"What are your three favorite words?"

"I don't know."

"How can you not know?" she said. "You're a writer."

"I use words," I said. "I don't fetishize them."

"Well... maybe you should."

We were laying on her couch, naked. She was reclined against the corner cushion and I was reclined between her legs — as if she were some sort of strange yet sexy settee conformed just for me. I couldn't imagine ever moving.

Maybe it was just the pot.

She always liked to smoke up after sex, and then ask me weird questions. Half the time they were stupid stoner questions — bizarre hypotheticals meant to seem deep and probing, but actually meaningless.

Trouble was, the other half of the time they were really great questions.

"C'mon!" she said.

"I don't know. I need more time."

"Oh god, no one's writing this in stone. I won't tell anyone. Just pick something!"

"It's that joint," I said. "I'm more of a drinker. Pot makes me... ineffable."

"What?"

"No. That's one of my words. Ineffable. It means something so great it can't be expressed in words."

"See!" she said. "That's a good one!"

"Insouciant," I continued.

"Which means..."

"Casually aloof. Casually sassy."

"What made you think of that?"

"Guess," I said.

"Well thank you." She took a long drag, then said the word out loud. "Insouciant."

"Lay on the 't' more at the end — insouciant."

"Insouciant."

"Fun to say, right?"

"It is. One more."

"No, your turn now," I said. "I'll finish later."

"You should've said that about five minutes ago," she said.

"Insouciant."

"Fuck," she said.

"What?"

"Fuck is one of my favorite words."

"Fuck. Fuck's a good one."

"Fun to say."

"Even more than insouciant," I said. "And versatile."

"Fuck this fuck that..."

"Myopic," I interrupted.

"Which means..."

"Self-involved. But it's an intellectual way to say it." She passed the joint down to me. "Which I guess is sort of what I am. A self-involved intellectual. Someone so caught up in his own mind that he often misses what's going on right in front of him."

"Yes."

"Thanks."

"No," she said. "Yes is one of my favorite words."

"Another good one."

"I like to say yes to things."

"Not... everything."

"Maybe you just haven't asked in the right way."

"Tangible," I said.

"You already used up your three."

"It means..."

"I know what it means," she said. "Turn around. And come here."

A half hour later, our positions were switched — she was now laying on my stomach. I breathed deep and her body raised very slightly. Sex had calmed my mind. Made it monosyllabic. Hm, it thought. Nice. Hm. Ah. God. Yes...

Yes. Fuck.

"Your words were really good," I said.

"I know."

"Mine? I think I need to revise."

"You mean you got four words," she said, "and didn't mean any of them?"

"I meant them when I said them, but now..."

"Well I only got two words, and I meant 'em both."

I looked down at her constellation of tattoos, overlaid across her skin from nape to navel: the scar of a new star on her neck; her deceased mother's name across her heart; Mondrian-style stained glass windows, cracked across her ribs; a violin's F cleft looping languidly below her hipbone.

At first, I didn't like her tattoos. I figured I'd soon tire of looking at them — if I actually stuck around long enough to tire of them, which I doubted.

Now? They'd become one of those things — a perceived 'imperfection' that you ignore at first, then get used to; until, in the end, it becomes something you actually cherish. Something you would long for were the two of you to ever break up.

I was falling for her, I realized.

"Hey, what was your last word?"

"I'm not telling," she said.

"C'mon."

"No," she said, and smiled. "You should've listened when you had the chance." Then she drifted off to sleep.

Copyright 2009 Dave Mondy  |  Make Contact