Quiet

There's no one in the next room but I keep my voice down anyway.

Photo by Jessica Nunes

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There’s no one here. There hasn’t been anyone here in a long time. Yet I have to be quiet.

The apartment is empty. The bed beside me is empty. Yet I keep my voice down when I come in here at night to find you. Like there’s someone in the next room I’m trying not to wake.

But there isn’t. There’s just me lying in the dark, and the version of you I keep here where I can reach it.

And the saddest part: nobody forces me to do this. You don’t visit me. You don’t haunt me. I’m not some woman who lies still while a ghost climbs into bed.

I come looking.

Every night I turn off the light, and I open the door in my own head to go find you.

It’s surprisingly easy. All I have to do is say your name and my body already knows.

I should be embarrassed. Ashamed.

But I’m not.

One thought and my thighs press together under the sheet, wet already, in an empty bed, waiting for a man who is asleep right now in a house I’ve never seen, next to a woman who isn’t afraid of him.

Because that was our downfall, wasn’t it? I was afraid of you.

Not afraid you’d hurt me. Afraid of how much room you took up. How you’d come up behind me at the sink and put your mouth on the back of my neck, making me forget what I was doing. Making me forget the life I was building.

You were the fire my mother warned me about. The fire in the middle of my perfectly crafted life, and I told myself a fire that big would burn the entire thing to the ground.

So I put it out.

I’m the one who put it out. I did that.

But in the dark, alone in this apartment, I can have you exactly the way you were. I feel you come up behind me, your hand spreading flat over my stomach, and pull me back against you. I feel your hardness against the small of my back, grinding against me, your mouth finding my ear.

“Shh,” you whisper.

It’s not a request. You say it like a rule. Like the quiet is something you’re putting on me.

Because that’s the whole game, isn’t it? Whether you can make me break.

You press your palm flat over my mouth and tell me not to make a sound, then do everything you can to pull one out of me.

I was never louder than when you told me to be quiet.

Your hand slides down. You take your time getting there. You make me feel every inch of the waiting, your fingers tracing the top of my thigh while I push back into you like a woman who’s lost complete control.

When you finally touch me, you make a low sound against my neck because of how wet I am.

Because I always was. Because my body never once played hard to get with you the way the rest of me tried.

“There she is,” you say. “There’s my girl.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. The room is so quiet I hear my breathing, and I hate the sound of it. It’s pathetic. Lonely and ridiculous as my hand moves under the sheet while I pretend it’s yours.

You push two fingers into me and hold your other hand over my mouth, telling me to take it quietly until I come apart against your palm as I try to obey you and fail, my pathetic sounds leaking out around your fingers.

And you love that, don’t you? Love hearing me break. Love that I can’t do the one thing you ask.

You feel me start to go, press your hand down harder, and say right into my ear, “Shh. Quiet. You can do it. Be my good little girl.”

You turn me over to you because you always want to see my face. I hate how easily I obey. I want to hide, but you don’t let me. You take my chin and make me look at you while you ease inside me, slowly, watching what it does to my face.

I keep my eyes shut now to try and recreate your image.

It almost works.

The weight of you.

The stretch.

The way you go still once you’re all the way in and just look at me, let me feel you, let me grow desperate before you move.

“Look at me,” you say.

I do.

“Tell me what you want.”

“You. I want you so fucking bad.”

You watch my mouth tighten as you push deeper, but I tell you again how bad I want you over and over because I can’t help but say it.

The sounds are grotesque. Inhuman. The sounds of a woman who’s lost every ounce of control.

But that’s what you loved. The loss of control. That’s the difference between you and every careful man I chose after, the ones I picked precisely because they can’t do this to me.

You didn’t stop when I lost control.

You didn’t check in.

You read my body like you’d created it and gave me what it asked for until I was saying things that made no sense.

I say it again, just like I did back then.

I say it loud, into the empty room, in my own voice. And I hear it. Hear how it sounds, a grown woman alone in the dark saying the name of a man she walked away from.

And the silence after is the loneliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

I put my hand over my own mouth.

Be quiet, I tell myself.

And I try going back into the fantasy.

But I can’t because I know you’re doing this for her now. Or maybe it was last night. Or you will tomorrow. That same mouth on the back of her neck. Your hand flat on her stomach.

You tell her to be quiet, but for different reasons. The kids are down the hall, and she laughs into the pillow. You both muffle your sounds, and it’s sweet, it’s a life, it’s the exact thing I ran from because I thought it would cost me too much of myself.

It should’ve been me. That was the offer. You were offering the house and the hand over my mouth for the rest of my life. But I was so scared of how badly I wanted it that I called it a fire and walked out to keep from being burnt.

Well, I’m burnt now. I made sure of it. And nobody will get in here to burn anything down. I’ve built a quiet so complete that I have to whisper to a man who left. I do it to keep from feeling stupid, and it worked. I’m so safe in here I could scream and know one would come.

What I can’t figure out is if I’m sorry. Because I know if you put me back at that sink with your mouth on my neck, knowing everything, knowing about the house and the family, I’d still be afraid of you.

Now I have the quiet.

I have the dark.

I asked for all of this.

And look how much of it I got.

—Sloan

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