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Maybe not to you, I don’t say. It feels like a big deal to me. I don’t really do this. I don’t date, or at least I haven’t in a long time, and never guys like him. I don’t say that, either. Instead, against my better judgment and because I really do like him, I say, “Okay.”
“Okay?” he asks.
“Doyouwant to see how the other half lives?” I ask, grabbing my things and standing up from the table. He says that he does and grabs my hand. We leave like that—hand in hand—and I can feel all my coworker’s eyes burning holes through my body. They’ll have questions for me tomorrow that I know I won’t feel like answering.
We enter the building and take the stairs to the basement. I lead him inside and, jokingly, ask if he would like a tour. There isn’t much to see between my four concrete walls. There’s a small kitchenette to the left, a bathroom to the right, my bed, the couch, a coffee table, and a tv. I have some plants to combat the dankness of the basement. Sometimes, I wonder if they just make it worse—damper, somehow.
“So, it’s a small apartment,” he says. “Do you think I’ve never seen a small apartment? Am I supposed to be horrified?” he asks.
“Maybe. I don’t know what frightens people like you,” I say, shrugging. I don’t know, but I assume living just above the poverty line would be on that list.
“This is not a big deal. I’m starting to wonder if you are seriously disturbed.”
“Oh, that’s the other thing. I am very seriously disturbed,” I say.
“That’s also fine, actually. I happen to find that to be a very endearing quality in women, so I am glad to hear it,” he says.
Then, he’s pulling me in closer. He kisses me, softly at first, and then much harder and deeper, and he’s pulling my shirt off over my head. We make our way toward the bed and Jake unbuttons my jeans and then his own. He lifts me up and I wrap my legs around his waist, and he lays me down on the bed. Then, we are both naked and he’s on top of me, then thrusting inside of me. He’s bigger than I remember, and I’m nervous, unlike the first time, because I like him and won’t be able to disappear in the morning. I try to relax my mind and get it into the same state that my body is in, which is complete ecstasy. He flips me onto my stomach, entering me from behind and his fingers find my clitoris, and before long we are both cumming and sweating and gasping for air.
I turn over and stare at the same spot on the ceiling for what feels like a while, not speaking. I wish we had left the lights off, but hey, it’s all out there now I guess—disturbed persona, murky apartment, flawed body. I wonder how much he noticed when I feel his fingertips tracing over the scars on my stomach.
“What are those?” he asks, “I mean, I know what they look like but—”
“These—” I say pointing, “are cigarette burns. And those—” I point to my hips and inner thigh, “are self-harm scars.” Jake is silent, and I know he’s wondering if I had done them all myself or if it were a previous partner or whatever, so I do something that I normally don’t do, and offer more of an explanation. “My mom, when I was a kid. She had, you know, some issues. A drinking problem, various drug binges, and anger issues, obviously. For whatever reason, she seemed to think that a lot of her problems stemmed from the fact that I was always just there, needing the things that all kids need: food, shelter, love.”
“Ruby…”
“I don’t want your pity, to be clear. I’m fine, and honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m educated, I have a job, and I have this place. Most kids like me—they don’t get that lucky. They end up following in their parent’s footsteps or in foster care where the abuse they face only gets uglier, or they end up dead. I'm lucky that for the most part, I was just alone.”
It's true. I see the kids who weren't so lucky in the news all the time, and it fucking rips me to shreds.
He doesn’t know what to say, and so I just lie there raw, completely exposed, and full of regret. I have only shared assorted dark details of my childhood with a couple of people: Evie, because she’s my person, and Alex, because he had been through his own personal hell, and he gets it. He was orphaned at a young age and was one of those kids that grew up in the system, bouncing from one toxic house masquerading as a home to another. I don’t envy that life.
“Ruby…I don’t know what to say. I am so fucking sorry. That is so fucked up. No one deserves that.”
“Yeah, well, thanks,” I say, because I don’t really know what to say either.
“Do you still talk to her? Your mom?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t spoken to her in about…6 years now. Jesus, it’s been longer than I thought it had. It was her choice, actually. I don’t know that I would have had the courage to give up the only semblance of family I’d known on my own, not completely, if she hadn’t chosen it, too. I went home to visit her for her birthday that year. She had asked me to, but when I went inside, she wasn’t there, so I went to her on-again/off-again boyfriend’s trailer and found her there. She was…alone and unconscious and the whole place had this awful, chemical smell. I thought I was going to pass out just being inside, so I pulled her out and back to our trailer and called 911. I saved her life, right? But after I left, the other guy’s trailer exploded. As it turns out, they had been cooking meth. Both swear that I must have been the one that caught the guy’s trailer on fire to get him in trouble.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to figuratively pull my mom out of the fire and save her from herself, you know, because I needed her. Then when I literally did it, that was the thanks I got.”
“Ruby, I’m so sorry,” he says.
“See what I mean? Completely different worlds.”
He’s probably changed his mind about me now. This is probably it because he probably isn’t having fun anymore, and he had said that we could hang out until we weren’t having any fun, and now maybe he gets that I am broken beyond repair. I get up, throw on a shirt, and say that I need to use the bathroom. Maybe he will pull the same shit on me that I did on him, and he will be gone when I get out.
I emerge a few minutes later and glance at the empty bed, my chest tightening momentarily at the sight of my self-fulfilling prophecy. But he isn’t gone. He’s standing in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water. He sets it down and comes over and hugs me for a couple of minutes. He kisses me on the forehead and says, “Let’s go to bed.”
And so that’s what we do. He turns off the lights, after choosing the wrong switch a couple of times, and crawls into bed and holds me while we lie there in what is almost complete silence, save but the light traffic outside the window. I am both atypically content and wholly uncomfortable, wondering how I can be both of these things at the same time. It takes a while for me to fall asleep, but once I do, I have one of those rare, deep sleeps where I’m not disturbed by images of that little girl with the matted dark hair, huddled in the corner of a dirty trailer wondering how long it would be before her mom came back.
five
Iwakeupmuchearlier than I normally would, because Jake is already up and dressed. It’s still dark, but I remember that he is one of those regular schedule people, the 9-5ers Monday through Friday. As nice as it sounds, I like to sleep in. I don’t know what time it is, but I know it is still dark. In Seattle, at this time of year, that could mean that he’s already late. The sun is late to arrive and too early to go, and that’s only going to get worse. It doesn’t matter so much for people like me, who exist mostly at night, but it does wear on you after a while, once all the holidays have come and gone and winter starts to feel like an eternity. Anyway, whatever time it is, I know that it’s too early for me.
