Chapter 35
Tristan stood on the stoop of a terra-cotta townhome.
His eyes followed me to his door, which he held open with his body.
As I passed, I smelled an ocean-inspired cologne different from his usual one.
A fresh, bright fragrance. My skin grew hot imagining his fingers dancing around his bathroom cabinet, searching for the right scent.
I followed him up a steep staircase that groaned under our feet.
A skylight poured moonlight onto the hallway floorboards.
His unit was at the top. He had to perform some aggressive, complicated ritual to unlock his door.
“Sorry,” he muttered. Flecks of sweat on the back of his T-shirt seemed to have appeared since my arrival. I could tell he was nervous.
We found ourselves in a small open-plan room: living room, toy kitchen, study nook.
He went to the fridge. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Cool. Want something to drink then?” He nodded at a corduroy couch that looked like it had seen a million asses. “Feel free to sit.”
I slipped off my shoes, tucking my leg underneath me on the sofa. “Do you have champagne?”
“For once, I actually do.”
“Sorry I didn’t bring anything.”
He returned from the kitchen with wine and a canned beer. “You’re good. It was last minute.”
Flopping on the sofa, he lifted an arm over its back. T-shirt slouching off him, neck muscles tightening when the beer went down. Even on the opposite end of the couch, he felt too close.
“So,” I said. “Why are you alone tonight?”
“I wasn’t in the mood to go out.”
I realized I was going to have to be more direct. “Where’s Nia?”
“New York.”
I marveled at the kind of woman who abandoned her boyfriend on New Year’s Eve and just went to New York.
I pictured her sporting a fur coat in Times Square, Technicolor lights flashing across her face.
I felt a shiver of guilt. Jay’s face, open and vulnerable, thumbs catching my tears. I looked at my phone. Still nothing.
“Why didn’t you go with her?” I asked.
Tristan paused. “We’re kind of in a weird place right now.” He added, “Also, have you been to New York? It’s cold as fuck.”
He turned the TV on. I half expected CNN to be playing. He asked what I wanted to watch. I said I didn’t know, so we just stared in silence as he scrolled through endless streaming options. Eventually he gave up and got another beer.
His back still to me, he said, “When do I get to read your novel?”
“Never.”
“C’mon. Really?”
“Deadass.”
He returned to the couch, sitting closer.
“When do I get to read your dissertation?”
“I dunno, like I said, like, six years. I might be dead by then though.”
“What do you wanna do after school? I never asked.”
“Teach.”
I smiled. “Really?”
“What? I don’t look like a professor to you?” He swiveled his neck to flash me his ironic Patrick Star tattoo, drawn with a child’s wobbly hand.
“No.”
He laughed. “Seriously, you can ask Jay.”
I could tell we both felt uncomfortable. He reached down to lift his pant leg and scratched his ankle.
“We’re actually on a break.”
If he felt anything about this, he didn’t show it. “Damn. I’m sorry.”
“I mean, maybe it’s not a real break.”
“Okay?”
“I mean, I don’t know. He wants to close the relationship but…”
“Ah.” He said this like Jay hadn’t probably told him.
“I already know how you feel about that.”
He looked at me innocently. “I didn’t say anything.
” But I could tell he thought it, that what Jay wanted from me was normal, that I was the one wanting something foreign and dangerous.
I was grateful he held his tongue. It was hard enough trying to climb this hill at the same time I was deciding whether I was willing to die on it or not.
“We’re attached to each other so I just… I don’t know what to do, like.” I dropped my face into my hands, overwhelmed, about to cry, before gathering myself and playing it off by rubbing my cheek.
Tristan reached out to touch me before withdrawing his hand and placing it on the back of his neck. “Seven years is a long time to be with someone.”
“What’s your longest relationship?”
He paused. “Three years. But yeah, seven is a millennium to me. Like I said, I might be dead.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Fine.” He scooted toward me. My body clamped with anticipation, but he stopped, dropping his head down, looking up at me with big, liquid eyes.
“Can I ask you something personal?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
I picked up my wineglass, turning it in my hand. “Would you call yourself depressed?”
He paused. “Not at this moment. But I have depression, yeah. If that’s what you mean.”
“I’m sorry. That was probably insensitive.”
“It’s fine. I don’t have a problem talking about it.”
“I think my dad’s depressed.”
“Has he talked to anyone?”
“Like a therapist?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
I stared at the slight wrinkle in his forehead to avoid his eyes. “Do you talk to someone?”
“Every week.” He smiled crookedly. “And I’m on drugs.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Being on drugs?”
He was trying to make me laugh, so I gave him my laugh. “Being depressed.” When he didn’t respond right away, I said, “Is that a dumb question?”
“No. I was just thinking. I don’t even know if I could explain it.”
He set his beer on the coffee table and thought for a long time. Outside, partygoers shouted on the sidewalk before the street went quiet.
“You’re a good student,” he began. “You have lots of friends, you want things—to learn, teach, that girl in your political philosophy class, you want her bad. Then one day, you’re just tired.
Not sleepy, tired. You don’t want anything.
Not to teach, not the girl, only the comfort of your bed, which no longer comforts you.
You’re always crying. You didn’t even know you had that much water in your body.
You were never good at biology.” He laughed. “Your friends drop by—”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple sliding up his throat.
“They want to see you, but you can’t stomach seeing them.
You know you love them on some level but you can’t feel that love.
You can’t answer the girl from seminar’s calls and she stops calling.
Everyone stops calling. You have no history, no future.
Your life is no longer a story, but a series of empty actions that don’t add up to anything.
