the easy way

He isn’t my boyfriend, not really. He isn’t my anything, which is an arrangement I like because it means that I am not his, either. That’s important.

He says I deserve a real boyfriend. He says he wants to take me out to dinner. When he is putting his clothes on and I am rolling over and pulling the blanket tighter around myself, closing off the spaces he left behind, he says that he is going to be a good boy and call me soon. He starts work at six. I sleep until eight.

We have sex with the lights off. His hands and mouth stay within designated safe zones. He does not try to touch my stomach, where it begins to fall over itself, or the sad, inverted curve where my waist meets my hips. His hands move, always, upward from my knees, never the other, more perilous, way down.

And maybe he does this because I have made it the easier way. I wear skirts that slide up, that sometimes don’t even need to be moved out of the way, they suddenly just are up, or fallen down, as if they’ve been like that all along, just waiting for his hands to cover the gaps in the fabric.

Maybe he does this because he is as wary as I am of the other direction. Maybe he recoils, a little, as I do, from the body I try so hard to hide.

His hand moves up, and as it moves, it flicks off, one by one, the switches in my brain, like the last man leaving the office and turning off the lights for the night. First I lose words, then vision and hearing, then smell. Once smell goes, I lose memory. I no longer exist in a time and place, I am no longer part of a sequence of events and so I cannot tell you how long I last there, in limbo, until his hand moves to the last light, where his hand lingers, where his hand pushes and rocks and the light goes out and I am lost.