14 Fuck it
14
Fuck it
I wake up, but I don’t care when. What time, what day, what year. I don’t care. I wake up in the kind of “mood” where you have no fucks to give. I open my eyes without an alarm startling me, and the only thing I find is a pale-white glow in my room. I’m alone.
If it’s Saturday, I’ll spend it in bed and do nothing but sleep. If it’s Wednesday, I’ll do the same. What about the magazine? Who gives a fuck? Tomorrow will be another jump. Tomorrow, I’ll be in another year. It seems like the changes I perpetrate in the past don’t have any consequences, so…
I turn over and pull my blanket up to my ears.
It’s winter. That much is easy to figure out, because the house is cold and the thin light coming in is like a typical winter morning. And if it’s not winter, it’s about to be. And it must be early even though it’s already daytime, because the building’s central heating hasn’t come on yet. It must be nine at the latest.
But I don’t care. I’m not interested in anything outside this bed, outside the feather duvet my dad gave me when I moved out on my own. I never confessed to him that I don’t like it because sometimes feathers escape from the filling and prick you.
Not content with my padded lair, I pull the duvet over my head for total isolation. And I would have fallen asleep again if it weren’t for the keys I hear scratching in the lock and warning me. Someone comes in quietly. My ears prick, and I hear that someone put their keys down on the entrance table and slowly close the door. I can hear a paper bag rustling as shoes are pulled off. A short zipper is opened, and if I had any doubts, this would have cleared them up: they’re Tristan’s boots. I have good hearing, the house is small, and the bedroom door is open…and these sounds are part of what was, until recently, my routine. I roll back toward the window again and burrow deeper.
Maybe I should grab my phone from the bedside table and try to figure out what day I’m living again, but…does it even really matter? I’m stuck in a loop. I’m in a kind of personal hell. It’s my limbo. A state of suspended consciousness where everything is spinning so quickly only to end up landing in the same gutter.
Barefoot footsteps padding toward the bedroom rouse me from the drowsy state I’m submerged in, but I don’t turn my head toward the door. Not even when the mattress sinks from the weight of his knee.
“Miri…” he whispers into my neck before kissing it intensely, affectionately, stopping to breathe me in. “It’s ten. Wake up.”
“I am awake,” I say, my voice thick.
“Are you feeling okay?”
He puts something on the floor, next to the bed, and with his hands free, he leans back into me.
“Are you sick?”
“No. I’m tired.” But my tone of voice seems to express something else.
“Do you need a hug?”
I stay silent. I have a lump in my throat that makes it hard to swallow. I’m enveloped in his scent. He smells good in the morning, before he showers. Tristan’s skin holds a delicious memory of his cologne in a low, serious note, like the keys on the left side of a piano. It’s a note that reverberates in your chest. And that’s how he smells. Of my sheets and yesterday’s cologne.
“I went out and picked up breakfast,” he says into my ear, getting as close to me as he can in my fetal position. “And I made coffee. You’re right…that coffee maker isn’t that hard.”
“You did it in the Italian espresso one from the back of the cupboard, right?”
“Yes.”
That makes me smile a little. In all the years I’ve been with Tristan and that coffee maker, I’ve never been able to get him to work it. It’s an impossible threesome.
“You just have to push the buttons, Tristan.”
“Well, it comes out better from the Italian one. Come on…”
I turn around and sit up a little; he puts a tray into my lap. A coffee, an orange juice, and a Swiss bun. I love Swiss buns. I touch it with the tip of my finger…it’s still warm. Fuck. He smiles at me with his white teeth.
“Come on…”
“What about you?”
“My tray’s in the kitchen. I have to get ready first.”
I wrinkle my brow when I see him efficiently unbuckling his belt. Then the button and zipper of his jeans. He struggles to pull off his pants; they’re the kind of jeans that have no stretch, and they fit him so well. Then, before he takes off his sweater and shirt, he tugs his navy boxers into the right position. He takes off his socks and tosses them on the floor, leaves the bedroom, and comes back a few seconds later with his own tray and a few goose bumps.
“Fuck my life, Miranda, it’s so cold in your apartment in the mornings.”
He does a juggling act to get into bed without spilling his coffee and orange juice all over himself.
“Brr…” He looks at me and smiles. “Aren’t you cold?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s weird, because your pajamas are ‘unpajamas.’”
“What does that mean?”
“That you’re more naked than dressed in those. They’re naked pajamas.”
He kisses my shoulder and starts on his coffee.
“It’s mizzling.”
