The Day I Became a Guy
Men and women aren’t born equal. I don’t give a damn about our theoretical potential. To this day, we’re not armed the same way in the arena of sex. We’re already maturing ahead of our time, we’re procreating on fixed-term contracts, we’re earning less, even on temporary contracts, our eggs have an expiry date and our vaginal secretions don’t make babies. That’s how they calculate our entitlements at God our Father’s family allowance fund. What’s more, we do not come as often, or as quickly, and we’re less likely to ignore feelings when there’s sex going on. I mean, we’ve spent thousands of years waiting for these sons of bitches, so obviously that has had an impact on a gene or two. No. No. Don’t get the wrong idea. We’re not their equals, Loluche.
One Detail Too Many
He leered at their photos, and they would never know. It wasn’t like the women in the magazines. They were real. They had taken photos of themselves. They had put their phone down on a steady surface and looked at it, thinking about how they’d be looked at. They clutched their chests, stared at the screen with wide eyes, their heads thrown back proudly, or with lips slightly parted. They had also taken the time to introspect, lying on the bed, one leg on top of the other, or legs apart, perhaps with one hand on the phone and one hand on their genitals, writing a biography that gave them a certain personality, passions, hobbies, maybe even some social status. They had tapped out a few words with their fingers in the dark of a lonely bedroom. Or perhaps they had typed them after a break-up, in tears and a rage against the world. Perhaps they had even written them behind the back of a man they were thinking of cheating on.
This focus on themselves made them touching, vulnerable, human, violent and vicious, but it also invented spaces, places and timeframes that took Louis on a journey. And he really enjoyed traveling without having to look out of his window. He was happy to be able to caress, motionless, at any moment, the hope of being interesting to a woman who existed and whom he had also invented. Besides, he wouldn’t have to do much. He could be completely himself or not at all. She would talk to him from behind a screen. He could do as he pleased. He wouldn’t have to blush. He wouldn’t have to bow his head or look her straight in the eye.
From One Puzzle to Another
So I ordered this jigsaw painting and concentrated on putting it together. Once, then once again, then... The work restructured the space and made it smaller. At first, I felt like I was in Alex’s house. To be back in that enclosed space where I had become diluted. Where I’d distanced myself from myself, where I’d been loved and had loved. Then, as I put the jigsaw together again, I moved away from Alex’s home and found someone I knew well: the little girl in me, filled with wonder, a nine-year-old girl who was rediscovering, over and over again, an extraordinary expression. Achieving this work was both restoring and distancing me from solving an insoluble problem. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, pieces of the jigsaw stuck to my cheeks, and I’d continue the work in my dreams: I’d dream of putting them back together. When I came home from work, I’d find the jigsaw again, just as I would find my cat. Happy and confident that its love was unconditional and that it couldn’t let me down.
The Dominatrix from Cergy
I nod mechanically. I’m Harry Potter facing Hagrid Rubeus. I have magic in my brains. She’s big and strong. We take a seat. She orders a pint of blackcurrant for me and a Coke Zero for herself, which she drinks in one go. I gulp down a whiskey neat. We exchange small talk and anecdotes, then soon enter the characterless lobby of a thirty-storey tower block. Small guy gangs are smoking hash and staring at us. One says: “Little faggot”. Aicha, unperturbed, big, fat, her breasts like an army ready to defend me, tells them to shut up. I’m shaking in my boots as her gaze lines them up one after the other like pieces of meat on a skewer. The guys just laugh, but quietly. The laughter fades. Until it disappears. We climb the stairs. Four at a time. Once the door is closed, she leaves me no time to think. Slaps come in all directions. I undress, she undresses me, I undress her, she undresses herself. She grabs me by the hips, wedges my head between her tits. My head disappears, slapped from one breast then by the other.
You like it, slut, don’t you? You like it when I fuck you.
Louise and Leila
Mario texts Leila. I suggest we make love to break the ice before she arrives.
