“I feel disgusting.” 

The way she said it, it wasn't an apology or a plea. It was simply a truth she laid out between them, as if it were no more strange than saying the sky was blue, or the river ran north.

He studied her face, how the sun hit the fine bones beneath her skin, and he could not reconcile the word "disgusting" with what he saw. Her hair was the color of a wheat field set ablaze; her body slim, almost carelessly arranged. When she entered a room, the air would fill with her essence, like bubble gum, or candy, something sweet—childhood preserved in cellophane. 

This was not a narrative about whether she was beautiful. Somewhere deep down, he felt like she knew that, and not in an egotistical way, she was not pretending just to garner attention. She was truly uncomfortable in her skin.  

“You don’t look disgusting,” he said, though he knew that wasn’t what she needed. 

She needed the contradiction to exist, for beauty to feel like something alien, for the sweetness that clung to her skin to be at war with the sensation of being unmade. 

She sighed, adjusting her tits, her nipples hardening, beginning to poke through the sheer fabric of the bed sheet draped across her chest. This was turning her on. 

"It doesn’t matter how I look," she finally said, as if resolving a quiet internal debate. "It’s how I feel." 

That space they inhabited together was not a room, not quite. More like a liminal atmosphere, a hush that existed before sound, or just after. It was always dusk there, always the slow hour when light seemed to lose its grip on form.

He watched her.

Not with hunger, not anymore—though hunger was perhaps the doorway. Now it became something finer, more troubling: an obsession with how she saw herself. The way her eyes flickered toward mirrors, not to admire but to verify. The way her laughter sometimes came a fraction of a second too late, as if she was waiting to see how it would land on others before committing to joy.

“Touch yourself,” he said; low, deep, persuasive.

“Think that will change things?” she cooed back.

With him, she was warm. Sometimes unbearably so. She would curl into his arms and press her face into his neck like she was trying to disappear inside him. But always—always—there was a pause behind her touch, a subtle withholding. She wasn't so much loving him as running through the lines of love, searching for the right intonation.

“Is this what intimacy looks like now?” she asked, running a slender digit through her moistening slit. 

It was, for him. A soft rendering of desire, rehearsed but never quite performed. Sex, when it came, felt like a question she was asking him in a language neither of them fully spoke. And he never knew quite how to answer. But it—she—made his fucking cock throb like no other human being could. 

He thought about grabbing a fistful of her auburn hair, dragging her to the bathroom, and bending her over the vanity. He wanted to hold her chin from behind and make her look at herself, really look as he pushed his hard-on up into her needy cunt. 

See what I see.

He imagined thrusting up hard, forcing her onto her tiptoes, bracing herself against the cheap linoleum counter. Her eyes might widen with the recognition, appear too big for her face like she couldn’t believe who they were letting in. 

But that would solve her…and ruin him. 

He tore the sheet off her letting it land somewhere where the maid would wonder what the fuck happened. 

“What now?” she asked. 

He could see the glint of translucent, milky-white cum pooling where her finger was circling inside her delicious pussy. Her legs spread wide, an invitation, tempting him in. 

His cock was already rigid, angled toward the ceiling, precum glistening at the tip, balls cinched up tight like he was about to cum and he hadn’t even touched himself yet. He stood at the foot of the bed. 

“Let’s see how disgusting we can make you...”

She smiled.

He moved around to the side and swirled his finger in the air gesturing her to spin until her head was at the edge of the mattress, fiery tresses hanging to the floor. He bent over to palm her perfectly round breasts, rolling her nipples firmly between his fingers. As he leaned, his cock inched closer to her face. 

“I can smell your lust,” she said.

He walked his hands down further, spreading her slick pussy and pressing two fingers in, forcing a breath out of her gaping mouth. Nudging forward a bit, he settled his balls against her lips.

A groan escaped him as she suckled, using her tongue to poke at each orb in a way that made him aroused and uncomfortable at the same time. 

His fingers curled up inside forcing her hips into the air. He moved his free hand up to throttle his cock. 

She was stunningly beautiful beneath him, her face buried somewhere under his crotch, but the idea of her seemed to float up and penetrate every cell in his body. 

“I’m going to cum,” he grunted.

Throttling faster, he pulled his balls from her mouth with a pop and straightened up. 

The first burst of ropey cum reached her cunt and she immediately worked it in with her hands. The second and third coated her heaving chest. The rest he saved for her face. 

When he woke in the morning, she was gone. Her keys, her bag, her scent—all gone.

He told himself it didn’t matter, told himself he wasn’t in love. But love is a slow fever. You don’t feel the burn until it’s inside your bones. 

Sometimes he thinks he sees her—a flash of auburn in a crowd, the curve of a shoulder vanishing around a corner. But it’s never her. 

It never was.