Loving You...

(1,493 words)

         The terrible feeling surged through her body, yet again. She clasped her right wrist, trying to contain that horrible throbbing that collected there. It wasn’t enough that today had been a bad day, no. It wasn’t ever enough for everything to be going wrong, she thought. And now this. Great.
         She picked up the phone and dialed his number. She couldn’t really stand the sight of him. He was ugly, yes, that was it. But she didn’t know where in his face he was ugly, or his body, and she didn’t know how he was ugly, there was just an ugliness about him. He was ugly in his being, that’s all she knew, and it collected on his face like a horrible mask. His ugliness was not on his skin but in the way he wore his skin. Like it didn’t belong to him.
         “Hello?”
         “Yes,” he picked up. “Who is this?”
         She did not respond.
         “Ellis? Is that you?”
         Hesitating, she began to stammer. “Yes, yes. It’s me, Rob. It’s…it’s happening again. I think I might need you to come over. The damn thing’s happening again.”
         He sighed on the other line. The way he sighed made her stomach squirm, and the way the rest of her body was feeling meant this  was not welcome.
         “Can you come or not? You said if I needed your help, if this happened again I could call you. Well, now I’m calling you and you don’t seem too eager at the idea of helping me. So if you’re not gonna help me just tell me and I’ll call someone else.”
         “Okay, okay. I’ll be there in a half an hour.” He hung up.
                   
         She sat huddled on her bathroom floor on the cold ceramic tiles. She wished she could lay her forehead on the cool ground but knew she’d have a hard time getting up again. Sitting down as it is was a compromise. She leaned her head back and thought again how much she disliked him. Every time she saw him, talked to him or even just heard about him her skin would crawl.  He was a parasite, she knew it. She leaned back and closed her eyes, and though the throbbing was pulsating throughout her body, causing her head to slightly bounce back and forth off the wall, she felt the fuzzy dizziness of sleep coming on and she succumbed, hoping to escape from the pain, even for just a moment.

And there, in the corner. Well. Wait. She was dreaming. A club, a nightclub. But the music was coming through muffled, like she was outside and the doors were closed. Though she was inside, and it seemed her vision was blurry. All she could see were shadows of figures dancing on the dance floor, and a girl with a purple dress, muddled purple dress with white heels, parading her lank body on the floor, dancing with the shadows. And there, in the corner, a snake-like creature. Not completely a snake it seems. As she was staring at its eyes, she could hear the music getting louder. All the bodies were dancing faster, faster and harder, the tempo of that muffled music was getting faster, and the music was getting louder and she continued to look, and as she was looking she began to sweat, and she was sweating and wiping the sweat from her brow and she looked down and saw her feet move so fast that she couldn’t see them moving, only their blur. And she was barefoot, and the ground felt cold like a cave floor. And she looked up at him, and the pounding beat made her dizzy, and the driving drums blurred her vision, and her eyes glazed over, as the sound kept pounding, pounding, pounding…
         
         “Ellis! Ellis!” Someone was at the door. Rob. “It’s me, Rob! You up?”
         She got up, slowly at first. Then the pain came rushing back. Her shoulder hurt the most, and then it sped down to her right hand. She keeled over from the pain. She stretched out her left arm and held on to the bathtub for support. “Yeah,” she squeezed it out. “I’m coming!” She slowly walked over to the door. She managed to unlock it, but the pain was gathering in her stomach again, swirling steadily, swirling and growing, throbbing, clawing at her insides. She only managed to open the door before the growing pain inside her stomach overwhelmed her and she fell into Rob’s unsurprised hands.

Her feet were hurting, but she kept on dancing, and it hurt until she cried, but she kept on dancing, even when the pounding of the beat was too much for her, the bass line too erratic to be pleasing. The snake eyes from the corner had moved and she saw its oily, crusted body gliding along the wall, feeling out the atmosphere with its fork-tongue. Suddenly, the snake stopped. It turned its head towards her. It moved over slowly. She couldn’t move, though her feet were moving faster than ever, dancing to the insane beat. It slid on slowly, approaching the tiny, inconceivable space between her feet, in between the rapidity of her stomping feet, the snake moved in. It curled up her calf, calm in the violence of her movements, soaking in the sweat of her body, and she saw as she was watching the snake that she was naked. It moved up slowly and, as it was about to jump onto her hand, she felt a cold splash on her forehead, and she awakened, wild-eyed, looking straight up at Rob.

         “How long was I out for?”
         He just looked at her and sighed. He walked away into the kitchen, bringing back a glass of water. He handed it to her as she struggled up.
         “Did you do it yet?”
         “No, Ellis,” he replied, holding back his impatience, “you have to be awake for me to do it.” He rubbed his wide right hand across his face, scratching at his stubby beard. As he did this, he looked down, and with the light in her bedroom directly above him, it made his eyes appear hollow. He had a protruding brow line, she noticed, but she still couldn’t find his ugliness.
         She took a quick sip from the glass. “Okay. I’m ready.”
         He sighed. “Okay.”

         He sat down on the bed, his back towards her, as he removed his shoes.
         “Why don’t you look at me?”
         He turned his head slightly and raised his eyebrows, but didn’t respond. She looked at his neckline, the degree of the shoulders, the shape of his head. But nothing really ugly.
         She closed her eyes. The pain was coming back. “Come on, quickly.”
         He didn’t rush. She couldn’t tell exactly, but she felt like he was smiling. That made him uglier, and she wished she could smack the smile off his face. But she wasn’t strong enough. Afterwards, maybe.
         He had by now removed his shirt, undershirt, and was working on his belt. She was growing impatient, because it felt like the sickness was scratching at her insides, like it was tearing at the walls of her stomach.
         He stood up and pulled off his jeans. He turned around and moved on top of the bed toward her. There was nothing sultry in his movement. It was only tired, though predator-like. An old, worn predator. He pulled apart her bathrobe and laid his head on her chest, then went about the business of penetration.
         Because that is all that it was, though she couldn’t explain away the addiction, the affliction of it all. She hated his thrust, his sweat, as her body clung to his, the nails gripping his skin in demonic affection, pained by its own surrendering, its own descent into a death-embracing ritual. The ritual was the death that she felt, which, she knew, was the anti-feeling. It was death because she didn’t feel anything at all. Just a reaffirmation of her own nothingness. And, oh, how ugly it was. She clung onto his skin, around his mechanical thrust, the sweat from her body glazing his, an oily sheen as the pair danced in the moribund unison. As she closed her eyes and felt him, she could only feel his ugliness, his ugliness on her, her ugliness, and she could not know why she needed him, and she could not know why he would submit to her so readily, so timidly. His exhalations grew rapidly then stopped, and she imagined herself that under his breath he had uttered, “I hate you.”
         In her mind though, where she felt most ugly, there where she was hidden, naked, exposed, she knew she loved him beyond all reason, her love that made him ugly, that defeated his pride, her love that loved itself, that dangerous love, self-fulfilling and all-consuming, and as the pain she felt subsided, she realized it was eternal, and she hated him again.