You’re only this moment and it’s the most painful moment of your life. ”
His voice fell off a ledge. I recalled Nia saying he’d left school and wondered if this was why. Like a coward, I failed to meet his eyes.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he said. “That was too much.”
“No, no. I asked you to tell me and you did. Thank you.”
After a long pause, he said, “Jay didn’t stop calling. That’s why this feels so bad.”
I nodded. “I can leave.”
I felt bad too. Wretched. But stirred into this wretchedness was a want I had no command over. A want that split me in two: One of me was running home to call Jay. The other stayed, crawling into Tristan’s lap.
“I don’t want you to leave,” Tristan said finally. “I want you to come here.”
My stomach clenched, anxious with expectation.
I moved clumsily toward him. He straightened against the sofa to welcome my weight as I straddled him.
From this angle, his face was funny. He looked like a hungry, hormonal teenager.
All the intimidation of his hoop earring, fuck-you tattoos, antidepressants faded into this counterimage: him as nervous, needy, thrusting up at me through his jeans with adolescent impatience.
Holding the back of my neck, he drew my mouth to his.
He was sucking on my bottom lip, letting it pop wetly back into place, while I wrestled with his belt with irrational anger, fantasizing about taking the faux leather into the teeth of a pair of scissors.
He laughed, easily unlatching the buckle with his free hand, sending it flying across the room, metal snapping against the wall.
He fought my jeans down to my ankles and propped my bare ass in the air before proceeding to run his tongue over me like an animal.
I was facing the window but: What the hell was even out there?
There was only his tongue fucking me in here, only his dick springing up to greet me when I bent over to peek between my legs (Hi!).
My head went limp on the sofa arm the way it did on a roller coaster the moment I surrendered to the insane fall.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” I said, robbed of my $50,000-a-year vocabulary because of a man.
What was feminism when you were getting fucked?
He flipped me over, not letting me up for air, flattening his tongue against my clit.
A strangled sound clawed its way out of my throat, and my hips chased his mouth.
Two of his fingers found their way inside me, digging out more ruined sounds.
Possessed, I rose from my cunnilingus grave to mount him like a motorcycle I was ready to drive off a cliff.
“My condoms are in my room,” he said.
We both looked at his bedroom door. It was so far away. How were we going to make it to his bedroom without fucking first?
He lifted me over his shoulder with dramatic resolve and carried me to his bedroom like a whore-bride.
We collapsed, kissing on his mattress. Impatient, I took his pink head and ran it over my slit. He groaned, “Jesus, not yet, not yet,” reaching for a gold metallic square on his nightstand, tearing it with his teeth like every sex education video instructed you not to.
Once it was on him, gleaming, plastic, he sidled beside me. “Are you ready for me, baby?”
“What? Hurry the hell up!”
He laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. My body was one big heartbeat about to fail. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a stroke (“twenty-four-year-old Catherine Elise St. Clair, a DC native, died on New Year’s Eve over some dick she wasn’t even supposed to be getting”).
He entered me, clamping his eyes shut. I wrapped my legs around him like I was going to fall off him if I didn’t.
Now he was the one saying, “Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” and feminism was back in business.
He twisted his fingers into my waist, raising me to meet him.
He was louder than I thought he’d be. It occurred to me that people could hear us, which sent a thrill down my spine.
I was making threats now: I was going to suck him, and take him, and finish him, and milk him.
He fed words into my mouth you could say only from inside someone (“Clench around me, squeeze it all out of me, fuck, like that, like that”).
I briefly saw our bodies from across the room, rabid, drunk-looking.
I reached up and ripped the cross from his neck with my teeth.
So much for never taking it off. I thought he was going to get upset.
Instead, he grinned, bending down to tongue the slippery metal out of my mouth and spit it across the room like a fucking forest pagan.
This was what Jesus died on the cross for, so this man could slurp it out of my mouth.
“Fuck, I’m gonna come.” He kissed my collarbone. “Turn around.”
I thought he was going to finish on my back, but, with a firm hand, he pushed me flat against the mattress.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
I must’ve sounded panicked, because he paused. “You want to stop?”
My eyes closed. I thought of Jay’s chest pressed to my back. But Tristan’s knuckles kneading my waist reminded me what I wanted then. “Keep going.”
I felt him smiling against my cheek before he sucked his thumb and slipped it in my ass.
I knew it was over then.
In a sweet, patient voice he told me to let it out, that’s his girl, just like that, give it all to Daddy, good fucking girl.
I cried, exhausted, delighted, like I’d actually accomplished something.
The people next door bellowed, “Happy New Yearrr!” as Tristan wrapped an arm around my stomach, lifting me flush against his chest (“Sure hope 2025 is better than 2024, what a shithole of a year”), slamming, buckling (“Sharon, this sparkling cider is delicious!”), grunting like a pig stuck in a mudslide (Anderson Cooper: “Happy New Year from CNN!”), falling, finally, forward with all his deadweight on top of me.
I was afraid to look at him. When I rolled over, though, he looked the same, curls slick with coconut oil, back slightly hunched, shiny with sweat. He peeled off the wet condom and slapped it on the floor in an act of shocking barbarism. Then he swung his legs on the bed and cradled my face.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I just died.”
He laughed, pushing away the hair stuck to my forehead. “You came like a good girl.”
I was wet all over again.
“But what I mean is, do you feel bad? I feel awful.” He paused. “I feel like I should be feeling worse though.”
“I feel awful too.” I touched his sweaty cheek. “But to say I regret it would be a lie.”