Made for Your Pleasure
Every night I offer my body again, hoping you’ll return to claim it.
The sheets are cold where your body used to be. I curl my fingers into the empty space anyway, as if I could pull you back through sheer will, through the ache that lives under my ribs now.
Every night, I light a candle. Not for prayer. For memory. I remember things like your hand on my throat, gentle and possessive, the way scripture says a man should hold what belongs to him: “the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.”
I shouldn’t want you still. You walked away. Said I was too much. Said loving me felt like a sin. But isn’t sin just hunger with a bad reputation?
I kneel before the mirror to remember how you liked me on my knees, forehead pressed to the floor, ass high, waiting for the first touch. I whisper your name into the carpet. The silence answers back with heat between my legs. I hate how wet I get just saying it. Hate how my body still obeys a man who isn’t here.
I’m breaking.
I slide two fingers inside myself and pretend they are yours. Slow at first, just the way you taught me. Then deeper, harder, until my wrist aches and my breath comes in staggered waves. I call you a God when I come. The words taste like blasphemy and communion all at once. “This is my body, broken for you,” I whisper, echoing the words of the Eucharist, but meaning something filthy, something mine.
I cry when the endorphins fade, not because I’m sorry, but because you weren’t here to hear it. And because I still feel guilty for wanting it. For needing it.
When I sleep, I dream of you returning. I dream of you kicking the door open, eyes black with the same hunger that used to scare me. I dream of you grabbing my hair, dragging me to bed like a fucking caveman, and splitting me open while you growl the verses you used to recite against my ear.
“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” you’d say, thrusting deep enough to hurt. “She was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
In the dream, you don’t stop until the sheets are soaked with us, until the only word left in my mouth is your name. Then you lean down, lips brushing my temple, and whisper:
“You were made for this. From my side. For my pleasure. So I’m not forced to walk through the valley of the shadow of death alone.”
Your words convinced me to leave everything I love behind. I believed you. I cut ties with the world to be under your command, only to have you forsake me and cast me off into a world of loneliness.
I used to pray for strength to get me through. Not anymore. My only prayer is for you to come back. To take what is yours. To remind me why I was ever torn from your rib in the first place.
Because the hole you left doesn’t want to heal.
It wants to be filled.
And God help me, but you’re the only one who can.