And the part where you told me what you did, about going out on your balcony…

  Oh, Christ, that was the end of me. The most pathetic and homely sound fell out of my mouth, like an ehhgghn from the top of my throat, and I cried way more. It was so sudden and so alarming, and I tried to rub the tears away like they were wasps. I don’t know who I was afraid would see.

  Why cry at all, though? Why not jump up and pump a fist toward the ceiling in triumph, because HOLY SHIT THAT IS A BIG FUCKING DEAL YOU’RE AMAZING.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was seriously proud of you. But I think it was humility I was feeling, or some kind of personal pride that made me cry. Because I think you’re saying that I had something to do with you deciding to do that, to step out on that balcony and let the world roar its silence at you, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been that for someone. Whatever the word is.

  “Inspiring” sounds so fucking narcissistic.

  “Motivating” is just douchey.

  But whatever it is, it made me cry to think I could be that for somebody. I don’t know if I was crying because that felt so good, to be that for you, or because I was ashamed to have never been that for anyone before now.

  Anyhow, there’s my dark and tortured masculine mystique shot to shit. Never fear, I’ll get it together by the time 10pm rolls around.

  Right. Two bites of ice cream does not a well-balanced lunch make, so I better figure something out before the boy wakes up.

  Later, I’ll be rereading your texts from early this morning.

  And figuring out precisely what it is I want to do with you next.

  In the meantime, tell me about your childhood.

  I’m not asking for a banquet here, just a few forkfuls. What was your first pet, or what was the view out of your bedroom window? Did you like to jump in puddles, and if so, what color were your boots?

  Anything. Anything at all.

  3.33pm

  Now I don’t know whether to be happy or annoyed at myself. I forgot that you had asked me not to give you any hang-in-theres. The urge to tell you how amazing I think you’re doing just took over my fingers, and I couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

  Call it excitement over the balcony.

  Adrenaline or something.

  Though I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t love knowing that it was encouraging in some way. That they made you feel so much, and part of the feeling was pride. Because you should be proud.

  Of what you’re doing for him. Of what you’re doing for me.

  You are doing something for me, Malcolm. I don’t know what it is either, but I can tell it’s there. I wake up more hopeful about what the day might bring. More excited about my life, because now I know my life can have something in it. I can talk to someone without smashing to pieces and feel pleasure without following it up with guilt or shame.

  Even the thought of you going away doesn’t terrify me like I thought it would.

  Though I hope you take that the right way.

  I don’t ever want you to feel like I couldn’t be without you.

  But oh, I would love you to stay.

  3.44pm

  Damn, I keep skipping your questions. I got as far as thirty seconds into MasterChef before I realised. But in my defense, there always seems to be so much to say. It’s easy to miss things out, even if I don’t mean to.

  Or maybe I mean to a little, when it comes to childhood.

  Even though your questions brought up so many sweet memories. I had red wellingtons, as bright and glossy as glace cherries. And I loved them so much that I actually hated puddles. I avoided them so my lovely boots could stay looking so pretty. No marks on them, no streaks of mud. Just two perfect little jewels, always waiting for me by the front door.

  Instead of the usual series of hand-me-downs and things worn to a thread.

  And I never had a pet.

  Pretty glad about that now.

  What about you? Tell me your favourite thing from childhood.

  6.22pm

  I should have known better than to ask.

  With every question, I keep expecting to learn something about you, to get a solid, tangible answer I can hold in my hands, a new shard of a vessel I’m trying to piece together to contain you.

  But every answer only hatches a hundred more questions and leaves you somehow more nebulous than ever. Like maybe this pot is as big as a pyramid, and even a bathtub full of shards can’t help me.

  That’s not a criticism, though. I’m not annoyed, and I’m not going to pry. Not just yet. For now, I’ll take what I can get and turn your eerie, beautiful, melancholy little details this way and that in the light, and enjoy them for the puzzle pieces they are.

  As for me, my favorite thing from childhood…

  I have a lot. I have tons.

  I could say my grandma’s pool.

  I could say Super Mario Kart.

  I could say driving out near Sandia in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers.

  I could say a hundred things, but looking back it’s hard not to say my mom. Maybe that’s because I lost her a couple years ago, or maybe it’s simply because she’s there, in just about every good memory I have. Even Mario Kart. (She was always Donkey Kong, which I thought was pretty badass for a girl.)

  I had a happy enough childhood. My parents were married, and they did a decent job. It was just me, no siblings, but they didn’t spoil me.

  My dad and I were never super close. He’s not a bad guy, just one of those men who struggle to relate to kids. Even his own. He’s … odd. Even as a child I knew it. I worried when I was younger that I might be weird like him, like I could inherit it the way I had his eyes. Probably has everything to do with my old need to pass for cool.

  But we did have good times. He’s an astronomy nerd, so he’s the one who wanted to drive out to the mountains at one in the morning on a school night to see the meteors or a lunar eclipse or whatever planet was orbiting extra close to the Earth. I was mostly in it for the hot chocolate and some bank shot facsimile of his attention, but I liked it okay, too.

