It's a last resort, and I know it. My predicament is piteous; it's not that I'm really desperate, more like helplessly determined. Sometimes I think I'm just confused; perhaps it's the challenge of the whole thing. I cannot make a man love me. I cannot make a man want to be with me. My only hope is that can at least make him want to fuck me. I don't think that will ever be enough for me, though-- just sex, being simply two friends who happen to occasionally have sex. I've tried everything from talking to him, to writing, to calling, and even ignoring him. I think the ignoring part feeds him. He only seems to pop back in line with a more fervent presence. As soon as I'm rid of him mentally, there he is, sitting in my living room, ringing my phone, hanging out in a bar with me drinking beer, listening to music, dancing close, holding me, falling into bed.

"No matter what, we have to still be able to hang out," he says after we've made love and lolled in his bed for hours dozing, and simply breathing in one another's mien, "We still have to be able to be friends. It's really important to me."

"Of course," I say, fully believing I'll be able to put him out of my mind as soon as he shuts the door behind me to shower off his own sticky cum, my savory spit, and our mutual sweat. Instead, I grab his pillow and I breathe in his smell. Instead, I lie there recounting seconds of time spent in long, drawn-out slow motion replays. Instead, I stupidly fall in love. I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. I loathe myself for putting me through this misery even as I revel in the dreamy high of post-coitus endorphins.

It's hard when you are in love with the person inside the man, and also in love with his body, his cock, his very smell. Why couldn't his body have been scented oddly wrong: to have happened to produce chemically incompatible pheromones? His cock should have been designed plain, and not so oddly, perfectly upwardly curved, so delicious to my lips, full inside my mouth, and so fulfilling to my loins. He's centered to my target, prone to my G-spot, aimed right at my heart and soul. I could come just thinking about it...

It would be easier to forget making love to him if his hands upon my body were not so gentle and careful, and yet, still strong. It would be easier to forget him were not his words so compassionate, sentimental, and at times, even soulful. It would be easier to stop remembering him if he wasn't such a substantial person, so full of insight and interest and the serendipity of random surprise. I get taken in by his sudden bursts of insight, I get wrecked by a tiny secret indulgently shared, I swoon after stumbling upon all the little specialnesses of him found in a careless burst of drunken or unchecked enthusiasm.

Oooh, and I love his neck! It's the most biteable neck on earth. I could get lost in the muscles and curves, linger there to taunt his ears and lavish his lobes with kisses and tiny flicks of my tongue, lap at his throat and revel in the feeling of his coarse stubble scraping my tender cheeks. I could bury myself in his shoulders: hide away from life and pain and even love, float inside a world of tactile sensations suspended above anything real, nothing other than his smell, his skin, his touch. 

I wonder if he cares about me at all, if he thinks of my affections, too. I laugh out loud, mocking my own choice in men: unavailable, aloof, unwanting. He tells me he doesn't think of me much. Maybe he'll surprise me for real and finally love me, too. I sigh aloud, "There's just no way," I mutter to no one, surprising myself at the determination behind my new motto, "He'll never love me." I need to memorize this line. I need to repeat, to chant, to sing this chorus. I need to really believe it.

If only he would be mean or ugly or bad! Why does he have to be so close to me, such a true friend? His good words often influence me, even though I have been repeatedly spurned by the same mouth, different letters, different sounds. Perhaps my delusions of his love stem from his nearly constant non-verbal invitations, his openness, his ever-invested presence. He says outright, he tells me, "don't love me," but in his embrace there transmits all the power and warmth of a man madly in love: moonstruck for my attentions, for the heat of intimate and personal touch. What surfaces from him and then channels through me as we embrace, or dance, or kiss, is not something based on friendship, nor is it something based simply upon lust. Yet, it is simple. It is true. Why is love so bad, so wrong for him?

I cannot imagine why he doesn't want me, no matter how hard I try. He tells me, "I just don't want anyone to care for me that much." Is this his form of living suicide? I have felt the pangs of sorrow and the longing for quickest death in my darkest depressions, but I have never, ever felt the need to remain uncared for and unloved. What makes him so frightened of me? What makes him so afraid of love? 

As a final mental effort, I daydream of a way to lure him, then to enchant him, to saturate his thoughts with my sensual fragrance, to charismatically beckon him with the scent of my rich perfume, to imbue his thoughts with the smell of my cunt, and to force his mind to hunger for my laughter hanging at his lips, needing me as my voice descends upon his ears, making him lust for me. Somehow I want to be suddenly available to his psyche, to fall right into his open heart. Oh, to have him pliable, to make him want me, too! I know it is useless thinking, hoping and dreaming the impossible, but still I do, I really do. And so tonight I have a little daydream, and in it I'm irresistible:

The blackness of the velvet hood matches my choice of hair color this night. It surrounds my too white face with a soft shadowy halo of fabric, flows from the cape that clasps at my neck with a silk-braided Chinese frog. I pucker my plush red-velvet lips, and smile because I know he wants to fuck me in this straight black, blunt cut wig.

