Anna
I’ve never felt so safe falling asleep with a man as I do with Luka. There’s no apprehension, no nervousness, or rigid muscles against him. I melt into his body, absorbing his intense warmth like an endless sponge.
Every time I’ve sought out physical comfort from a man in the past, it always felt like some kind of malignant dance. I’d allow them to enter me, but I would give them no warmth. They wouldn’t receive one inch of my essence as a person, and I would make sure to never contact them again once I had run out the door and down the street after our encounter.
I never liked the idea of sharing a bed with any of these men, but I imagine it had something to do with how malicious they all felt when they fucked me. It was almost insulting, like none of them wanted anything to do with giving me pleasure. I was nothing but a toy to them, and they were more than willing to let me know it. Every time I’d leave their houses, I would be overcome with this sense of shame and guilt, even though I had sought out the experience for my own needs as well.
But Luka… he makes me cum so hard that I’m screaming his name. I allow him to own me because of that. I let him call me filthy names and degrade me because it’s all for my pleasure. He turns submitting to him into an act of indulgence for me.
Despite spending the majority of my night alternating between intense, passionate sex and sleep, I wake up feeling as though I’ve spent the entire night in peaceful slumber. I allow myself to awaken gradually, watching Luka’s chest rise and fall rhythmically as the sun bleeds through the blinds over his skin.
Seeing somebody like Luka in such a peaceful state of being like sleep is confusing, almost unnerving. How does he let go of all his thinly veiled anger and resentment when he sleeps? Surely, he would be tormented by it as the iron grip of his mental control dissolves into a dream state.
At around nine AM, he begins to shift into the waking world, blinking awkwardly at me while I stare back at him.
“Were you watching me sleep?” he asks, his voice deep and scratchy from sleep.
I flash a shameless smile. “I was.”
“That’s pretty weird. Why didn’t you get up and get some food or something?” he asks, covering his face from the sunlight as it slices his line of vision.
“I’m not sure. This is the most normal I’ve ever seen you, so maybe I just felt like I had to absorb it. You know, save it for later when you’re stomping around the house taking phone calls and disappearing for weeks at a time,” I reply, smirking a bit.
It’s a gamble to make a joke like that. I still haven’t been able to gauge his sense of humor at all, and I have no idea if he’ll think I’m kidding or attacking his character.
“Yeah, maybe the concept of normal comes easier to people who don’t move drugs and black-market weapons for a living,” he responds, and his tone is just as impossible to read as the braille menus at the fancy uptown restaurants that I can’t afford to eat at.
“Can you just tell me a little bit about that? I’m honestly just curious about it all. Like, I’ve done questionable shit to pay the bills too, but it was more like… insurance fraud, you know?” I say, reaching onto the floor for my shirt and pulling it over my head. “I was planning on doing that before you snatched me up, actually. I couldn’t stand working that fucking bar job any longer.”
“Insurance fraud is too much paperwork. You need to start without something that doesn’t leave a paper trail. Drugs, for example,” he replies. His tone is zen and unbothered, tempting me to inquire further.
“How did you get into it?” I ask point-blank.
He shrugs his wide shoulders. “My brother and I were street rats as kids. We didn’t have a lot of supervision since our parents both worked at the foundry in the city. Their shifts were all fucked up, so it was easy to get into shit,” he explains.
“Damn, sounds a lot like me and Rachel,” I reply, feeling a twinge of guilt at betraying my parents and their ability to raise us. No matter how poorly they acted as parents, I can never fully remove them from that position in my life. They were the only parents I ever had, even if they resented every minute of it.
“You two don’t seem like the type to get into trouble,” he responds, grabbing my waist before I can get off the bed. I have to resist leaning in and kissing him as soon as he touches me.
“We aren’t the type, at least not before Rachel started dabbling with drugs,” I reply. My heart swells a bit at the reminder that my teenage sister has already struggled so prematurely in life.
“Then what did you do with all that time unsupervised growing up? I knew kids who would blow up glass bottles in the parking lot behind my house while their parents worked or cooked meth,” Luka replies.
I think to myself for a moment, trying to pull a select few memories from the vague grey ocean of my past. There’s so much I’ve forgotten or blocked out that the accumulation of what I remember is probably no more than a couple of years combined, at best.
“We spent a lot of time at this corner store near our house,” I begin, carefully mapping out the timeline of the memory in the most tangible way possible. “I think the owners felt sorry for us. It started when my mom sent me there to pick up a bunch of Sudafed for them to cook with. It’s obviously unforgivable to put a child into that position, but I’m glad someone recognized it even if they weren’t able to help a whole lot. The woman who worked there would always give me and Rachel free bakery items and whatever else she could scrape together.”
“So, you should be used to strangers taking care of you,” Luka says, and the directness and honesty of his statement creates a weight in my stomach.
“Yeah, in a way. There were a lot of people who kind of looked out for Rachel and me, but at the end of the day, nobody wanted to intervene in a way that really matters,” I reply.
Luka stays quiet for a moment. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean. We had neighbors in our apartment building who would invite my brother and me over to play video games some nights when our parents had been gone a few days in a row. We didn’t think a lot of it, but it wasn’t normal.”
I empathize so deeply with his struggle, with the intense loneliness of his childhood. To live with ghosts for parents is one of the most crippling existences possible for a child, and here we are, recalling our pasts so casually as if we spent them in summer camps, writing letters to eager and present parents who wanted nothing more than to see us flourish in the world. The reality was starkly different.
“Did you have a lot of friends in a similar position growing up? Like the kids with the bottles?” I ask, recalling a few stray neighborhood kids who would sit after school with me when nobody was there to pick me up.
He laughs. “I wish, but those kids were dumb as fuck. I tried to interact with them a few times, but they behaved like wild dogs. Leo and I were smart kids, and we didn’t have the patience for the constant fighting and pissing contests that come from distressed young boys.”
“What kind of smart were you? When Rachel was a kid, she was reading two levels above the kids in her second-grade class, but she was terrible at math, so her teachers disregarded her,” I ask as I curl up into Luka’s chest.
He leans back, placing his arms over me. “I was in a similar position. I had a good brain for chemistry, but I used it in all the wrong ways. If I were raised in the US, I might have been one of those kids who would have made bombs in my backyard,” he responds, laughing a bit with a note of bitterness in his voice.
He seems far away, like he’s being held hostage by the reminder that his potential was wasted.
Instead of speaking, I wrap my arms around him, feeling his heart beating under my forearm. He brings me closer, using me to keep himself grounded as his memories flood back.
We both lie together in silence, allowing the scared kids we used to be to breathe a bit, to come out of hiding, and remind us of who we used to be when we had no power in the world.