The initiative works well. Mario undresses hastily. I only pull down my panties. I watch him undress, relieved we’re going to do it while noting its inescapable predictability. I kneel on all fours on the bed so he can take me without seeing me, and so I don’t have to kiss him. He quickly puts on a condom, takes me, moans to himself, oblivious to my existence, to my inner reality and his own. I feel nothing, nowhere. Not even pain, not even disgust, not even boredom. He straddles me and I fall asleep just like in front of a bad porn film. Very turned on, he pulls out. He doesn’t want to come. We’ve got to save ourselves for the rest of the night, he says. We get dressed just as we got undressed, hastily and without poetry, and we wait for Leila in the living room.
Alesia’s Forcer
He mistook my disgust for desire. My no for a yes.
I push him away vehemently, claiming - in case a simple refusal wasn’t enough – that I’m on the verge of an imminent vasovagal syncope. This doesn’t discourage him. He encircles me with his tentacles and whispers contradictions to me:
We can take as long as you like. I’m patient, you know...
The Other
At night, the men watch a match and Zahia and I talk on the sofa. We cuddle and stroke each other’s hair. We tell each other about our lives.
One evening, she lies down on my thighs and tells me that she never had a childhood, that she had been introduced to the world straight away, that she didn’t know anything about games, that she had started later, much later, at thirty perhaps. She loves transgression and the one thing that came to mind is the body.
Touching, you understand, touching when it’s inappropriate, and always another body, otherwise people will think I’m trying to make friends. And I don’t care about friends, you understand. I don’t care because friends don’t exist and never have.
The Cheat
Every morning, Antoine enters the kitchen, kisses my cheek, and recites to our daughter Elsa a poem or a multiplication table that she has to learn by heart for school. He exhales a woody fragrance, his mouth tastes of honey, his loose linen shirt reveals the little twisted hairs, his curly hair falls over his cat-like eyes, his mischievous eyes follow our daughter’s determined lips. I look at him, admire him, enjoy the picture of a man I loved, of a child I adore, but in my heart, in my pussy, there’s nothing left. Coffee is a lure; it no longer warms my heart. The caress is like warm earth covering a corpse.
The Wait
Lise smiles. Rose returns her smile and continues:
Oh, I used to be like you. I used to wait too. I waited all the time. One day I waited for a woman for a whole day. We had made love the night before, and the moment after we’d made love I started waiting for her. She hadn’t even left my bed yet, and yet I felt she was already far away, already gone, already lost. I waited for her for days. She never came back.
A Conversation
Most of the time, just after I’ve said I already have someone, I also say: I don’t have sex, ever. I don’t have sex. I do all the other things. I look pretty, I make conversation, I keep company, I eat dinner, have lunch, drink and smoke. But I don’t make love.
Never.
I don’t make love.
What happens during is all, absolutely all, all that can happen, except the sexual act. When I say I already have someone, most of the time it isn’t too embarrassing. They continue to say. To talk. To hope. But it is when I say I don’t make love, particularly when I say I do everything but not love, that I get the response So you do nothing? So I say they can try it with me if they want to, and if they don’t want to, that’s fine. And sometimes they reply: Try what?
An Almost Perfect Wedding
What was real between us and what was fake? Was our relationship false? After all, isn't that the case with all relationships? Aren't we all, to varying degrees, artisans of denial? Don't we all choose to ignore the warning signs, to turn a blind eye to what's not working in a relationship, to persist in the illusion of a perfect love, a perfect relationship, an ideal partner, an eternal love? Don't we all think that a simple swipe on a dating app might be enough to awaken Cupid? And yet we know full well that love is not to be found in the superficiality of a few retouched photos, and yet we search again and again for it in this plethora of lies....
A-typical Love
He makes love the same way he doesn’t talk. A lot. I like his hands, I like his skin, I like the way he smells, I like his sex, I like the way he comes in and out. I love the beginning, I love the middle, I love the end. I love the way his resting sex quickly hardens. I also love how, most of the time, he’s silent. I like how he gives little importance to my intelligence and my ideas. When the sex is over, I think about establishing a language. But when I open my mouth, Romain, again, silences me and takes off my clothes. I take it out on the collection of short stories I’m writing. Since he doesn’t say anything, I make characters talk, I ask strangers questions, I invent dialogues. In my short stories, the characters have conversations and in my short stories, I don’t talk about Romain yet.