He once asked me not to take off the wig, the night when we very first made love. Well, he didn't exactly ask; he seemed surprised when I removed it, when I offered my natural mess of ash curls. I didn't listen to him. I didn't pay attention. I was busy. Then, I didn't have the same regrets as I do now. Then, I had a mission: to get laid, plain and simple. His scent had me dripping. His cock was hard beneath his baggy pants as he pressed himself close to me while we danced in the bar to the crooning, love-lorn Patsy Cline. I drowned myself with Vodka in seven different ways just to get up the nerve to ask him to kiss me. But a kiss is never enough for me, now is it? A kiss is like an invitation to my pussy. My sugar walls begin to drip and flow and expect to be made love to as soon as a man's lips meet mine. And, oh... that smell. That smell of a man who wants me. I begged him to take me home. Me begging? Yes. I was not ashamed. I was mad with lust and drunk as a whore. 

Tonight, in my dream, I beg in a different way. I beg with my body instead of my voice: I've worn a special outfit just for him. He does not know this. Tonight I have a new vision, a new focus. To fall in love, or rather, to be loved, and then to be made love to by him. Is beauty really only skin deep? We'll see. The red glitter I've applied around my blue-green eyes gives a strange shimmering impression to the sights in my peripheral vision. It's almost like tripping, but that's as far as the special effect goes, it just makes me pretty, and makes lights dance, look sparkly to me. My black nails, too, sparkle a little with a silver frost only on the very tips. I bite my lip then smile, wickedly. I am making myself perfect through my envisionment of folly.

I know he's always wanted a little Goth chick in his bed, in his dreamscape, in his masturbatory play world. How do I know? I'm not a vampire, nor a psychic-- I'm a woman plain and simple, and a woman in love/lust can easily see what a man she wants sees. She only needs to open her eyes, to see through his. She only needs him to want her the way he wants other women.

I see the soft sighs of which he is so unconsciously unaware whenever certain ladies or girls pass him on the streets in the Quarter. I see the longing, the almost regretful frown when he looks at a certain type of girl-- he knows in his head she won't look twice at him. No, she won't even look once, I watch him consider. I see him as he sees himself in that moment: the invisible man, or worse, the pathetic nerd, the loser. I see him ponder futility, matching up odds with actual moments of strength. I see him calculate those odds in a nanosecond and finally give up. I watch him grow more aloof, even more invisible. I watch him disappear. Oh, but I'm here...

Tonight, I will appear to him. Tonight I won't disappear; my new visibility will hearken to him, will draw him out, will make him see me. I, who am tired of being the invisible watcher at his side: I will become his dream girl, his wicked temptress. I will raise the odds, even the score. I will have him with me once again, at least I'll be in his bed once more. Just watch me.

Can I compete with all the young things? The piercings, the leather, the pink and punk hair doused with shocking black tips. Silver jewelry, spiked shoes, barbed looks, jaded eyes... I can and will become like the little freaks who play dress-up to impress one another, and to shock the tourists. The ones who live to stun pathetic nerd boys with their thousand dollar wardrobes and bored, hollow lives, wicked smiles. I do not listen to Switchblade Symphony, I do not own a coffin, but I'm here, baby. I'm present and ready. Just watch me metamorphose into Mistress Perfect.

But I tell myself this very same little lie every time we go out together in our group of friends. I dress to impress. I dress up. I dress down. I end up going home drunk, alone. I lie in my bed and I hold my pillow and I think of his neck, the way he smells. I hold it tight and I find the thoughts of us kissing, of him suckling my breast, of him sighing when he entered me last. They invade my open eyes, and so I close them to get closer to the pictures in my head. I close them tightly and I clench my knees together determined not to come thinking of him again. But the ache is so strong and the imagery is so hot, so real, too soon to be forgotten. I put my hands between my open lips, and I find the ache there too ripe, too hot. I put my fingers inside me as the picture of his cock flooding me turns into my fist pumping inside me, and I open to it, to him, to my memories, to my plastic-coated hopes, and I come, tears flowing sideways, dripping into my ears. 

I wake up, I'm not sure when: mascara on my pillow, pale blue morning, bile in my throat. I call his house. No answer. What was I hoping to say?

Copyright © 2001 Jamie Joy Gatto. All Rights Reserved. Do not post or copy without the express written consent of the author. 

Her first collection of short fiction, Sex Noir: Stories of Sex, Death and Loss, is published by Circlet Press.  "Gatto's tales range from sexy to harrowing, from tragic to optimistic, and from hardcore to sugary sweet-- sometimes all within the same story." ~ AVN Click on the book to learn more about Jamie Joy Gatto's collection of dark & often tragic erotica, Sex Noir.