The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(70)

“Only because I did it without telling you.” Will sunk a little in his seat. “I didn’t think that part through too good. None of us is really into surprises anymore.”

“No shit.” John said.

“But once the shock wore off… What the hell, it’s just hair. It grows back.”

Lucky ran her hand over Will’s crown. “It’s like velvet,” she said, a little dreamily. “Especially when you rub against the nap.”

“Yeah, with your inner thighs,” David muttered and again the table broke up.

Erik laughed along, but he kept an ear peeled the next few weeks, listening for Will and Lucky’s customary noises in the middle of the night. Either they were having quieter sex or, like Erik and Daisy, they weren’t having much at all. Erik desperately wanted to ask. Hit the gym or go for a run and bring up the topic. Ask Will if he and Lucky were having trouble in bed.

But he didn’t. It was awkward. And such a f*cking drag. He thought his physical relationship with Daisy would get better back at school. Back in the cradle of their romance.

It didn’t.

Their desire was back—whether it was from the campus vibe, or from the memory of past sexual encounters splashed all over the apartment on Jay Street, the love call was loud and undeniable. Yet the love itself was unremarkable.

Daisy had to struggle to come. Moves and tricks Erik had once brought her around in minutes, but now brought only an indifferent, dulled pleasure. “It feels good, it’s just not taking me anywhere,” she said, her voice filled with a confused frustration. “It’s like I’m stuck. I don’t know.”

“I know,” Erik said, confused by his own experience. He felt like a klutz in bed. Getting aroused was no problem, the urge struck often, but once in the act, he couldn’t get completely into it. He wasn’t exactly stuck, but he couldn’t seem to find the hook during sex, the ability to step off the edge of himself and fall headlong into a climax. It was like sleeping with one eye open, or one foot planted on the floor: he couldn’t give over to pure pleasure anymore, he felt constantly braced for something.

Cruelest of all, sometimes the sex was sweet and connected, but followed by an anxiety so intense, it left them reeling and shaking, if not outright physically sick. It was a sucker punch tactic filling Erik with an angry dread. They’d be cuddling together in the afterglow, minding their own damn business, and little by little he would start to feel sick, feel the unexplainable fear coming out of the dark.

“When the wolves come,” Daisy said. To her the angst was like a pack of hunting beasts loping over the horizon, coming to tear them apart.

Erik fought it. Tried to make a stand, using all the mantras and talismans at his possession, but it was no use. The undefinable terror ensnared him like a trap, a fish in a net, dragged down by a churning undercurrent of something is wrong, something is wrong, and no means to fix it other than throwing more and more time at it.

Beside him Daisy shivered, caught in the same net. “Why is this happening?”

“I don’t know.” He had no answers. He could not help her, could not save her from the wolves plucking her apart, petal by petal.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. They clung to each other, shaking it out, trying to beat it back with jokes.

“Gotta love the afterglow.”

“Most people have a cigarette. We have a panic attack.”

They were both free-falling, gripped with a terrible foreboding they could not explain. Shivering, freezing cold, pulling their clothes on and seizing extra blankets.

“Let me spoon you,” she whispered.

“Please.”

She pressed up against his back, knees behind his, her hand flat against his knocking heart. Laying this way, with Erik sandwiched between her hand and her body, pressure from both sides, seemed to be the only calming remedy.

“At least we’re both feeling it,” he said.

“We’re in it together.”

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have a nervous breakdown with than you.”

“Oh, honey. You say the sweetest things to me.”

“I’m trying to be funny about it. I don’t know else what to do.”

“I love you. We’ll get through it.”

“I love you.”

“We just have to get each other through it and…f*ck sex.”

He laughed. “Fuck sex.”

“Fuck this.”

“Fuck this f*cking f*cked-up world. Jesus Christ, what the f*ck.”

“I love you. You’re f*cked-up and I love you.”

“I love your f*cked-upness.”

They were trying so hard but they were so young. Unskilled and powerless at three o’clock in the morning when they ought to be consumed with each other. Instead they were being eaten alive.





Pepparkakor


Erik wondered how many important conversations had taken place while he was either up a ladder or holding one.

He was holding one now for Joe Bianco, who was replacing a section of Christmas lights on the porch of La Tarasque.

“You having nightmares?” Joe asked.

“Sometimes.”

“How often?”

“Few times a week,” Erik said.