Sorry, I’m being harsh. I’ve always had a deviant vision of other people’s thoughts; perhaps you didn’t think all those things. But perhaps you hoped them, just a bit.

THREE

I didn’t love him, I felt no tenderness for him, I wasn’t particularly fond of him. I exploited his adulthood, his experience, the security he was able to give me.

He exploited the childish part of me that I guard so jealously, because it’s small, insignificant, soft, and yet precious. We exploited our bodies with the excuse that we were freeing our souls. He said I had given my freedom to him, that with me he felt like a falcon. But what had he given me?

I gave myself to him because he was the only one at that moment in time who could lick my wounds. Lick them, open them up, and make them burn. And then lick them again.

I told myself that his body was exactly the same size as the deep abyss that had formed inside my own. I thought his body, stretched out on top of mine, might suddenly heal the bloody wound that opened up a little more each day, each day another centimeter.

Then I let him love me, and he let me love him.

At the precise moment when I came, I already felt sated and full, and wanted to be alone with myself. He turned his back on me and I curled up in a fetal position on the bed, closed in on myself. I masturbated.

Then he left me alone and stayed motionless on the unmade bed, completely naked, one arm over his head and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, lost in thought. His body still pulsed with erotic discharges, his virility a powerful presence.

In those moments of silent stillness, when the darkness of the hotel room was lit at intervals by the headlights of passing cars, I wondered what he would be left with if the natural perfume in which he was drenched were assimilated, swallowed, fixed within me. He would become an arid oak tree, about to die of dehydration, and his roots would be firmly planted in the earth, but the sap would no longer course through that rough and imposing trunk.

FOUR