Page 1 of With This Lie

1

Dani

As a child,you learn how to give and receive love. In the absence of this teaching, you learn what is substituted. In my case, I learned to be callous. Some might even say calculating. I learned to be true to myself but trust no one else. I learned that everyone was a liar. These teachings make the notions of love and marriage nearly impossible to entertain. And while some may call what I experienced a trauma I need to heal from, I call it a way of life passed down to me as a means of survival. And I’m sure if I thought about it hard enough for long enough, I could begin to pinpoint the exact moment I decided these things were not in my future plans. No white wedding dress, no matching picket fence, and definitely no children. I think I was much younger than anyone would expect when making those kinds of lifelong decisions. The kinds of decisions people make well into their adult lives. Lately though, my mind revisits the same memory over and over again. Perhaps because it is part of what fueled my decisions. I think I’ve analyzed every detail of it trying to understand why it plagues me as much as it does.

I think I am about four years old. My mother leads me into my bedroom by the hand. She is smiling down at me through her long blonde hair she’s curled with rollers and we stop in front of my closet. She is wearing one of her fancy lace nightgowns that she keeps in a special drawer in her dresser that I’m not allowed to open. She opens the closet door and spreads a blanket on the floor.

“Sit here, my love, my princess. This is your castle,” she says to me.

I tilt my head at her, waiting for more explanation.

She hands me a small pink flashlight and my favorite coloring book and crayons. “Wait here for me until I come and get you. You’ll be safe here. Okay, my love?”

I nod my head up and down vigorously. I don’t want to disappoint her.

She kisses me on my forehead and shuts the closet door all the way until I hear it click.

I flick the flashlight on and prop it up in the corner of the closet.

I don’t know how long I was in the closet. In my four-year-old mind, it could have been fifteen minutes or three hours. Looking back, my adult mind has processed that it was probably about an hour. My mother charged by the hour and rarely ever did a John want or need longer than that to get what he came for. My mother: the prostitute, the hooker. She always smelled like Virginia Slims and a cheap knock-off version of Obsession by Calvin Klein. It took me a few years to nail down that scent and sometimes I can still smell it in crowded restaurants or in groups of older women that walk by me on the street. Every time I do, I inhale the scent and exhale a fresh new load of recalled memories.

I roll over and stare up at the ceiling as I let my thoughts return to the present. At least it’s an interesting ceiling. It’s one of those snooty downtown lofts with exposed brick and pipes and ducts. My eyes trace over it all, wondering what the monthly bill on a place like this is. This guy is good for it, I’m sure of that.

I take a sideways glance at the man next to me. His back is toward me and he has a really cliché tattoo on his shoulder blade of some kind of tribal symbol. I imagine he probably got it in college and definitely doesn’t know what it means, even all these years later. Probably picked it right off the wall in a fog of beer and double dares while chest bumping his frat brothers. One could only hope. I don’t know for sure. We don’t really talk much. It’s not exactly what we prefer doing.

I feel him begin to rustle around under the blanket.

His legs kick away the sheet twisted around him and he sits up rather quickly. “I’ve gotta be out of here in an hour so you might want to get moving, sugar tits,” he says.

Mark is your typical alpha male. Almost everything that spews from his mouth is annoying as fuck and sometimes even offensive. Scratch that. It’s almost always offensive. I roll my eyes and begin stretching my arms up over my head. I don’t have an issue bailing fast. I already got what I came for.

I stand and search the floor for my bra and feel his gaze burning a hole in my backside. “What?” I ask, looking over my shoulder at him.

He bites his lip and looks me up and down. “Damn. You’re just so sexy. I can’t control myself around you. Look what you do to me,” he says, as he stands from the bed.

The man does have a nice body, I have to admit. There he is, his tent half-pitched. And like most typical alpha men, he’s displaying it proudly. As if, as a woman, I just can’t control myself at the sight of a stiff dick.

“Yeah, too bad there isn’t any time.” I feign a sigh. I am about as aroused as a damp towel at this point and not in the mood to stay. I find my clothes strewn about and start getting dressed.

“Maybe we have time for a little something,” he says.

I hear his voice growing closer behind me and before I can respond, he presses his body into the back of mine—tent and all. He wraps his arms up around the front of me and grabs at my breasts. Lucky for me, I am skilled in the art of the slip away.

I spin around to face him, and back away at the same time, breaking his grip. “You’d better get your shower in while you can. Don’t want to be late,” I say, turning back around to finish dressing.

“Maybe we can meet for lunch? Bang a quick one out?” he asks, smirking, palming my ass cheek.

I finish putting my boots on and keep my back toward him. “Sorry, sugar. I can’t today, as much as I love banging things out.” I don’t like to make these things too frequent. I need to spread Mark out over some time to recover from everything else I have to tolerate just to get the good sex.

I hear him huffing and walking off into the bathroom. He’ll recover; I’m sure of it. I take my chance to slip out while he’s in there. Part of me starts to wonder if putting up with him is worth what he provides. Sure, he’s good in bed. But irreplaceable? No way. It’s probably time for this Dani girl to start the ghosting process. He probably won’t even notice.

Married men like Mark don’t make a fuss about the side chick slipping away. There are probably ten more in line behind me. That’s why he has the downtown loft close to work in addition to his family home in the suburbs half an hour outside the city limits. Men like him “work late” a hell of a lot more than they actually work late. Their wives don’t care much, usually. They have their own lives, with “personal instructors” and weekly “ladies’ nights” and no one says anything because the money does all the talking.

I put my earbuds in and start down the street, flipping through the music on my phone until I find the perfect walking home song. “Possum Kingdom” by Toadies fills my ears, and while I realize the song came out in 1994 and is sadly a quarter century old, this shit is still my jam. What can I say? I enjoy a wide variety of music and some of it is as old or even older than I am. At least it seems like most people say that. I’ve always wondered, though…if those music artists comfort us, who comforts them? This is exactly the kind of weird shit I think about when I’m walking home. I walk everywhere. I don’t even own a car. I live right at the edge of downtown, close to everything including where I work, so I don’t really see the point in having one. In this day and age, that makes me a very strange person to most people. They either assume I don’t have a license or that I’m poor. Neither is the case.

I rub cocoa butter lip balm over my lips and wait for the light to change before crossing over Third Street to get to my block. When I make it to my red door, I pull my key out and notice my downstairs neighbor peeking through his window. Robert is an eighty-two-year-old man who refused to move when the area around him started to change. He’s Italian and feisty and protective. He’s pretty perfect. I walk up the two flights of stairs to my apartment and let myself inside. Aside from Robert, I don’t really talk to any of my other neighbors. I think we all prefer it that way. Robert never seems frightened by the black nail polish I wear religiously or the tattoo on my leg or the fact that they probably all think I’m a lesbian because I’ve never had a man to my apartment. Everyone else in the building seems to think all this behavior adds up to me worshipping the devil or maybe even belonging to one of those awful Scientology groups. I don’t really give a shit either way.

Robert once told me, “That’s what color your fingers are after you die. I think they look like shit but they’re your nails.” Then he shrugged.

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