What It’s Like To Casually Hook Up With Someone You Love

He was an alluring, tremulous sea of tepidness. He would draw me into his waves, time and time again, tumbling my wearied body around whichever way he pleased. I floundered in his possession, unable to resist his propulsion. And just as rapidly as he would advance, he would recede away, leaving me alone on a frigid, unforgiving shore of self deprecation. It was a cycle of complete fucking agony.

“This is the best thing ever right now,” I said to him coyly as I admired the snow’s delicate descent, briefly illuminated by the pale glow of the streetlights before collapsing calmly onto the pavement.

“I know, right?” He replied between drags of his cigarette, looking at me in a way I wished he always did. An unmistakable flicker brightened his gaze, floating from my chest to my eyes, making me feel wanted and beautiful. I stood close to him, alternating the harsh, warm smoke in my lungs with gasps of the brisk winter air he brought out of me with his hand down my tights, moving ever so perfectly inside of me. He was no stranger to my body; he knew how to touch me in just the right ways.

It was this touch that garnered my attention in the first place, the night I met him, so long ago, when I was still brand new to New York City. I came to regret the events that unfolded that night, for giving into him, for letting his persistence overtake my disinterest. I resented him for awakening something in me that I so desperately wanted to return to slumber; a craving for his touch that developed into an insatiable hunger for his entirety.

We stood there in the unrelenting cold, kept warm by our lust and copious amounts of wine and whiskey, to finish our cigarettes before heading back inside. I cherished moments like this with him, when I knew I was exactly what he desired right then and there, even if it was fleeting. We were most comfortable around each other at times like this, bare-skinned and brazen between my sheets. He acted so differently around me when it was just the two of us, when we were able to remove ourselves from the clinging, noxious net of our mutual friendships.

Every inch of him was right there on top of me, uttering my name so softly, and yet he was still able to elude me. Every time I hoped things would be different, that he would finally open up to me, that he would let me in, and every time I was left disappointed. He would retreat back into his timidness, leaving me confused and shrouded in self doubt. I yearned so strongly for him to pull me back into his dark abyss, to stop leaving me in solitude on the sand and allow me to immerse myself completely in his cold, murky waters. I wanted him to let me feel everything, even the unforgiving singe of the salt water in my nasal cavity.

I knew that I didn’t really love him; that I was in love with the idea of him, and my irrationality humiliated me. My desire revolved around his intangibility, enabling me to mold him in my mind to fit who I wanted, needed, him to be. I knew it was a quixotic façade; but I still couldn’t calm the tortuous ache that resonated within me.

I had no vessel through which to channel my desires for him. There was this beautiful, blossoming love inside of me that was given nowhere to flourish. I wanted so badly to expel everything onto him, to tell him that I had never felt this way before, that the passions swelling inside of me were absolutely terrifying, debilitating, and that I didn’t know how to handle it. It was all just way too fucking much. A cathartic outpour to him proved to be my only release, leaving my pride in irreparable pieces on my bedroom floor. Pulling myself through that hullabaloo was an entirely different form of misery.