  It always felt like his telescopes were way more interesting to him than me, but he didn’t land me in therapy or anything. And I can still identify a fuckload of constellations, which has got to be a dying art.

  Since my mom died, he and I almost never talk, if only because we got lazy, relying on her to pass the phone and spur our few yearly conversations. I call on his birthday and Father’s Day, but to be honest, I’m always a little relieved if it goes to voicemail and I can just leave a message.

  It’s embarrassing how little we have to say to each other. Sometimes I wonder if he maybe has Asperger’s. It would make me feel better to find out he’s awkward with me because of that and not because there’s something inherently broken about us as a unit.

  But my mom was amazing. I’d say my best childhood memory was the day I woke up and she told me I was sick.

  She just announced I was “sick” and that I didn’t have to go to school, and that we could do anything I wanted for the entire day.

  I was really young, so it probably bleeds over into other memories, but I know for sure I asked for water balloons. There’s nothing as good as pelting your mom with a water balloon. And I know we went to McDonald’s and she let me order off the grown-up menu, and I got the meal with two cheeseburgers.

  That was the day I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the theater, even though she had to know it was way too scary for a seven-year-old. My friends were all so jealous. It was righteous, as we said in those days.

  Looking back, I wonder if that happened just after she got sick for the first time. It would have been the same year, I think. She always got a little impulsive and sort of … aggressively fun when there was a recurrence. Maybe my sick day was actually her sick day.

  I wish she was here, so so badly. Alive, of course, but also here, with me. I wish the boy could meet her. I wish she’d be here five years from now, when he’s seven, to inform him he’s sick and take him out to some righteously age-inappropriate matinee in the middle of a school day.

  That’s probably my biggest wish. What’s yours, stranger?

  Talk again once the boy’s asleep. I’ve got a penne bake to assemble and a toddler to bathe and bedtime songs to sing to the world’s least enthusiastic audience.

  6.55pm

  I feel terrible for not wanting to talk about it a lot—of not knowing how to talk about myself a lot—because I love hearing your details so much. I just want to go over all of them and ask you what this one felt like and what happened after that. But it doesn’t seem fair when I only offer shards in return.

  So I’m going to try. Maybe start with Mario Kart.

  Because oh I love love loved it too. I was only friends with a girl in my year so I could play it. And I was good at it. I could nail anyone with a green shell or a banana—and I was never ever sorry. In fact, it was the one thing that I didn’t care about hurting feelings over.

  Feel my blue shell of death you turd licker was a common refrain of mine, for those afternoons at Lindy Potter’s house.

  Man, I lived for those afternoons.

  I would have probably lived for afternoons at your house, too. Playing games and eating burgers and water balloon fights. Even the stargazing sounds amazing—all of it like all of my daydreaming about being a kid in some warm American suburb. Back then I devoured films and books about ballparks and bubblegum and picket fences. I was Ramona Quimby and Stacey from the Baby-Sitters Club.

  Hell, I was the murdered girl in a Point Horror novel over being myself. Being dead there seemed infinitely better than being alive where I ended up.

  Though of course I know none of that’s really true. I totally get that it was just a fantasy, and the reality isn’t any different. Or at least the pain isn’t any different when something terrible happens. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have had those things with your Mom and then lose her. Or to be so close to something like a great relationship with your Dad, and then so far.

  I don’t know if I would want it, knowing that it could be so easily taken away.

  I’m so sorry you had to go through it.

  Can that be my wish, to wish you hadn’t?

  9.54pm

  That’s just how it is, I guess. Good things come, and eventually they leave us. Or sometimes we leave them first. Sometimes we even get a chance to say goodbye.

  A part of me wants to promise you that I’ll never leave, that I’ll always pick up this phone, but only a liar can make that promise. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. I could waste away from cancer when I’m sixty-two. I can only be here now.

  That’s something I have to say to myself a lot these days—that I’m here now.

  I lug a lot of shame around, knowing I didn’t come over the second I found out I had a son. I knew about him for seven months before I came. Knowing what I do now, it’s like a knife between my ribs.

  If I’d come, and if I’d seen what state he’s in. I could have spared him seven months of only god knows what. Seven months it might take him seven extra years of therapy to get over, for all anyone knows.

  But there’s no such thing as time machines, and, in the end, no such thing as wishes, so all I’ve got is that mantra. I’m here now.

  I do have my dad to credit for one thing—he’s making me a better father, myself. If only because I’m determined to give the boy what my dad couldn’t seem to give me. I’m always on the floor, on the grass. Always itchy to show him I’m here, let’s play. Let’s do kid stuff. Let’s do you stuff. Whatever that might be.

  I’m living for the day he comes over while I’m messing with his blocks or his toy bulldozer and finally decides to join in. I have to believe it’ll happen. If I didn’t, I don’t think I could get out of bed.

  Okay, stranger, this is heavy shit. But you know what? It’s after ten. I’m going to leave you momentarily to pour myself a drink and reread your message from earlier, reset my head. And after that, I promise I’ll make it worth the wait.

