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.

When he finally told me he was married, he said it with such delicacy that I thought he must be afraid this admission would hurt me. But it didn’t. Made things clearer, in fact. It was just sex. He might be hurting me but it was only physical. I think he wanted to talk some more so I coaxed his cock into erection and we went back to fucking soon after.

We saw less of each other when a year later my ex asked to be taken back and I accepted him. In the meantime, his wife got pregnant again. Feeling unable to support a second child, they decided on an abortion, which I helped pay for. Before that, he had never asked me for any money. I’d pay for dinner or drinks in the few times we went out together, but that was about it. I looked for the requisite guilt that accompanied the thought of assisting an abortion but my Catholicism was comatose.

A little over a year ago he showed up at my flat unannounced. Said he was curious as to how I was doing. This was his way of saying he missed me. Well, not me, probably, but the sex. Sex with wives is almost always a chaste affair, this I know. So while I had no need for him, I had sex with him for old time’s sake.

I had forgotten how good it was. I was surprised, though, at the tenderness I felt for the first time, with him. It was almost as if we were lovers. This unnerved me. For months I didn’t return any of his phone calls and text messages. I only agreed to see him when things with my actual lover took a turn for the worse. As always, he was the perfect diversion.

He still is.

But lately, he questions me a lot. My need for a relationship. He firmly believes these relationships do not work on a fundamental level. Get a wife, make children, then fool around with other men. This seems to be his philosophy, as with many of the men in this country. When I point out what we have, he asks me what I think we have and I cannot answer. Sensing that I’m upset, he says, ‘We are good friends. And friendship is good.’ To soothe me probably. How convenient. Friendship allows him to care for me, but not to really love me. But do I love him? Probably not. At most, I probably care for him the way he says he does for me. I can only sigh at the irony that my longest relationship is not really a relationship.

In any case, it’s probably best that we do not love each other. Because if we did, who knows how much we can just end up hurting each other?

But I don’t tell him these things. Instead I listen to his tales of little dramas at home and at work, feigning interest. I want to peel at the scabs of the wounds in my heart and pride. Watch myself bleed all over again. Feel the pain. My left hand rests idly on his pubic hair. I barely note the stirring of his cock until he pulls me for a kiss. 

Enough pillow talk. 

from an untitled longer work

phnom penh, 2008

copyright Michael P. De Guzman

photo: http://www.sxc.hu/