“Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah, just for a second.”

You last for longer than a second, but not by much. I feel the cold metal of your ring through the back of my scalp as I swallow your guilty satisfaction. Clothes primly rearranged, lips a tell-tale hue: I feel a bruise forming on my left hip where I pressed the bone too eagerly against your car’s console.

We drive in silence, the weight of our missteps held off by the erotic afterglow. Back again in the surroundings of naive acquaintances and corporate white noise, I search for a conscience that doesn’t exist. I should hate myself. I should lick my lips and taste bile instead of desire, but somewhere in the past year of finding love and losing it, I found my power and lost my ability to defend others against me.

“What did you do for lunch?”

We’re winding and weaving, flying down the road, trees whipping past. I follow him like a pipered rat; with every oak that passes—a blur of branch and leaf—the lines of won’t and can’t blur into will and shall.

The rocks crunch under our cars as the tires peel into his parking lot. I peel the small rock from my left hand and forget it in my purse along with my ability to choose right. He pulls me from the car, his lips crushing mine as we walk awkwardly attached to his door.

“That was the longest drive ever,” his lips whisper to mine.

Keys in lock, door swings open, clothes pulled asunder in our haste. We race against thinking twice, race against sobriety and sobering regrets. His teeth on my neck, my nails in his back: we lay our marks of claim as we fuck against the wall, barely keeping our balance in our erotic inebriation.

He pulls away, and I follow again, up the stairs this time to his room where we fall into bed and back into each other. We conquer a chair next, but our strength gives out to give way to the floor.