Desire

I don’t want your respect from a distance. I want to be the thing you open in secret at 2 a.m., with your hand already under the sheet and my name stuck in your throat.

It was six forty. She checked her watch, asked me to pull over by the alley, and before I could ask anything, she was already kissing me.

I joked that she should sleep with me that night. I never imagined that after midnight, my bedroom door would actually open.

With mascara running from my tears, she took my hand and led me upstairs, determined that what we felt would no longer be a secret.

I told him I just wanted to practice taking photos. It was a lie. What I really wanted was for him to finally look at me the way I’d been looking at him for weeks.

“Patience is a virtue,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the coffee. And I, who had gone a month without permission to finish, knew the test began right then.

That night I didn’t have a condom in my bag, nor any intention of asking him to put one on. I only wanted to find out how far we could go.

We were newbies and nervous, but that couple sitting at the back of the club looked at us like they already knew exactly what we’d come for.

No one in that house knew what I was hiding under the black dress. No one except him, the masked stranger I handed it to in a dark hallway.

I thought I was alone among the trees, until a crackling sound changed everything and I realized how badly I wanted someone to find me like that, naked and surrendered.

I ordered my first toy online so I wouldn’t die of embarrassment in the store. What I didn’t imagine was the delivery guy’s face when he handed me that box.

I read every word he wrote to the other woman and, instead of rage, felt a heat between my legs I didn’t recognize. That afternoon, I stopped being invisible.

That night I locked the door, turned off my phone, and, for the first time, let myself discover what it felt like to stop resisting.

In the darkness of my room, nobody could see me. Or so I thought, until he came to his window and kept looking toward me longer than he should have.