Ever since Lucien\u2019s eight-week promise to his wife not to see me, I spent most nights at Ben\u2019s, drinking wine and smoking hash.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not going to run off and live with that old French git,\u201d Ben said, shaving a hunk of sweet Afghani into smokable flakes with his Swiss Army knife.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do you spell\u00a0git<\/em>?\u201d I said, recording all of his Briticisms when stoned.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ll be wiping his ass in ten years.\u201d<\/p>\n Ben\u2019s face was thin, his head shaved, and when he took a drag he looked like a skull and crossbones.<\/p>\n \u201cLemme draw you,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cRemember, I\u2019m the artist,\u201d he said, throwing me a flat thick pencil.<\/p>\n I drew two circles the size of quarters, filled them in black as could be\u2014the way you did on a Scantron\u2014and tore them out. I leaned my head back and put the circles over my eyes. Walking on my knees, I stuck my arms out in front of me and said, \u201cI AM SKELETOR.\u201d<\/p>\n I felt my way to the coffee table, to our last bottle of wine. The black circles fell off my face when I poured.<\/p>\n \u201cMake us a draw-er-ing,\u201d I said, scooting over to Ben.<\/p>\n We sat knees to knees and he sketched what looked like a melted candle.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very Petit Prince. What is it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s you and me under the covers.\u201d<\/p>\n I grabbed the sketchbook and tossed it. \u201cGive up,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m nicking you,\u201d Ben said. \u201cServes the dodgy Frog right.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou and I would end up dead in the Seine,\u201d I said. \u201cDead\u00a0drunk<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n It was getting late, past me dealing with the Metro.<\/p>\n Radio France switched from French songs to American.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s Mariah fuckin\u2019 Carey!\u201d Ben said. \u201cYour compatriot. Giz\u2019 a snog!\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes, you kiss a guy because he throws a line you couldn\u2019t ever possibly hear again.<\/p>\n We were drunk, we were high, our foreheads hit.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Ben stood, pulled out the futon I always crashed on, took the blanket down from the shelf and put some water on for tea.<\/p>\n \u201cThe usual?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cOui<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n My head was spinning. Ben kept begging for me, through the wall. Him\u2014like in the cartoons he drew\u2014a stick figure boy with \u201cShag\u201d in his thought bubble on one side of a barrier, and me on the other side, a stick figure girl thinking \u201cPatience,\u201d but maybe the word wasn\u2019t completely spelled out.<\/p>\n My eyes landed on a glass of miraculously unfinished wine and the Swiss Army knife Ben had used earlier for scraping hash. The Paris night blew across the greenish-grey rooftops outside. The moon replenished itself in the City of Light, the city of no ice cubes.<\/p>\n \u201cCome sleep with me. I\u2019ll behave like a brother.\u201d<\/p>\n All the tricks and cheap wine.<\/p>\n I jumped on top of Ben in his twin bed, my lower-center pressed to just above his, the place of ironwork-twisted-in-root smell of men. I was wearing his boxers and \u201cBritish Fag\u201d tee, holding the hash-sticky knife blade to the moist mound of his neck.<\/p>\n \u201cHow about you and me starkers?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Stoned on hash, I could see where he had nicked himself shaving. White fibers of Kleenex stuck to yellow crust, not quite a scab.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst,\u201d I said, \u201ctake a sip.\u201d<\/p>\n I held the wine glass at an angle so as not to spill, at an angle Ben had to lift his head to\u2014that forced him to press his Adam\u2019s apple into the blade.<\/p>\n He sipped.<\/p>\n His hands moved from my hips to my ankles and a grin spread across his cheeky face. He had good bones. He laughed under my thighs and I felt his laughter hit just above the band of his boxers, which I still had on because as fucked up as I could be, I knew cheating with a Brit on my French married lover who might be leaving his wife when I still wasn\u2019t legally divorced from the Russian, wouldn\u2019t be right.<\/p>\n Like how surfers get to standing in one barely visible move, I hopped up and stood above Ben, marching with the knife in one hand and the wine glass in the other. My feet landed in drunken rhythm on either side of his narrow hips. \u201cHayayaya!\u201d I said.<\/p>\n Ben had a sawhorse set up by his bedroom window to serve as an airing-out hangar for his Paris-smoky clothes. The sawhorse stood one foot from the bed. I stepped onto it and balanced, still with the knife in one hand, wine glass in the other. \u201cI am Nadia Comanisshhi!\u201d I said.<\/p>\n Out the window the cobblestones below were grey like the moon and set in a rainbow pattern. I threw my hands to the sky and stretched, arching my back, preparing to land like Comaneci, flatfooted and final, or like Kundera, between laughter and forgetting.<\/p>\n \u201cJe t\u2019donne un 7<\/em>!\u201d Ben had become an Olympic judge.<\/p>\n I turned from the window, tried a dip off the beam with one foot\u2014the simplest of moves.<\/p>\n \u201cJe m\u00e9rite un 9<\/em>!\u201d I said\u2014and fell.<\/p>\n My wine glass flew. Wine splattered everywhere\u2014on Ben\u2019s twin sheets, on his pile of clothes, on his face.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m sorry!\u201d I said.<\/p>\n Ben jumped to the floor, grabbed me under my armpits, and lifted me to a stand. \u201cBloody hell!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Wine droplets clung to his eyelashes. He had his hands on my face again like when I\u2019d let him kiss me because he had said\u00a0Mariah fucking Carey<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou okay?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I raised the knife up between our stained lips. I put the blade to his face and shaved a bead of wine from his cheek. It seemed to breathe \u2026Where there is love\u2026<\/em>\u00a0on the edge of the blade. Ben put his finger to it, and then to my mouth.<\/p>\n \u2026 I\u2019ll be there.<\/em><\/p>\n ____________<\/p>\n Christine Fadden recently found herself biting her own fist while watching\u00a0Dexter<\/em>, Season 4. She admits she does like this Mariah song, and also, J-Lo’s\u00a0Love Don’t Cost a Thing<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since Lucien\u2019s eight-week promise to his wife not to see me, I spent most nights at Ben\u2019s, drinking wine and smoking hash. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to run off and live with that old French git,\u201d Ben said, shaving a hunk of sweet Afghani into smokable flakes with his Swiss Army knife. \u201cHow do you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}