She had seen him from across the conventional ballroom, pressed against the pealing wallpaper, in between screen prints of Dalmatians and scratched photographs of local playgrounds. She tried to dance around him, tried to see where her goddamn confidence had got to, but when he caught up to her in the parking lot, she might have fallen into his lap.

     Just a drink, he asked, to catch up on the past three years.

     She left her car in the hotel’s parking lot, teasing when she said if it was towed she’d have to stay the night. She caught something flicker in his eyes, her skin prickling. It was just the overhead light, reflecting off his glasses as he leaned over her to open his Volvo’s door.

     As they drove, they spoke lightly, their strained smiles ticking off the glass as they took in the same air. Snapping his wrist, he released a cigarette from its blue-and-white packaging and placed it in his mouth, his other hand sliding with the wheel. She couldn’t look away.

     “You smoke now?”

     He switched hands, balancing the cigarette between cherry lips, and rolled down the window.

     “Yeah, I know.” He flicked ash into the dark. “Y’remember my dad?”

     She nodded and kept her head straight, but saw the passing traffic in his eyes, which she always imagined to have been a soft green. Though that could’ve been someone else.  “How’s he doing?”

     “Better that he quit.” He grinned. “I took it up for him.”

     She inhaled, rooting for the yellow, caramel taste and passed her tongue over her teeth.

     The pub crept up on them and they got out, went in, sat themselves in the corner. They threw drink orders at a passing waiter and smiled quietly as he fulfilled them. She pinched the lime for her drink, a cloudy mojito. He used the last drop for his SoCo and Coke.

     College had favored her and she talked freely of her projects. A quarterly magazine had bought her novella and she was expecting a call about an interview on an internet radio show that featured faceless writers. She forced herself to look into his face, to ask the questions that tugged at the back of her mind, tugged since things had gone south. Did he still listen to the same angry music? Did he read the new John Grisham novel? His smoke blew across his glasses. When things began to get more remote, she settled for how Colleen was, a grimace pulling at her lips.

     He stirred the straw in his doused Coke, sucking at his bottom lip.

     “She’s doing okay,” he hummed.

     She shifted, her shin brushing his knee.

     “Yeah, she’s expecting then? I saw her tonight talking to Ana.”

     “Yeah.” He took another drag off the cigarette and watched her. “I don’t know how that happened.”

     “Oh.”

     She watched the walls, commenting on the Beatles memorabilia and vintage bottle caps. She laughed when he remembered that she once compared him to John Lennon. He laughed, stole a few sips from her drink, made the waiter keep ‘em coming.

     When the nightlife around them began to dwindle, he checked the time on his flip phone.

     “Wow, it’s getting pretty late, kid.”

     She leaned back into her seat, relaxing into the alcohol forming a warm ball in her stomach.

     With a smile, she simpered, “Heyo, boyo.”

     “Are you staying anywhere?”

     “I was going to head back homewards after the art show,” she sighed. “But I got distracted.”

     “Yes. You did.”

Unachieved words tug at his mouth again and she nods, confirming. He pays, she offers a fight and ends up leaving a five dollar tip under the sugar caddy.

     She floats to the car on too long legs and he helps her in. She smirks, learning that his apartment is only three blocks away. The road trip is fleeting, under pressure and he parallel parks with strange ease. The sky rumbles.

     Inside the apartment, he flicks off his shoes, she slides off hers. She’s had the same pair for years and he notices. Their small laugh hangs in the air and she follows him to the living room. He sits on the couch, sliding all the way into the seat. She sits on the edge, leaning forward, feeling the hem of her panties between her lower back and the thick air, her jeans riding low on her exaggerated curves. She frowns in the dark of the room.

     His heat is next to her, spreading across her thighs and numbing her knees. He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t look at her. She takes in his profile, watching him watch the thoughts that run through his sight.

     Of the apartment, she can’t sense much of his presence. It’s clean, devoid of interest. A picture of Colleen sits atop the television set.

     The television flickers, throwing a shield of blue, humming into their faces.

     “Want to watch something? I’ve got The Young Ones TiVo’d.”

     “Sure.”

     They’re seven minutes into the program when she decides her back is sore. She leans back, transfixed in her drunken state when his arm snakes across her neck, his large hand to cup her shoulder.

     The show catches them off guard, and they pull apart immersed in giggles; his deep and set, hers metallic and open. As the episode fades into the next, they are listening to each other breathe and she can feel his large hand inch down her back.

     In a fit of refreshed sniggers, through her blouse he pinches the clasp of her bra and releases, making it crack.

     She doesn’t hesitate, she doesn’t question, just does. She begins to unbutton her white blouse. He stops the sniggering and pushes her hands aside, nipping at the flesh of her neck with his teeth as his hands, like spiders unravel the web.

