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It may bore you.

She herself may bore you.

She tries not to and this makes it worse. She is too young to know many men who aren’t entranced by the credential of her beauty and the drawing power of her x. Some women almost never outgrow that.

Nude, her breasts are small, her ass slightly slack. You get too old to tell a woman what she wants to hear. This makes her want to hear it more. There are men by the hundreds in any bar, and there is nothing extraordinary about you but your inattention. This is not a tool, but a fact, and your acceptance of it is a meridian. A thing inside of self to fear, like any change.

She comes to your apartment once, twice, three times. She wants to make her father small. She means to take from you what she can mistake for the semblance of his full on acceptance.

This is your green couch and she is small on it, her practiced smiles, the phrases with which she means to shock you, as if you haven’t heard someone so blunt or quick before, but this confidence is a put on, and you’re tired. She needs you to ask her for the gift of her body, but for you it is no gift and so eventually she needs to ask you to ask her, and she goes about all of it like most any girl who has yet to walk through the fires.

But you will not play.

Annoyed, you tell her each time to go. The first time, your hand beneath her bare jeans, on her ass. Lunges, you tell her. Your body won’t keep. It’s not keeping all ready.

What you’re not attracted to in her is not the way her ass feels. Don’t see her wrong. She is that kind of lovely that will begin to creep away at twenty five. But this is her at twenty three.

What the real problem is: you’ve reached the point where you can’t stand a spoiled girl.

And so you see the absolute limit of a bonding. It will begin with a fuck and end with one, little more. There will be the mechanics of it for you, and what will she have then.

But hand on her ass, cold words coming out of your mouth, you know the truth. You know the little lies you tell yourself: that if you stand there with your knife and your bloodlust and she finally throws herself on it, have you done wrong?

Second visit. She works in a Victoria Secret and she asks you to see her panties and bra. She kneels on the bed. How does it look? You can’t see like that any more, the way most men see, not this girl, not at this moment, not most girls. You watch a woman drink a soda and you can imagine the sugar in her blood, in her guts. There are layers even to physical beauty, not to mention the other.

It gets harder for one to be beautiful in front of you.

The attraction is base. That’s not quite the same as saying nothing is there. Her breath is slightly foul, as if from a stomach disorder. The bones of her face are very fine, her cheeks like airbrush inventions. Her waist very narrow; her skin dark and smooth; her eyes prettprety. She takes a good photograph, leaning forward, the first night, her blue shirt, her bared shoulder, eyes down cast, her gentle smirk, but it is all illusion, the picture better than the sum of her, and on the bed in her bra and panties, a pornographer’s dream, and I have the heart of a pornographer, but I do not further undress her. We lie there for a long time in the silence and the dark, my back to her, and she tells me all the secrets she thinks will make me admire her.

You could fuck her then, you almost do, the third night; this time she comes unbidden, and she stumbles through her vision of seduction. You sit above her with your knife, your bloodlust, but beyond the ecstasy of the death itself, you will both be disappointed by what you don’t take here.

Her belly still sunken. Her hips bones still visible. Her x small and slightly open, lines of wet running through the dark cats eye of it; you go in with your fingers, with your tongue. You feel overly somber and you know what this will be like for her, a wound to carry afterwards, a reminder of a man she thought she was taking possession of only to see that she herself had been possessed and left behind.

In the end, you do not fuck. It feels to her like rejection, and she is bitter leaving.

In days, in an email, she’ll tell you that she’s finally agreed to her boyfriend’s proposal, that she’ll marry him. You should wonder as if it is a legitimate question how she’s been broken. You should realize that the apparent virtue of your freezing does not so clearly reflect on your desire to protect any her; in the end you must recognize that it wasn’t for her at all that you weren’t fucking, not really.

In the end, you're always trying to save yourself from something, even the smallest thing...say the ennui of fucking a girl you've already known by type over and over.