real life

The love story ending you'd never see in the movies.

 

 

It’s all wrong from the beginning. We know it. Ignore it. Coast on borrowed time. We fall into one another far too quickly. I feel myself dissolving; no longer a whole person, but an outline, coloured in with parts of him.

We meet in secret, snatch hours from the top and bottom of days. We’re work colleagues, fuelled by the cliche´of the clandestine. Can’t be together. Can’t stay apart.

For the first time ever, my thoughts are consumed with sex. I’m hungry for it. The more I get, the more I want. It’s selfish, sweaty, fierce sex. We claw at one another. Tumble from the bed to the floor. Collapse in breathless piles of laughter.

He’s beautiful. Simultaneously soft and strong. I feel wanted. Sexy. I walk emboldened. Paint my lips red. On the nights we’re apart, desire keeps me awake. It prickles. Alive and greedy.

At work he’s more senior than I. Has more to lose. He’s a manager in a corporate world of grey suits and strict policies. I’m squeezing in hours around uni lectures, photocopying and filing, counting down the days until summer holidays.

Away from the office in his studio apartment, we circle one another in a dance of words. His drip with logic. Mine are flung from a secret strength. A hurt that festers. A hurt I believe is proof of love. We stall. We sink. We surrender. I wake once again, tangled in sheets and secrets.

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We fall into a cycle of talk and tears. Of sex and sleep. I fumble through days, write essays on American literature. And fold in beside him at night, safe in an unsafe haven.

“Why are you with him?” My friends chorus.

“But the sex!”  I say. “And I love him. I think.” They look at me like I’m a woman possessed.

A business trip forces three weeks between us. Soon after he leaves, I’m lost in a new rhythm of coffee and study and girlfriends. Out of touch and sight my desire for him wanes.

Straddling timezones over the phone, we scramble to fill the silence. I realise I don’t know if he has any siblings. That I crave his body. His scent. His stubble under my fingers. And not his words. He asks me what I’m wearing. Doesn’t ask about my exam.

“I lust you.” He says.

“I lust you too.”

Reunited, we struggle to slip back into each other’s lives. Exam weary, I chase sleep. Not sex. And the quiet still of time on my own. He stops texting every day and I stop hoping each message is his. We stall. We sink. We surrender.

It was wrong from the beginning. We knew it. Can’t ignore it any longer. It isn’t love. Infatuation perhaps. Each with an idealised, and incomplete version of the other. The spell splinters. Breaks. There are no books or CDs to exchange. Not even a toothbrush.

We part. Leave with ourselves intact.

Lady Chatterley is a writer of life, sex, love and relationships; the real, the raw and the raunchy. She can be found on Twitter here.

What about you? Have you ever fallen in lust?