I stare at him. Him and his myriad terms for identifying how hard it’s raining.
“Drizzling?” I ask.
He smiles and nods. A fine rain, not very intense, the kind where you can’t be bothered to open your umbrella, but the damp gets into your bones. He loves it. It reminds him of Galicia.
“I was going to say we should go drink vermouth in La Latina, but with this weather…” He takes a bite of his bun and looks at me. “I was starving! We didn’t eat very well last night, did we?”
“I don’t know.”
And the thing is I really don’t know.
“You’re really quiet. You normally wake up more… I don’t know, it depends on the day, of course, but you’re usually a little peppier.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t know.”
He downs his orange juice in one gulp and studies me with his thick eyebrows subtly raised.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No.”
That doesn’t seem to placate him much, but he concentrates on his bun, which he finishes in two more bites and washes down with his cortado. Then he puts the tray under the bed and turns back to me, where I’m pulling my bun apart into tiny pieces that I put on my tongue so they dissolve in my spit.
“Is this about Thursday?”
“What about Thursday?”
“What you said to me on Thursday. The whole thing about…if this is going to end some day, we might as well end it now.”
Ah…mystery solved. The jump was only a few days.
“No. I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. That’s all.”
“I get it.”
I take a big sip of my Americano, which isn’t very good, and then, firmly gripping the tray, get up. I’m wearing one of my nightgowns that uncovers more than it covers.
“Give me your tray. I’ll take it to the kitchen.”
“Why the big rush? We can take them in later. Come here.”
“Come on. Give it to me.”
He groans and finds it under the bed; then he rebalances his glass and mug onto the one I’m holding and slides his under mine to make it easier for me to carry. My bare feet stick lightly to the parquet on the round trip. When I get back to the bedroom, I find him at the bathroom door, and he pulls me into him as soon as I cross the threshold.
“Let’s take a hot shower.”
“Together?”
“We’ll actually fit in yours.” He smiles.
It doesn’t seem like a sexual invitation. Knowing Tristan, it probably isn’t; that’s not his style. He sneaks in, rubs you, kisses you, and…before you know it, he’s on top, inside you. And he’s arching with pleasure and you’re digging your nails into his back and pulling his hair and biting his bottom lip…
Stop, Miranda. Stop.
I turn on the hot water, but before I strip off completely, he sticks his hand in and turns it up a little hotter. Tristan likes his shower water scalding…if it’s not stripping off a layer of skin, it’s not hot enough for him. He tugs on the waistband of his boxers, but before he takes them off, I head to the door again.
“You go ahead. I’m gonna grab another towel. Plus it’s way too hot for me.”
If he finds that weird, he doesn’t say anything. When I come back to put the towel down, he’s standing with his back to me, facing the stream, a waterfall cascading onto his head, plastering his straight hair across his forehead. I don’t want to look too hard because he’s naked, and naked Tristan has always been too attractive to me. With that cute little butt. The thin but strong legs. That V his abs make on the way down to his cock… I’m not a very shallow girl, but I like the shell housing Tristan’s soul a little too much.
“I’m leaving your towel here.”
“Stop looking at my ass,” he teases with his eyes closed.
“I’m not looking at your ass.”
“You’re looking at something…”
He steps back a bit from the stream and looks at me, pushing his hair back. My eyes keep trying to travel farther down, but I resist…
“Go ahead and look.”
“I don’t want to look at you, you narcissist.”
“Do you remember what you said to me the first time I got naked in front of you?” His voice, always a little raspy, has a fun lilt to it now because he’s making sure I can hear him over the murmur of the water.
“Yes.”
We side-eye each other and smirk.
“Such a dirty girl.”
“I just said what I was thinking. Don’t hate on me for my honesty.”
“You said I had a beautiful cock. Who says that?”
“Me, because you do. It’s not my fault.” I shrug.
He backs into the water again, shaking his head incredulously. Maybe he’s never believed that I think he has the most beautiful cock on the face of the earth. The foam from the soap he’s been rubbing all over him falls to the shower floor and slips down the drain. He’s smiling kind of enigmatically, somewhere between nostalgia, sadness, fun, and desire.
“I like you when you’re like this,” he admits. “Even when I’m trying to find the remote control to slow you down a little.” He turns the shower off.
He sluices off some of the water clinging to his skin with his hands. He turns around with a kind of pride. I don’t look down, but it’s there.
“I’m not looking at it,” I repeat.
“You’re smiling.”
“Of course I’m smiling.” I try to stifle a laugh. “You’re being a cocky jerk.”
