact. There are two inarguable facts in my situation.
He’s ten years my senior,
Last night at Haus was an escalation, the culmination of many building moments. Boundaries broken, lines scuttled, thresholds crossed. I’d started weeks ago, growing more brazen, thirstier with each passing day.
One where we’d talked at length. Exchanged dick pics. Admitted to long-buried fantasies only anonymity can surface. Fetishes that persist deep beneath the psyche like fungus in damp soil.
Nathan is such a fucking parent. I pause, noting how quickly I’ve returned to square one. From covering up to longing to resentment over the course of a single day. The guilt makes me even angrier.
A smarmy, lanky, smug kind of corporate gay.
Kathy didn’t open her own front door but stood waiting in the foyer, crossbow cocked and ready.
I collect my roller from the trunk and follow Oliver through the front door. The heavy aperture behind which the manifestation of my life plan unfolds with deliberate predictability. A routine I suspect Oliver finds stifling at best. And at worst? Tepid. Boring. Banal. Everything he resents is everything keeping him safe. On the straight and narrow.
He’s attractive. No denying that. Strung out, fresh from outpatient detox, and he still stole my breath. Brown hair that bleaches in summer. Jaw square as any all-American boy-next-door’s. Skinny, sure, but I’ve got a type. He’s got an ass any bottom would kill for and a smile that sinks teeth into you. No one would call him sophisticated, but he’s nothing if not intelligent. Extraordinarily so, and surely some man would see what I’d seen years ago. Fall hard, same as me. Decide to say fuck it if he’s taken and go for it.
Nathan and I did have good sex a handful of times. Never what I would call great, but I try not to compare. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t helpful. But Hector and me—that was great sex. You can’t miss something you’ve never had, and the inverse is also true. You can’t lie to yourself when you know you’ve had better.
comprised entirely of
He’s penetrated my privacy, befouling and defacing it.
That’s not who he is, and I chose him—or let him choose me—specifically because of who he isn’t.
But I honestly could not imagine sleeping with any of Tom’s strangers because none of them are Oliver. After five years of dwindling emotional investment from him, do I have some kind of psychosexual issue?
“Blake?” A disembodied voice whines from an occupied stall. “What?” the twenty-something at the sink says. “Got any Adderall?”
When denial’s that thick, you can suffocate yourself with it like a pillow.
He’s ungrateful.
But it didn’t matter; I’d already pulled his file from Psych. No admin questions a request from a white coat, stethoscope, and badge reading medical doctor.
But the ends were binary: Oliver could struggle through this by himself and die like the millions of addicts just like him. Or Oliver could choose life. With me.
Like Mormons bumping carts in the liquor store,
it’s simply habit. A survival technique I’m too good at. Equivocating. Focusing on the literal meaning of my words the way a child might.
This society, it swallows up smart people. If you’re smart—and not a sociopath—you don’t stand a chance.
tangible definition.
Faustian little worms called to the surface by a hard rain.
The new boyfriend’s so far out of Tom’s league in the abs and hair and ass and smile and, shockingly, charm departments that he must have an angle. A concealed flaw that keeps him from the Dardanelles-crossing yachts of smarter, richer men but works just fine for Tom’s brand of Fire Island A-gay.
Last night’s spent condom lies on the floor beside my socks, and I roll over to
head, I took him from behind and choked him. Like Oliver had been.
But now I can’t, and the room tilts. The walls stretch like long sheets of gauze. I can’t call Hector out because the moment’s already slipped. If I do it now, my initial hesitation will invite far more than questions from Nathan.
“I don’t think you know a lot of things.”
