Whiskey Sours
It’s been so long, but sometimes, still, you come
back, or the ghost of you does. Maybe it’s the Catholic guilt; it’s funny, it’s
when I touch myself – even not scandalously, even if I just rest it, down
there, that sometimes your image rises, unbidden, the way your pudgy face would
come so close and your pupils go wide when you stroked and I wondered what
reaction I was supposed to fake tonight to keep you happy, and I feel like I
want to shiver and shudder, go take a shower, or something.
#
-
Six
months. I hope we’ll still be together in another six. I hope we’ll be together
forever.
-
FUCK
OFF. Fuck off – out of my head, out of my life, out of my head. Fuck off
forever.
#
“How come we never
said I love you?” he asked her, on the pier.
She didn’t answer.
She was thinking. That was one of the things he said he liked about her, her
thinking. The thing he really liked, though, was that when she was thinking,
she was silent.
So she didn’t tell
him the answer she had thought. She thought it was obvious anyway. Because we didn’t. Because we don’t.
#
It comes back sometimes,
haunts
In different ways
A similar laugh and sense
of smug entitlement in a stranger
Triggers a feeling
And my body tenses
Like by doing that now it
could make itself, in the past
Never have let you in,
My legs clench, clamp
shut, wishing you were never here.
#
She wanted to try
a whiskey sour in the college bar. He told her she wouldn’t like them.
#
Sex and panic. That
was their glue. He wanted an easy ride, in every possible sense of the word. He
thought a younger body easier to conquer, a younger mind more malleable. She
thought she was too old to still be a virgin, too old to never have had a
proper boyfriend. She thought, beggars can’t
be choosers. She came to the pub for their first date with the taste of
panic in her mouth. When she woke up in his bed the next day, that taste was
even stronger.
#
No one ever said
they thought there must be something wrong with her, because she never had
boyfriends. They were happy and she suspected relieved she’d finally found one
though, even if (come on, everyone was thinking it), he was slightly less than
ideal.
Her friends said
things like “Ooh, you’re so cute together!” And she thinks, What, like a pair of rabbits?
“It’s sickening!” How did that become a complement?
“Love love love!” There’s got to be more to love...
#
She wanted to try
a whiskey sour at after-work drinks. She liked them. She woke up the next
morning and made a mental note, a resolution. If she has a one night stand
again, she’ll only have it with someone who lives in the same transport zone.
#
She doesn’t always
stick to the transport zone resolution. But awkward early morning journeys are
a small price to pay for the late night fun. She starts to think of these
short-lived thrusting trysts as mini-exorcisms. Every new man’s physicality
pushes the memory of the older man further away.
She still loves
the taste of whiskey sours. She wakes up in the mornings with all sorts of
tastes in her mouth. None of them as bad as panic.
#
Love takes
selflessness and courage. He didn’t have the first and when they met, with the
taste of a general panic about life so strong in her mouth, she didn’t have the
second. But she was getting there. And that’s why it was over.
She’d tell her
friends how they broke up on a pier and they’d joke she should have pushed him
in.
#
His hair is kind
of blonde like the whiskey sour he bought her. Kind of brown, like the coffee
he made her the next morning. She’s too embarrassed to admit she can’t remember
his name and saves his number as My Favourite Whiskey Sour.
She finds out his
name after they’ve been out a few times, but she doesn’t edit his details in
her phone.
#
In the new house
she wakes up earlier. She idly browses her phone and that ex’s wedding pops up, somehow, in her news feed, and the first
words that come to her mind are bullet
and dodged. She hasn’t thought of him
in a long time, she’s surprised to realise. She thinks she never worked out if
it was an abusive relationship, or just a bad one, and is there really a
difference anyway? She thinks that nothing now makes her want to say yes to a
man more than knowing he’ll respect a no if she gives it.
She rolls over and
smiles. Her Favourite Whiskey Sour gets up to make her a coffee.
Naomi Elster has a
PhD in breast cancer. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and scripts, and has been
widely published, including by The Establishment, The Guardian and Crannóg
Magazine.
Tags:
Short Fiction