There is a certain ache on my arm. It’s as though the blood has stopped flowing. I turn to look and wince. That’s right. Her sinuses have been heightened and only the constant sniffing interrupts the growing glow of the room. She breathes a steady flow of air through her mouth, quiet and sighing. I try to remember last night as the alcohol swims in my head. We had eaten Japanese food. And as soon as she wakes up, I will continue the date as though nothing had happened, part paid escort, part listening sensitive partner, part sex god.  She rubs her face against my skin, and I feel a sudden shock of anger. How could you not cry at such a brutal time, I don’t understand. She assumes a mould of contact with her body against mine and lets out a sigh. I relate her need of contact to the past relationships that she had told me about. Those foreign flings, the meaningful ones that ended in shame and the ones that shredded her heart and still do. She looks back in a cynical hindsight and I briefly wonder if I would look back in ours like that. A moment catches my throat.

I saw you crying, red eyes and nose. I should have held you and told you everything would be alright, as your body got ravaged. But I was never one of public displays of affection and I walked away after kissing you on the head, feeling equally frustrated at my frigidness as you were. It just had been too long since a woman who didn’t give a damn about my star sign and calculated how compatible we were.  

I want to get out of this bed, but I cannot, for fear of the sudden chill that might touch my new friend’s body. I’m trying to avoid her. Last night, she was charmed by my practiced conversations and my attempt to humor her. She does not know that all that was a result of a combination of something else. Then it led to something unexpected but unsurprising. I had thought she was too young to experience this. I had long forgotten the proper protocol of sleeping with someone. Do you keep your clothes on, or if you undress too quickly, does that make you seem desperate and chauvinistic? But if you keep it on for too long, does it appear that you are unwilling and uninterested? I tried to kiss her as though she meant all that I wanted you to mean to me, and she replied with unneeded moans of gratitude and over-zealous perception of pleasure. I feel sad for her, she is like a lost bird, and in a world too big for her and her desperate endeavor to fit in go unnoticed and yet are constantly manipulated to suit the other people’s own needs. I suppose she only wanted me to experience and exercise what control felt like. We all three will wake up lonely unwanted, and not knowing that we really are not, living oblivious to far-away longing. I feel sad for all three of us.

Thoughts that have been spinning in my chest have aggravated me and woken her. She rubs sleep from her face and sees you in my features, under lines and shining from the light that seeps through the crack of the scarlet curtain. She is unaware of the shimmering look in my eyes and gets up to make coffee. The sudden loss of contact soothes me and I no longer feel unfaithful, even though there was nothing to feel unfaithful about. This feeling is only caused by the anxious wish for our friendship to become more than platonic. And it pains me to look in your dark eyes, and your porcelain body that have been touched roughly and used indefinitely. I should have done something to help you, but the words struggled to get out and I replaced them with a rasping cough which pulled your eyebrows tight and high.

She now returns with the coffee and I drink it with apprehension and politeness. It leaves a salty aftertaste, the traces of alcohol in her body. I smile humorlessly as the line of sun deepens and lengthens into a thin strip of warm yellow. I feel empty and the line slides over my back and draws out a dark figure. And within that, I think I see the troubles in my chest.