NONFICTION
The Hugger
by Rob Duffer
"Are you crying?" I stopped. My eyes adjusted to the dark. In our drunken haste she had neglected to light the candles she had bought for my bedroom. Against the whiteness of the sheets, I could see the outline of her fist, her cheek pressed against the pillow in the direction of the door.
"No, c'mon, don't stop," she said. Our breath smelled like cigarettes and alcohol.
Months ago, her coworkers from the bar introduced her as The Hugger. Unlike her late-night friends she'd rather hug than have sex. Though she referred to penises as "dirty sticks," her abstinence was less about prudishness than self-respect. That was what I inferred. We went on three dates then stopped kissing, stopped everything but hugging. We became friends. During a month between leases, she stayed with my roommate and I. The testosterone must've gotten to her; we started having sex as inexplicably as we stopped dating. Her regular presence in my bedroom exposed the muted desperation of bachelorhood. As her third partner in her 24 years, I relearned gentleness, tenderness. She remembered how to hide.
Now, in the lightless bedroom, I felt special, rarer and more valuable. Yet why did she not seem to be enjoying it?
Two weeks prior we came together. I thought we locked onto that elusive physical chemistry. Wrong. She told me she came easily. The next time we were intimate, drunk again at four in the morning, she asked me to open my eyes. The candles on both nightstands must've shadowed my lids. "Open your eyes, open your eyes," she repeated it six times, until it was a command. It followed other commands – "go in slowly, ease up after I come." She wanted to communicate. I wanted to fuck. I lost my nerve, rolled over and flung the condom at the door. She left crying and I shut my eyes, saw her cupping her thumb into her fist when she slept, the same gesture she made during the indie movies she introduced me to. I felt her leaning her head on my shoulder, watching tearfully as a toddler kissed his tired mother's cheek on the train. Then I passed out.
The next night at the bar we argued about what happened; she called me an asshole, I called her a control freak, and our friends told us to get married. We laughed and resumed sharing my bed.
Emitting a soft moan, she writhed closer to the headboard, further from me. In the darkness, I found her eyes with my lips and tasted salt.
"You are crying!" I threw myself into the wall, wishing it would swallow me, consume me in darkness. "Why are you crying?"
"It's not you," she wrapped herself in the comforter, sobbing.
"What is it then?" I fumbled for the lamp switch on the night stand. I got angry, feeling as if I violated her, as if she had seduced me into hurting her. She asked me to calm down.
"I told you I'm not comfortable in the dark." "You're a child," I mocked her, looming over her on my knees. "Openyoureyesopenyoureyeslookatme."
"Stop it," she slammed her fist into the mattress.
"Tell me what I did wrong."
"I told you it's not you," she looked at me for the first time, with a smile that appreciated my ignorance. I waited.
You know the story. Somewhere, somehow, someone – a cousin maybe – broke her. The story that shames you as a male, the story that made me want to hold her and promise to protect her. As she talked about it, not the event but the aftermath, I stared at the ceiling and wished I could tell her to never again be afraid of the dark. What had she seen in my looming silhouette? My shame, her pain, stretched from my mouth to my dick.
"It's not you," she reassured me. She had been patching herself up since she was twelve. When the cracking began and she started to suffocate on the darkness of the past, she'd have to tell, to shine a light so she could feel whole, so she would know it wasn't happening again.
I should've been listening to what she didn't want to say.
Rob Duffer teaches creative writing, bartends and writes in Chicago, where he will soon be a father. His writing has been published in The Tap, Blue, Hair Trigger 26, newpages.com, thisisgrand.org and others. He is looking for an agent/editor/publisher for his first novel, excerpts of which have won partial scholarships and been named semifinalist in the Guild Fiction Writers Series.