You could never hate me as much as I hate myself

by Natty Soltesz

I first met Chris on Forbes Avenue, the same street I was living on at the time. Years after we’d been roommates/fuck buddies/pseudo-boyfriends, I had a dream about my apartment there that sort of sums it all up.

I had just left a party with some friends, and Forbes Avenue was deserted. We noticed our old place across the street and decided to check it out, fully aware that new people were living there. We went inside, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around, but the feeling that it wasn’t right felt heavy and sick in my gut.

I went upstairs into my old bedroom, and it looked completely different – piled high with clothes and garbage. A picture of a young college guy sat on the dresser. I bent down to see what was under the bed and there he was, the college guy, crouched silently, staring at me with cold dead eyes. I quickly went downstairs and joined my friends, trying to forget that I’d ever even seen it.

Chris and I met a few more times after that first night, then at a party we were both so wasted we pulled ourselves into a dark corner and made out violently. He was biting my neck hard and I was pulling him into me, fingering his ass which was soft and yielding. When we came out from the corner, an hour or so later, my neck was so sucker-bitten I looked like someone had tried to strangle me to death.

I had to visit my parents the next day, and luckily it was cold enough to wear a turtleneck. I hid it well, but as the day wore on, a brush burn from Chris’s stubble began to seep and puss on my raw chin, like a badge of shame and regret. I stayed home from work, didn’t call off, didn’t explain; just didn’t show up and wallowed in my embarrassment.

I moved in with Chris because I needed a place to live, and because it was the only sort of relationship I knew how to cultivate with another guy. I think only a week went by before we started fucking.

We fell into a rhythm of going out on the weekends and getting wasted, then coming home to have sex with each other. I became very cautious about hickeys, but everything else was a mess – we would knock things over, crush things underneath us. We let our other roommate catch us going at it on the sofa. We invited other guys over and had threesomes, sometimes in our other roommate’s bed.

Always, it was my dick in his ass. He was my roommate to my parents or my roommate-with-privileges to my friends, but never my boyfriend. We never talked about it, it was what it was.
He started sleeping in my bed. One morning I woke up to find him playing with my flaccid dick, trying to get it hard, teasing and pinching and tickling. I felt this rage well up within me, undefined anger at who he was and what he wanted from me, disgust at how far he’d go to get it. I lay there for awhile and pretended to be asleep, and then, at some point, I resigned myself and thought: I’m going to let him get me hard, and then fuck him as much as I hate him. I let myself get hard, then I shoved it in him so hard and violently and came so quickly that it was the best sex we’d ever had.

And then I stopped fucking him. I moved out when the lease was up, moved in with some straight friends who I’d have many occasions to obsess about. Chris and I stayed friends for a while, then he cut off contact with me, saying the whole relationship was unhealthy for him. The fucking we did was never discussed, it may well have never happened.

I have recurring dreams where I’m in a deserted mansion with one thousand endless, opulent rooms – rooms where nobody goes, rooms that I’m deadly afraid of. I dream about going into my basement at night and finding a man there, or hearing sounds coming from my grandmother’s attic, where my dead aunt’s body has been shamefully stored away.

One night Chris and I were driving along the highway when I spotted a path leading into the woods behind a porno store. We stopped to check it out. The path was well-worn and though nobody seemed to be around, it was littered with plastic cups and trash, and you could smell the presence of people. We went deeper and deeper into the woods, as the dusk grew ever darker.
Chris was following me when he stopped dead in his tracks, and gasped.

“What?” I said, and he pointed ahead of me, to a man laying there, face down in the woods. And though we ran away and the glimpse was only fleeting, his arms and legs sprawled out underneath him, I remember it clearly and I’m sure it wasn’t a dream. I’m sure Chris saw it too, it something that he and I saw together.