Why did it matter so much to me that she smiled?
Why did my heart race every time I heard her laugh?
It felt like some fucking. . .addiction.
Some disease with no cure.
I thought of her exhaustion. She was so fucking beautiful even though sometimes she had dark circles under her eyes or chipped polish on her nails. For some crazy reason that only God knew. . .every part of that made her so erotic to me.
What’s wrong with me?
Why did her exhaustion make me hard?
Why did the chipped polish on her nails feel more intimate than a lingerie ad?
Why did the curve of her belly, the heaviness of her hips, the weight she thought was a flaw, keep me awake at night with my fist tight around my cock?
I’d been reading psych books to try and figure it all out because that was what med students did when something scared them.
We looked for answers in the body, in the mind, in pathology.
And in this research, I found words like. . .
Obsession.
Compulsion.
Transference.
Those words stared at me from psych textbooks like accusations. Some case studies called it “maternal fixation,” some called it “attachment substitution.”
All of them pointed toward something possibly being broken in me.
Maybe I was replacing what I lost when my mother died. Maybe I was latching onto the first nurturing presence that didn’t recoil from me.
Maybe I was confusing gratitude with lust.
But standing outside that window, listening to her laugh, I didn’t feel confused.
I felt clear.
I wanted her.
Not as a saint, a surrogate, or some safe replacement for a fucking mother.
I wanted her as a woman—full, flawed, and human.
I wanted the breasts she tried to hide under blouses that didn’t quite button right. I wanted the curve of her hips when she bent to pick up a grocery bag. I wanted to press my mouth to every stretch of her skin she thought was ruined, to make her see how wrong she was.
And maybe that was sick.
Maybe it was pathological.
But sickness didn’t feel this sharp, this necessary, this alive.
When I thought about Teyonah—her hand brushing mine at breakfast, the casual warmth of it, her fingers lingering like she didn’t even realize how much they burned me—it was enough to make my skin ache for more.
Yesterday morning, she leaned across me at breakfast to grab the orange juice, her blouse brushing my arm, her breasts pressing faintly into my shoulder.