“Big dick energy.” He raises his chin, like a tough guy. “Look at it.”
“No!” A giggle slips out. “Get out already.”
He opens the door to the shower, and I chuck a towel on him immediately. He cracks up. That laugh I like so much. That laugh that sounds like a fifteen-year-old boy with his bomber jacket and his hoop in his ear, flirting with the girl he likes. I take off my underwear and then my nightgown. I throw it all in the laundry basket, but he wastes no time grabbing the nightgown.
“Not this one.”
“You woke up all fired up, huh?”
“We’ll see, we’ll see.”
He dries his hair with the blow-dryer (he couldn’t be more vain, my God) while I take my shower. As soon as I finish, he’s waiting there with the towel open, making a big show of looking away, like he doesn’t want to see me.
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
He doesn’t answer. He just wraps me up, rubbing me gently with the soft, fluffy towel over my skin, tenderly. He has his wrapped around his waist, and…oof. I think decades could pass, trillions of years, before I got sick of his skin, his touch. Why did we touch each other and look at each other so little at the end of our relationship?
“Dry off, you wet rat. And then we’re going back to bed,” he says to me. “It’s Sunday, it’s raining, and there’s nothing better to do.”
“And what are we going to do in bed?”
“Umm…” He pretends to think about it. “Well, we’re going to…vibe.”
“Oh yeah. Talking is underrated.”
“You underrate it because you’re a pervert.”
It’s raining. A light rain, an almost velvety curtain of water caressing the windowpanes. If it were colder, it’s the kind of day Madrid would be covered in a layer of crunchy snow that would quickly turn into dirty water but that would drive many people out of their homes. We Madrilenos, who are not yet familiar with the ravages of Storm Filomena, get really hyped about the snow.
But today, it’s just raining, and Tristan and I have climbed back into bed to hide from Sunday under the cover of a duvet and my patterned sheets. Behind his back, I’m making a mental list of all the reasons I should stop loving him, but he’s shooting them down, one by one, with his fingertips trailing down my back. His breath becomes a light breeze lifting the short hairs on the nape of my neck. I can’t focus on anything except him.
“Do you know the freckles on your back look exactly like the Little Dipper?” My usual habit of breaking the silence.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s good?”
“Some things aren’t good or bad. They just are,” I declare.
“You think so?”
“Of course. Some things simply are. They exist.”
“Like what?”
“Like… I don’t know, for fuck’s sake. I mean…trees.”
“Trees are good. They’re great. We breathe because they produce oxygen, remember?”
I want to kill him and then devour him with kisses.
“Ay…” When he gets like this, it makes me laugh. “Fine, then birds, I don’t know.”
“I’m sure birds make up an important part of nature’s food chain.”
“Do you think there are natural predators in the middle of Madrid?”
“Sure,” he says, very focused on tracing shapes on my back. He’s only wearing boxers, and I’m in my nightgown.
“There are things that aren’t good or bad, Tristan, that’s it.”
“Like us?”
I crane my neck to peer at him over my shoulder. He’s smiling a little.
“What? I can’t say nice things to you?” he calls me out.
“I find it kinda surprising that you consider that nice.”
“Ah, no? I said ‘us.’”
“Oh.” I turn all the way around and widen my eyes. “Should I give you a round of applause?”
“You’re so feisty, you little minx,” he says, leaning over to kiss me. “But you make me wild.”
Okay. At least we can both agree on that. I don’t remember Tristan saying stuff like that. I had forgotten he could be so sweet.
“I make you wild?” I want to hear more.
“You drive me crazy.”
“Because I’m so complicated, right?”
“Weird as fuck. Luckily I’m weird too.”
“Sometimes I’m boring.”
“Yup.”
“And sometimes you are too. Especially your texts, when you’re not in the mood.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“What do you want, for me to tell you I like you?” he teases.
“It wouldn’t be so bad. To know that. To understand it.”
“What is it that you don’t understand?”
“What you see in me?”
He blinks in surprise.
“What’s that about?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never gotten it. You’re one of the hot ones. Hot people should stick with people from their own species.”
“And you’re not hot, right?”
“Don’t get it twisted. I’m other things.”
“Ah,” he cackles. “And I’m just hot.”
That makes me smile.
“Yes,” I lie. “Hot and vapid.”
“That sucks. I’d rather be interesting.”
“Well, sorry. You didn’t get that in the genetic lottery.”
At first, from his silence, I think he’s searching for a retort, something fast and quippy, but I suddenly realize that’s not it. No. Tristan has stumbled down a path to another thought, another feeling.
