How to be the Other Woman

-Photo by me

Fragment Chpt. 1 (Maybe?)

Ravish.

…In his car where both of your breaths come in thick, laborious exhales and mist forms on the windows. Trace shapes and letters in the condensation, bite your lip and look straight ahead, and when you look at him, make sure it’s only out of the corner of your eye. Appear coy, but don’t allot him your full attention. Make him believe your indifferent. It’s in the deception

Read his thoughts through the dirty wordplay that you tease each other with. Be aware he is taken but ambivalent…at first. Fidget, play with your stockings, stretch out one leg at a time, re-adjust your skirt, massage your own neck with your fingers a bit to let him imagine his teeth there.

Maybe you’ve only seen her once and you can feel your brow pinch and your mouth dwindle into a tight line when her eyes flit over you from a crossed the room.

Or, just the opposite, you treat her like a new friend, compliment her shirt, her bag, maybe her shoes, tell her you should have a girls night, grab a drink, laugh at her one-liners and make sure he sees you laughing with her. Be recklessly detached and risk the scars left behind, disfiguring and permanent.

*

At home, paint your toenails red and listen to jazz while you shower, hum through the steam and stream of water. Let the vapor settle around the peripheries of the bathroom, touch the crevices of your body where condensation has formed, touch yourself in the way you know he would, with two fingertips. Let the water soak each part of you and be proud of the dips and ellipses of your silhouette.

Your hips jut and gyrate when you squirm. You dig your heels into the floor, or the couch or bed, or backseat where you are laying with your jeans around your ankles or skirt pulled up past your knees. You have bruises, beauty marks for your legs, faded, the color of thistle and a halo of yellow. You can let him take your shirt off but leave your bra on, and don’t loose your underwear in the heat of tugging at his hair or latching onto his shoulders. Don’t be that kind of girl to misplace your underpinnings. Know that he is good with his tongue. The climax reminds you of a warming stove, steadily building heat until your red with the impatient longing to come and he stops and runs his bottom lip up the inside of your legs until you grab his hair and tell him not to stop between gasps. Make him the best; tell him he knows your clit like no one else. Make him believe it when, after the warmth of his mouth, you finally come in purrs and moans. Let your muscles give in, let your legs shake, smile at him when he looks up and you from where he lays his head on your stomach. Be silent and listen to his breathe.

Don’t let yourself be existent because of what men think of you, or think of when they look at you.

Try not to wonder what he would think if he were to see you in the early hours of the morning. Believe that he would still find you sexy even with morning bed-head and stale breath.

Lie. But not too much. Or rather, see it as leaving out details.

*

If she sits and closes her eyes these men become mere flashes of skin, and shades of blue and brown irises between blinks, and bits of conversation and dark spaces and the flushed skin and swollen lips after.

The desire to touch

And she thinks about the way he articulates certain words

Words that would normally be banal with any other person but he draws them out on his tongue like he just exhaled smoke from a cigarette

“They've got so much detail. They're soft, expressive.” This is why he loves women, and why she touches herself in exploration. She tries to see what he sees. She wants to turn her cluttered conversation and awkward stutters into confidence, build up her quirks into something she loves. She wants to turn a bare shoulder to people who look through her or who laugh at her. She wants to take her insecurities and turn them into effervescence, blow bubbles in the air, turn people on with her laugh, stand with her spine elongated, collar bone worn like a modern piece of jewelry. She loves to be touched, an arm slung around her waist, a palm resting on the back of her neck, a hand finding hers. She loves the warmth that two bodies make on contact. The of her body define her tone. Her curves are punctuation marks.

The way he touched her, he was discovering skin for the first time.