L

I’m thinking of chocolate covered almonds. The chocolate is dark, dairy free. There is a candy shell, yellow or purple or red. As I drive she pops one and then the other into her mouth. I learned from my mother when I was young to fear a woman who eats.

I gave up those candies, all candies, as I’ve given up other things, as, if I lived long enough, I’d give up nearly everything.

And of course, death makes spartans of us all.

But for now, it is the sugar rush of candy. (And for a long time, it’s been meat, dairy).

L is pneumatic and blond. We meet at a bar, twice, in fact. She’s smiling and open eyed and lovely and each of the times I come across her I think about her for a while after she’s gone.

She tells me she has a child but the bartender tells me she has two and over the phone she tells me that truth before I ask her for it. We play pool in the middle of the week, though I am not the sort that plays pool. She is the kind of girl you trust enough right away to do things with that you would not normally do. If she asked me to dance, I might.

The pool hall is nearly empty, but I know the boys there watch her. She’s an open invitation in front of a mostly closed door. You’ll mistake her kindness and her bubbly nature for an easiness that isn’t really there.

She drinks a lot. There’s that and the candy almonds. There are things that people don’t hide up front that wouldn’t bother you later on but are too much too early.

He breasts are round and firm, her ass small and curved, but she will not show her stomach. Maybe something has happened to it in birthing. She wants to be fucked exclusively from behind, with her shirt not off, just down around her waist.

Her oldest is thirteen and she is only 27. She calls him several times in the night to postpone her coming home and finally cancels it all together. We finish and she turns to kiss me and we stop and then a little while later, we start again.

In the morning we wake and she showers and dresses but then we start again. She asks me to come in her mouth and I do. Then I see a drip of it on her blouse, a flower print without shoulders, a deeply cut neck.

She’s got to go home, to her boy, the babysitter, and the younger one, the babysat.

She talks of a gift for seeing into people and into the future and she is so serious and so certain and tells me stories that are so convincing I began to ask her about me, about my future, and she tells me that everything will be ok. I suppose she knows that at this time not everything is.

You can almost take a hold of her. You can almost want to. It is almost always this way with a woman. You reach a point where you might go forward or might go back, where everything is tangible, and the smallest thing can move you in either direction.

I feel guilty in the car as she eats the chocolate covered almonds. She’s going home to her sons and there on her flower print shirt is the darkened fabric where my come dripped. And I have a son. And an ex wife who is his mother.

And it’s not at that moment or this one that I feel L has been misused. It is that in this effort for connection, in this testing of bonds, we all are. Where there is need or want there is danger. We introduce ourselves to disappointment, time and time again. We create illusion and crash ourselves against it.

L understand me. She says, You’ll be all right. Someday, you’ll be ready to really share your space again.

I imagine her waking in the night and me stiff beside her and curled away, and maybe it is true, or maybe she just knew some other way. It is nice to be known and nicer yet to be known and accepted.

I think of L and chocolate covered almonds and the sun on her face and the way she smiled when she got out of her car. It’s a fondness I feel and a fondness I see, and the car door closes and because this is a post, that sounds like an end, and to the fucking, it was, but to the knowing it wasn’t.