Bulletproof Vests and Silicon Chests

Note*: Thank you for all the feedback, darlings. It helps, it does. I'm sure this part's inadequately written but it's the products of insomnia and inspiration, hopefully it'll grant me with a beautiful lovechild. -Mae

Bulletproof Vests and Silicon Chests

Chapter 2

    His hands are cold as steel as he slips it around my throat, squeezing so hard on my airways that I no longer can keep my mind preoccupied with the unevenness of his paperwork beneath my back, or the way my leg is trapped between the edge of the desk and his thigh as he leans over me. The air musty in his office, a little tiny storage room in the back of what doubles as Skeleton Crew; it’s so muggy in August like this, even in Jersey that he’s sweating nicotine over me, letting it collect on the hood of his eyebrow. I open my mouth – not for air, but for words but he only squeezes harder. Pressing his jaw against mine, I can smell his cologne so deep in my lungs it’s the only thing I am breathing. It seems as though that cheap stuff that smells like
Grandfathers and Cuban cigars is seemingly seeping into my lungs much quicker than oxygen. “What a filthy fucking mouth. Say it again.” He lets up and plants his hands on either side of me, rooted to the spot and just breathing over me with his jaw set. 

    I only gasp half a breath, rushing to get the words out as urgently as my will allows me. “I want daddy to fuck me.” I breathe in a huff as my eyes adjust, my pupils adjusting just enough to let enough light in and let him know the severity of every single syllable and sound I
speak. 

    I, myself, wonder when this never-ending monologue will cease to find words to explain. Chronologically, he bent to my needs and swore to my devil’s worship. Chronologically, all these heroines and protagonists are nothing more than clingy little shits, or cracked out whores, someone with no friends and with too much time on their hands. You change the order and cut out a few words and anyone can become an angel. It came to this nights long after the sun had gone down, sitting on the floor of his office smoking cigarettes and sharing a lukewarm bottle of wine as
we sorted through mounds and mounds of t-shirts, setting into seas of cardboard boxes. He asked me about my father after he’d compliment my eyes on their hallow gray
color, me telling him thank my father instead. Handling every piece of black fabric until you couldn’t tell the 20th from the 200th, I told him how my father drowned on vacation in Cabo San Lucas. How I saw him from the hotel window, a quaint little place on the sand and how we laughed at the distance and how from far off it looked like lost luggage or a buoy floating out; the waves broken and gashed while it sank closer and closer to shore. He was the last puzzle piece, diluting the water with his presence yet with no words, flashing his death into the sky with a gentle tide, inspiring the sun to shine. His skin was so tinted, so blue. If you were going to spread out his arms and let his legs unravel he would have fit perfectly into the sky with only his gray eyes as shining stars; you could have rubbed him into the sea, but only if you did it slowly, delicately. He doesn’t ask about my eyes after that. 

    We fucked that night on tops of piles of folded boxes and the clouded morals of his infidelity seemed to be blown away by what he called my “brutal and honest beauty”; but I don’t say much on it because for the few seconds he’s pounding into me hard, giving me rug burns and holding fast to my hair, tangled around his knuckles, around that silver band he wears … he can say whatever he pleases. “You’re so beautiful, so perfect.” He mixes it with thrusts that’ll bruise my hips and chases it with teeth that scrape my skin. Laying on top of his order forms, covered in a film of semen across my bare stomach and blinking away the sweat that stung my eyes, there was no awkward laughs or misguided stares. He smiled at me big so that all his teeth shown, every decaying and yellow and crooked one until the poison became infectious. I knew things like that, smiles like that didn’t come out of one-night stands. They didn’t come out of mistakes.

    I fell in love with him. 

    What a poor, misguided little shit I am. 

    What a tragic flaw it is to fall in love with any man who gives me the least bit of attention. We slept there as the final straws of my apprehension slipped away as my back laid against his chest; our own bodies like lovers. The inward curl of Frank’s arm as it curled around him; the night’s seduction playing jazz in the night. The ends of his fingertips curl into my skin tightly, keeping me safe from anything as well as the
idea of escaping the metaphysical torture he likes to inflict. I had been working a month or so; I worried not if his fiancé were to call or walk in or worry where he might’ve disappeared to, not of the way she’d look at him in the morning with worried eyes and a soft, yet simple smile of relief to his well-being as she would stroke his hair. I worried more and more about how glowing it felt to become part of him, to feel enraptured in his cathartic aura. 

    “You’re so fucking cute.” He grins that boyish grin of his sitting down so calmly, lounging in his seat as he looked at him, grabbing me by the sides; picking me up light as a feather
off his desk and setting me straddled on his lap. I loose sense of how to articulate what it feels to me near him and I skid around a response until he opens up a new topic. “You’re helping Jamia with the wedding.” I scowl and he looks away. 

    We talk about tantric sex, he hints around the word but talks about metaphysical wetness and spiritual bending. We talk about a film, a film we both can’t remember the name of where the lead goes into a trance after an orgasm and the earth turns moist and wet, a film of much falls over everything on the screen and what is assumed their after. All the while, his fingertips trace the crevices and curves of my body; anywhere he can reach and explore, studying as he were going to be tested at a later date. He knows me so fluently; he’s articulate in every sensitive spot on my being and can just barely brush his thumb upon my skin to send me spiraling down into his eyes. 

    “We want white flowers to match the flower patterns that are going on the table settings, but she wants to make sure that we have the freshest we can get in the city. She
want you to help do the arrangements by hand because she doesn’t want no premade shit, you know? … She’ll also need help transporting the dresses from Stella’s to our apartment to keep until the wedding and we can get some fittings done, but shit, we’re just running out of time now … You’re such a stupid bitch for putting up with me, for being so kind and
coy and gorgeous, fuckin' gorgeous. Don’t forget to remind her to reserve the date for the caterers because they only book months ahead.” 

    He tells me there’s something about the way I’m so coy to hide my honesty that makes him
bite his nails and how he finds safety in the corners of my lips, in the least likely places is where he finds his sanctuaries. Mutters into the shell of my ear how my feline body movement constitutes something of pure subversive sex and how he loves to see me hurt, how my pain is proud and beating out like paper folding under running water.

    He tells me he loves me in not so many words.