“Miranda…” he says a little more seriously, “you make me tingle.”
Ay, no. Please no.
“Shut up.” I cover his mouth with my hand. His soft, full mouth.
He pulls my hand away and repeats:
“You make me tingle. You tingle me. And that’s new. And I don’t know what it is.”
So what do I do now? What do I do now, when he cups my face in his hands and kisses my upper lip? What do I do when he looks me in the eyes?
“You don’t know what it is?”
“No. It’s like trying to tell someone I don’t know what color your eyes are. Because one day, they’re brown, then another, they look like the color of honey, and sometimes they’re crazy green.”
“Do you do that a lot? Tell people you don’t know what color my eyes are?”
“I talk about you sometimes,” he says in a quiet voice.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Stupid stuff you’d never believe. Stuff like my friend Miranda…”
“…makes me tingle?”
“No. Not that.” He smiles tenderly. “I keep that just for me. At least I keep it to myself until I know what it means exactly.”
“What could it mean, Tristan?”
“What’s going on? Do you know?”
“Yes.”
His expression shifts to a much more serious one. He takes a deep breath and stops stroking my face.
“You’ve always been scared to put a label on things,” I say. “I think you think that labeling something will make it fade faster. It makes it tangible, and tangible things…”
“…are at the mercy of time.”
My God, I want him so much.
“A table doesn’t hold less weight just because you call it a ‘table.’”
Tristan sucks his teeth and rolls onto his back; he rubs his hair with one hand, and with the other, he touches the thin chain he wears around his neck, normally hidden under his clothes.
“Clearly you’ve always been the one who takes the initiative,” he jokes.
“And that worries you.”
“It worries me that everything’s so clear to you, Miranda.” He turns back to look at me. “How hard you are, how you’re smarter than me, how you have this job you love, how you can never have enough sex, how sometimes I find sex instead of affection on your skin, how fast you accelerate, how you want to know when you’re going to see me, how…”
“If you were overwhelmed, all you had to do was say it, you know?”
“But I’m not.”
“You’re in love.”
He presses his lips together and doesn’t answer. He stares at the ceiling. I’m not scared of making a fool of myself, in case you were wondering; remember I have the advantage of knowing what I’m saying is true, even if he hasn’t figured it out yet.
“I don’t know what being in love means,” he says finally. “So I guess I can’t say you’re wrong, but I can’t say you’re right either. Is that okay?”
I smile.
“Ay, Tristan…”
He turns back to me.
“You’re the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last before I go to sleep. You’re on my mind from the courthouse to the firm and from the firm home. I open the fridge with you. I shower with you. I watch TV with you. All of it…and, hell, it’s not even the first time it’s happened to me, but it’s the first time it’s lasted more than two months.”
“You’re the king of jerks.” I smile.
“Boohoo, I already told you that.”
We both laugh.
“What if I am in love?”
“I don’t know, doctor, it seems serious.”
“Hey…” He gently whacks me on the arm. “I’m serious.”
“Well, if you are, it’s no big deal, because even though this is gonna make you have trouble swallowing, I am too, with you.”
Tristan swallows.
“We’re going to jinx it,” he says warily.
“No. Not at all.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Because even though I should be telling you the opposite to prevent what’s going to happen, I know what’s waiting for us.”
“Ah, the fortune teller.” He smiles, snuggling in closer and wrapping himself around me.
“We have some beautiful years ahead of us.”
“Years?”
“Yes. Beautiful. And hard.”
He seems to take what I’m saying very seriously.
“Hard?”
“Yes. You and I are very different, Tristan. It’s not gonna be easy.”
“But will it be worth the effort?”
A waterfall of incredibly vivid images rains down over me. The first time he held my hand on the street…probably the first time in the last twenty years of his life. The wild night of partying at that festival, in the summer, where we discovered that on top of wanting each other and loving each other, we’re the best companions in the world. The surprise trip I give him for his next birthday. The sex, all magnificent, wild, affectionate, and filthy. All the plans we’ll carry out and the ones we won’t, but they’ll serve as an engine for our thing. Him moving into my house. The honeymoon first few months of us living together. That trip to meet his family and the dawn on New Year’s Eve. The Vetusta Morla concert. Dancing at Rita’s wedding, in the pitch-black of the farm’s grounds, where noises echoed and bounced back to us so weakly.
I smile at him.
“I guess so. Yes. It’ll be worth the pain.”