  10.15pm

  You said it thrilled you, the idea of torturing me. Can I confess something, stranger?

  You already are.

  I’m suffering. I haven’t come since before we first discovered each other. Not even with your fantasies setting me on fire, getting me hotter than anything I’ve ever read or seen or heard or felt before.

  I couldn’t.

  I nearly did any number of times, but then…

  I didn’t want to come, then find your words still glowing on my screen in the aftermath, seeming utilitarian as porn. I couldn’t bear to cheapen them like that. They mean too much.

  And perhaps even more than that, I haven’t wanted the ache to end.

  How does that make you feel, to know I’m so hard and so frustrated it physically hurts? That you’ve done that to me. That you’re the only one who can fix it.

  I know how it makes me feel. Helpless. Alive. Desperate. Electric.

  All thanks to you.

  So what I want is this—come back to the fantasy with me. Where we left off, after I made you come.

  I want you on my lap, eager and frantic, only face to face this time. I want to feel you claim me, easing down slowly, savoring. Discovering what it feels like, taking a man inside you.

  I want to think you’re about to end my torment, to feel the slick, flushed heat of you working me, to revel in the fact that I made you this lush and tight, and now I’m about to claim my reward.

  I assume it’s my turn. That it’s only a matter of time. That you’re an angel, sent to save me from this hurt.

  Then you put your lips to my ear, and you say, “You don’t come until I tell you to.”

  Something moves through me at those words, a shiver made of fire. A fever as cold as ice. I don’t understand. You’re riding me hard, and I’m so close. It’s been days and days and days and I’m so. Fucking. Close. I say, “What?”

  “Don’t you dare come until I say you can.”

  I always knew we were playing a game, stranger, but the rules have changed. You’ve changed. There’s mischief and cruelty in your voice, and it has me as hot as the waiting or the strokes of your pussy or the smell of your own satisfaction in this room.

  I want nothing more than to lose control, end this maddening ache. Grab your hips and force the motions, quench my cock and shoot you full of me, make a mess of the both of us.

  But even more than that … I want to be obedient.

  I know you’ve got more in store for me. Your hands or your mouth, your words and your plans for my suffering.

  You’re going to test me, and I can’t guess what the punishment could be for disappointing you.

  I nearly want to find out.

  But not as much as I want to please and abide by you.

  I don’t know, I don’t know. My mind is on fire, and all I know for sure is how badly this hurts.

  So now you go next.

  Tell me how you’d test me.

  10.48pm

  You asked me who the fuck I am. The truth is—I don’t know when you start talking about all this sex stuff. It’s like a switch flicks inside me, and suddenly I’m filthier than I ever thought I could be. It’s like my arousal has been walled up, and now you’re poking holes in it. Cracks are starting to appear. Things are pouring through.

  Like how much I want to do what you just told me to.

  How did you know that I would want to do what you just told me to?

  I read the words couldn’t and hurt and don’t you dare and test, and my body went wild. I had to stop before I returned your text, just so I could properly control the things I said.

  But I can feel them spilling out anyway. I want to make fists in your hair—hold you there while I take what I need. Then just as you get desperate, just as you’re ready to beg, I would stop. Maybe pull those handfuls until you’re not sure if it hurts or thrills you.

  I think it would thrill you.

  Tell me that it would thrill you.

  Tell me that you would beg me to continue, and when I did that you would just want me to stop. I can almost hear the words it’s way too much, hissed between your gritted teeth. See you panting and shivering with long held back pleasure. Hear you gasping as you fight for some control.

  But I don’t want you to control yourself, my Malcolm.

  I want you to break down. Be a mess for me.

  Is it wrong to want you to be a mess for me?

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it’s better if I don’t say.

  You say now, instead.

  10.57pm

  Yes, it thrills me. All of it. Every last word. Every single fucking goddamn pixel.

  It thrills me to know I have that power to tear holes in your armor. Thrills me to surrender that power in the same breath and kneel cowering before you, happy to beg.

  Thrills me to think about those fists in my hair. To think of you using my body.

  Thrills me beyond reason to see you call me yours. Your Malcolm.

  Thrills me to imagine being the mess you so want to see, the one you must ache to reduce me to as badly as I ache for the relief. Handy how those two desires dovetail, don’t you think?

  But before I tell you exactly how it is you break me down and rip me apart, finally end all of this torture, I have one final question for you.

  You have to answer it.

  You can lie, but you have to answer.

  The thing is,

  I’m hurting.

  I’m desperate.

  I’m begging.

  Yet I don’t even know whose feet I’m cowering at.

  And so my question is,

  what’s your name?

  11.18pm

  Is that the price I have to pay before you tell me? The toll before I get to go down that road of ripping and tearing and whatever else you want me to do? I’d say that seems unfair, but I know it isn’t. I don’t even know why I haven’t told you. What makes me hold back things.

  Tell me your name.

  Oh god. I don’t think I can talk to you like this. I don’t think I can do this.

 

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