"Don't Touch Me"

January 9th, 1:38 a.m.

She tilts her head back, raising her chin, listening to the rain outside her bedroom window. She rolls her eyes backwards, sees the headboard, and then turns her face to the side, searching desperately in the dim light for the clock. She watches the second hand make its way around the clock's face; fifty-eight seconds, fifty-nine, six minutes. His head buried in her hair, pressed against her craning neck, she hears him suck in his breath and feels the swell of his chest against her body. As his sweaty hand gropes her breast, his waxy fingers working as they would on a dial during the search for a radio station, she realizes something; the problematic month of substitutions and compromises has come to an end. He is going to come inside of her tonight. As much as she hated the daily trips down to the laundry room to wash her bedding, she dreads this climax even more. She doesn't want it; the idea of a sticky surge of milk-and-raw-egg-white cells expelling from his body into hers makes her want to vomit. She thinks she feels the tiny baby-pink birth-control pill churn in her stomach, and has the sudden realization of how silly and forgetful she has been. Robbed of their life-producing function, her desolate insides laugh at her. And as the man lying over her opens his mouth in a silent cry of release, pulsing with his adrenaline rush, she laughs an evil, mocking laugh at her own being; the disrespect she's had for herself, the way she's let her own lies diminish her feelings of self-worth, and the apathetic way in which she cast aside her spirituality for a man whose love should not be directed at her. She laughs at herself as she pretends she is having an orgasm, raking her fingernails down his skin on either side of his spine, pushing her shoulders back into the mattress, and crashing her hips against his. And she laughs at him as he worships her body by penetrating and presenting it with his own, humble and ashamed of himself for failing her time-and-time-again-at-this-and-that-i-love-you- i-love-you-i'm-so-sorry. And her decision is made as she detects the arrival of her own, true release; the words she wants to say. Don't touch me. What, he asks, his mouth caught off guard in the process of preparing itself to puctuate the culmination of their interchange with a final kiss. She repeats it; her decision, not as a request or a command. Her closing statement: Don't. Ever again. Don't touch me.

END