     The Young Ones give over to Graham Norton and she’s cocked like a gun against an old lover’s shoulder, her blouse open, her plain ocher bra bathed in freakish light.

     In an exchange of heat, they push, they pull at each other’s mouths. Teeth clip tongues, salty breath mingles with sour. The familiar noises bubble easily to their throats as her hips jerk away from his finger tips, they enjoy the chase. He flips her into the corner of the couch, her head careening into the wall, sending reverberations through her muddied skull.

     She can taste the cigarette and this would normally be a deal breaker especially for him but tonight it’s all going to hell. She forces him back into the couch, inhaling him, fighting him. Her belt too constricting on her middle, she kneels on top of his hips and undoes her belt, her jeans, and slithers out of her underwear. His breath is hitching, so she eases up on her grasp of him. The laugh track on the TV is a drum and he’s bucking to it. She lays her lips on him once more, feeling his fingers tips slide through her. He’s bucking, but she’s bucking harder.

     “Lay on your side,” he grunts from underneath her.

     She stiffens, muscles creaking in her thighs, and slides off, feeling for the back of the couch, her eyes in a permanent glance.

     He pushes against her and it’s not like the ripping of worlds as she had thought it would be. It forces the breath out of her.

     “God,” he sighs, his face masked behind the niche of jaw and shoulder. “I’ve never heard you moan like that before.”

     It’s been three years. She doubts he tells Colleen that.

     In her mind she can see him, his lax jaw, and his smoked glass. She grips the sofa and moves back, undoing what he’s doing.

     He says that’s hot.

     “On the floor,” he hisses.

     He jumps up, the alcohol inside him wasted. She relishes in the cold breath that takes his place. She fights gravity and lands on the rug, ready to push against him.

     He’s slower now as he holds himself and guides it. She caws.

     He’s quickening and she’s racing it, clinging to the pale rug, spitting like a cat. When she can no longer decipher his breathing from the wet plaintive noises, she realizes that this isn’t sex. She’s emptying him. She’s raping him.

     But he returns.

     He moves in slow circles and breathes, his chest flush against her back, “Do you feel that?” It’s hot and heavy against her ear.

     Her breath is lodged in her chest, but a voice calls from her throat.

     “Fuck.”

     And it’s the end for him. She’s killed him. The tremors take him and she’s made that happen. She laughs and rubs the sweat from her forehead onto his carpet, breathing in as he pulls out. His corpse jerks down the hall to the bathroom and shuts the door. She waits, on her elbows and shins, praying to Mecca.

     It’s like the first time. It’s always like the first time. And she pants, rubbing where he left, so the pain soaks through to the core. She clenches it in.

     Lifting one knee, she then lifts the other. A hand snakes through the darkness to help her.

     “You okay?”

     It’s a hollow question and she doesn’t bother answering it. No bother, he doesn’t ask again.

     He stretches like he’s just got off the job, an oily sheen still on his cheeks. The peach fuzz on his chest flickers in the gaze of the television. He leans back into the couch, so she looks for her clothes. They breathe.

     “I don’t think I’m much in the disposition to drive you back, did you want to...?”

     “No. I’m good. I’ll walk. It’s not far.”

     This is self-destruction.

     “You’re not drunk either.”

     “No,” she tells him. “Why isn’t Colleen with you?”

     He looks at her, really looks at her. It’s amazing how she can see through his glasses in this light. “She’s staying at her sister’s.”

     “Oh?” Her throat is raw. “What happened there?”

     “I fucked Ana.”

     “That doesn’t make any sense.”

     “No?” He pulls a cigarette from behind his ear and she wonders if it was there the whole time. Somehow it cheapens the situation. She didn’t know it could be cheaper. “Colleen’s in a difficult situation. I think she thinks I did both her and Ana in.”

     “Maybe,” she says, the light of the TV flowing past her. “Is this a onetime thing?”

     A drag from his cigarette answers for him, but he deciphers anyway:

     “It doesn’t have to be.”

     That, too, is empty. It’s so hollow, she hears it reverberate in her sore, muddy head.

     “Well, I’ll leave you to it.” That doesn’t necessarily make sense, but it’s her curtain call and damned if she won’t end it like she should.

     “Have a good night,” he calls as she closes the door behind her. She stands outside of it and hears his non-movement inside. The TV and its harpy call resumes.

     She walks down the hallway towards the opening and its flat, shining street ahead, silent and sober. It’s rained. On his street non-surprisingly close to the hotel and her car, she takes a crumpled blue-and-white cigarette pack from her back pocket and kneels at the curb, sliding each haunting white cylinder into the sewer grate.