I don’t know when I decide. I don’t know if it’s when I say it to him or when I feel his warm tongue in my mouth. Or if it’s when I feel how much talking about love turns him on. Maybe it’s when he shifts on top of me while he kisses me. Or when he pulls off my panties. Or I don’t know when, but I decide, here and now, that even if I am stuck in a loop, I’ve been fooling myself thinking this isn’t a gift. Maybe it took me a while to understand it or process it or chew it over, but finally I get it. Every morning, every new old day, I’m going to try. Because if this has any meaning, that must be it, it has to have a purpose. And that purpose must be fixing what broke for us one day.
Tristan pushes into me without a condom. It’s not my first time with him, but it’s his first time with me in this crazy timeline I’m living. He seems repentant and excited by what he’s doing…and surprised I’m not stopping him.
He pulls out of me, supporting his weight on the palms of his hands, pressing into the mattress on either side of my head, and looks at me, holding his breath and licking his lips. I don’t say anything, I just squirm, and he rams into me harder; a moan escapes his throat. Fuck, I never realized how hot his moans make me.
“I’m not wearing a condom,” he reminds me.
“Pull out before you come.”
Don’t judge me. I wouldn’t do it in any other situation; let me get carried away now that I have the advantage of knowing we’re both healthy. In January, we’ll do an exhaustive medical exam so we know everything’s fine and can decide what kind of contraception to use from there. I would have waited if I didn’t know everything was fine.
Tristan stares at me so intensely it makes his eyes look deeper. Darker. He says again that it’s impossible to tell anyone what color eyes I have, and that makes me laugh because that’s exactly how I feel about his. They aren’t brown or gray or green. Just murky. And on top of all that, sex makes them hungry and languid.
“God…” he growls, thrusting as deep as he can, burying his nose in my neck.
He grips my right thigh and pulls it up on his hip. Suddenly he’s much deeper and harder, and the feeling hijacks him. He loses himself in pleasure for a few minutes, pushing in and pulling out almost all the way, alternating between hard and slow thrusts. I let a scream escape from my throat when he starts pounding me rhythmically again. I let him, loving feeling him like this, so naked, accelerating until the sound of our skin smacking together fills the room.
“Don’t come, don’t come yet,” I say. “Slow down.”
“Why?” he groans.
“Because I haven’t come yet,” I remind him.
That makes us laugh. Sometimes that happens. It’s not that he’s egotistical; it’s just that pleasure clouds his brain. It’s just that he forgets the whole world. It’s just that he drifts far away, to a place where he believes that his pleasure and mine are so intertwined that it’s impossible I don’t feel the same as he does.
He flips me over roughly so I’m on top, and I move very slowly. He needs to relax.
“Don’t fuck with me,” he moans as he digs his fingers into the flesh of my hips. “Go faster…ah…faster…”
I obey a little, but only a little. He laughs. Sometimes pleasure makes Tristan laugh, but I don’t think he’s aware of it, which makes it even more special. I circle my hips faster and faster, and he takes advantage of each little jolt to grab my ass even harder.
“Like that, like that, like that…” he moans.
“Like this?” I tease him.
“Just like that.”
He closes his eyes, licks his lips, and looks up at me again. We don’t need words. What we suspected…now seems more like a certainty. Our flesh slapping together sounds sensual and wet. We’re sweating, but neither one of us wants to stop. I’m afraid we’re not always in control of our bodies.
We roll each other over a few times before he settles between my legs, him on top, and his hips speed up the thrusts inside me without asking permission. It’s the signal for me to touch myself. His thrusts are getting faster and more violent, and his breathing is getting shallower. I’m about to ask him to slow down when he pulls out of me in a rush and sprays all over my…nightgown. From my nightgown all the way down my chest to my thigh. From my nightgown to the sheet. From my nightgown to my thigh, from my thigh to the sheet.
“Shit…” he mutters as he comes, watching every drop shower over me. “Shit, fuck.”
My fingers are still playing with my clit, and suddenly they hit the right spot, and just like that, covered in come, him panting over me with his cock in his hand, I come until there’s nothing left of me but a sustained note on a pentagram. An off-key note, so high no one hears. A note that shatters a distant crystal vase with how hard it vibrates.
Maybe it’s true what my friend Marina says, that we’re all stupid and our clits fall in love every time we sleep with someone. Or maybe it’s a question of being on the same vibration with someone, fitting together, feeling like a membrane is splitting when your skin pulls away from their skin. I don’t know what it is, but I know that if there was any resistance left inside me to fight against this, it’s drowning in saliva, sweat, and semen now.
I’m going to get him back. Fuck it!