The Burning by Legendre Thomas

Author:Legendre, Thomas [Legendre, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Leave. Leave now.

This was how it went: Ill at ease and wide awake as she listened to Deck’s steady breathing. When the man of the moment fell asleep Keris often found herself in this condition—alone, but not alone, and therefore lonely. Dissociated. A zero-valence feeling among the foreign silhouettes, the street noise, the sanitized scent of the hotel room. The mattress sagging beneath her. Every guest sat on this side of the bed to use the phone, so the impacts accumulated over time to form this crater, this dropping-off-the-edge-of-the-world contour. She was certain about it. She felt the cause as surely as she felt the effect.

Leave now. It was the demand of the situation. Or her own self-interest. Or both.

She slid from the bed and followed the trail of her clothing along the floor, picking up each item as she went. In moments like this she was always grateful for the condom because it prevented certain men from lingering after the pleasure was gone and she simply wanted to be herself again. She put on her underwear and stockings. As she was buttoning her blouse she looked over the room, at the low furniture caught in rectangles of streetlight, the bulbous lamps and television, the decorations that attempted to please everyone and therefore pleased no one. Deck’s body nestled beneath the covers. He had been good—or, rather, skillful in all the right places. In fact, she could still feel his imprint within her, like a hat only recently removed. He was a man who knew his way around the female body. But . . . .

She nearly lost her balance stepping into her pants. Something about his efficiency and precision and control, even at the very summit of pleasure when most men made faces and lost all sense of shame. At the bar she had detected something odd and pleasantly disjointed below his composure—someone, perhaps, who had studied philosophy in college and went through young adulthood in thrift-store clothing before finding a wife who had normalized him. Or something to that effect.

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