Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

dam broke for real this time. Something beautiful and unavoidable happened, and we were suddenly kissing. Tasting lips and tongues and the smoothness of each other’s teeth. The rush of feeling in taking hold and pressing our hips together. I felt her hands and her fingers moving over me. I felt the female softness of her body give inside my grip. We pulled each other’s clothes off and tumbled around the bathroom, ending up in the tub briefly. We laughed at the stupidity of the whole thing, the waiting. Reveling in each other’s sex, and making ourselves naked. We kissed close and hushed ourselves as we really started to screw. Right there on the bathroom floor. Giving over to the wild, ineffable energy of it all. We smashed through the waiting and it released us.
    Why we didn’t just go into her bedroom, I never asked. This was how it happened, and this was the only way I could imagine it now. Acting it out in secret, as her roommate cooked her dinner, one floor below. We were already a secret. This is a thing which I am following Lauren into , I thought.
    *   *   *
    That weekend Cokie went home to see her parents, and Lauren and I lay around naked in bed. Eating and fucking and watching bad movies. It is a small but infinite happiness to share a bed this way. Standing in the shower after, I would let her clean my face and wash my hair, and I began to think of Lauren brand-new. There was a swelling feeling attached to her love. If she shone it on you, it became a force of nature with the danger of swallowing you whole and making you forget. Lauren and I had a secret, and it drove everything else.
    But Lauren agonized over whether or not to keep it all from Cokie. I would laugh because we talked about the whole thing like it was some shocking affair. And in a way, I guess, it was. If this was a thing I didn’t fully understand, then I didn’t need to understand it, I thought. Everything felt exactly right. Stealing kisses in the bar, or right there in Cokie’s house as she walked out of the room. We got off on our own ridiculous efforts of subterfuge and denial. All these transparent acts of holding back in public, before we’d meet up again, on a doorstep or in a park. Throwing our bikes down and kissing in the dark.
    And somewhere in the middle of this, Cokie just seemed to disappear. Worse, we couldn’t even really find her. I hadn’t heard one word from the girl in almost two weeks. And that’s when Lauren decided that we finally had to tell her.
    But Cokie just laughed at us. “Yeah, thanks, no shit,” she said. “I mean, did you really think I didn’t know? Jesus! I just got sick of watching you drag it out.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Lauren asked.
    â€œI mean, stop being such babies and assholes, and just say that you’re fucking! Who cares? I don’t care. It’s not really that interesting, you know? Fuck all you want, for all I care. But stop treating me like I’m stupid.”
    Lauren didn’t say anything.
    â€œOh,” I said. “Sorry, Cokie.”
    *   *   *
    Sadly, everything changed after that. Everything that had been right the week before was now wrong. The sex got bad or boring, or at least less frequent. It was strained and fraught with too many strange concerns. Sex became a thing we did by rote, and then it just stopped altogether.
    Lauren and I decided we should take some time apart. But the tension of this made me crazy, and I broke down after a day. Showing up at her house, where we fought and fucked, and kissed good night out on the sidewalk, as she sent me home again. I couldn’t shake this new and terrible feeling that she was ignoring me. Lauren seemed to disappear for days at a time now. When we talked at all, it was in rambling ten-minute phone calls. These bursts where we would cover everything except the thing that had happened to us. Lauren wanted to talk