Everybody hurts

Post-coital conversations are over-rated.

It is early evening. We are in bed. I am curled in his arm, sore from the rather vigorous bout of sex he and I had gotten accustomed to. I can still smell sex in the fine hairs in his armpit. I close my eyes and wish we are not talking. But I know he won’t be able to help himself. He will talk, he always does. He asks me how I am. I tell him I’m sore. I know he likes to hear how he hurts me when he fucks me. A small laugh. ‘Aside from that. How are you handling it?’ I tell him I’m okay. He asks again, ‘Are you sure?’ I try not to pay attention, relishing the fatigue and languid pleasure brought on by sexual release.

‘Do you really want to know?’ I rest my chin on his chest. He nods. I tell him I’m coping. That I will miss the company, more than anything else. The feeling of security that results from the knowledge that someone cares for me. The sex is negligible. He smiles, knowing full well that my relationship hasn’t been sexually fulfilling for a long time before this break-up. ‘I care for you,’ he volunteers. 

‘You might, but I don’t really have you, do I?’ I remind him that he’s married.

He winces as if I had poked him with a sharp object. Recovering, he says, ‘But unlike him, I have never hurt you. And he did it to you twice.’

I do not say anything. I silently wish I am not discussing the demise of my relationship with him. Why can’t we just have sex and not talk, like we used to do?

I remember the first time I met him three years ago. It was about two months after my first break-up. We locked glances as I stepped out of the internet shop I’d regularly frequented. He looked young, made more obvious by his wispy moustache and goatee. The next time I was there, he sat beside me and just started talking to me. He was eight years my junior. I invited him to my flat but found myself to do anything but talk. He asked if I had some porn, I admitted that I didn’t. He asked if he can bring some DVD next time and watch it in my TV. I said sure, no problem.

He watched two DVDs the first time we had sex. Not that he needed the inspiration. I was the one who felt so ill-prepared for it and I hesitated. I didn’t want to get fucked but when he gently insisted, I relented. And I was sore for a couple of days. It was a new feeling. So much different from the emptiness that I’d been harboring in the time that my lover left me with no explanation.

In short, he became my coping mechanism. My rebound sex, my fuck-buddy, or whatever it is called these days. Two weeks later we had the same vigorous, almost brutal sex. We began meeting weekly. 6PM became a sort of witching hour for me. He began trying new things: he got more physical, bordering on violent. He would bite me, hit me a bit, throw me around. And I allowed him to do it all. Me, the hopeless romantic who had thrived in timid kisses and cuddling.

The pain was a welcome relief from feeling nothing.

(more…)