One thing I’ve learned is that grown men like cliches- babydoll nightgowns, boxes of chocolate. Hair ribbons. Sex.

I crossed the line two months after our first encounter in the theatre. A friend took over cleaning so that I could slip out past the double doors in my uniform, so I could slip the polo shirt over my head inconspicuously and hide my face behind a veil of hair, watching him. He was aimless and slow. He walked a block and waited at a bus stop there, all of his bulk precariously balanced on the balls of his feet. I looked at the road to check for cars, to check for rain, to keep the air free of weighty assumptions or questions I didn’t know how to answer. It rained, then. It was something out of an amateur fetish video.

When the bus came I was colder than I had ever been with fright and anxiety. Somehow being near to him was excruciating, muscular, aching. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me; his breaths were laborously intricate, marvellously so.

I sat and looked outside at all the corpulent beings and savoured the deeply musky smell of him, like the algae at the bottom of the ocean.

I felt like his child. I wanted him to eat me whole. I hated how much I wanted him.

He stood up a block away from where I used to go to school- Tucker Elementary, a plastic-and-portables building full of shit and thong underwear that lived to crawl up the backsides of prepubescent girls, only to be stuffed shamefully into dresser drawers at the end of the day. I was good at math and bad at art. This disqualified me from femaledom.

His house was lined with shrubbery and painted white. It was ugly and simple and there were no lights in the windows. I went behind trees and bushes every time he turned around. I think I heard him laughing.

He had no car and no garage, only cement steps leading up to a door with a glass outside protecting the wood inside. A doorbell shaped flatly rectangular and beige from pressings. I heard him set his keys down on a table inside. Then the door opened again suddenly and he said, “All right, goddamnit. Come in, if you want to that badly.”

I nodded and stepped in, onto the weighted-down flattened carpeting, pale azure. Stained black in places. It smelled like abandoned warehouses- dust.

“This is a pretty shitty place to live,” I said. We stood with the front door still open. All the lights were out and only the yellow streetlamp glow kept our eyes in focus.
“I don’t go much for knicknacks and that,” he said, in a voice that was more calm than I would have expected. “What do you want from me, exactly?”