our love was a masterpiece
Your internship ends at six, and despite the fact you feel like you could sleep right on the grimy upper Queens sidewalk, you don’t. Instead, your feet take you down the ten minute walk from your office to the small dingy bar you frequent on nights like these.
It’s a nice place. Doesn’t card you, for starters; and they serve your favorite craft beer, which is always hard to find in the midst of the city. When you arrive, there’s already a few people seated sparsely at the tables around the place. Couples on dates and university students like yourself.
Looking away, you take a seat at the bar. The bartender—a cute girl with a million ear piercings and a tattoo of a peafowl taking up half her arm—uncaps you a bottle of your favorite IPA , pushes it toward you, and smiles. She’s cute, you’re a regular customer, and you’re her favorite beer snob, but sadly she’s just not your type.
“Rough night, kiddo?”
You shrug. It’s not something you would tell this girl, a near-stranger in a bar. It’s just that ever since you flew across the country for school (at NYU), you’ve been kind of a loner. Falling out of touch with old friends, breaking up and out of long distance relationships that just won’t work out, calls with family going from every other day, to every week, to every month; you feel kind of alone.
“Just a hard day at work, I guess.” You take a gulp of your drink.
She flashes a quick half-smile, telling you “it gets better, y’know?” before going off to serve a gaggle of customers who had just walked in.
There’s a girl who walks in, definitely a couple years older than you. Likely already graduated school, and definitely not someone you’d typically be interested in. She looks at you, hair and eyes wild, with an ineffable aura of euphoria around her.
And you didn’t typically describe someone with the word “beautiful” (many don’t deserve the praise). But if you had to choose one word to describe this woman, that would be it. Beautiful, and wild; mysterious and unknown; something you wanted to desperately wanted to discover. Something you wanted to explore every inch of.
She looks at you, running a hand through her hair, patting it down, and straightens her light hoodie. The material is thinner than what most people would wear this time of the year, but it outlines and accentuates the rippling of muscles across her arms and chest. Then she turns away, ordering a coke, casually flirting with the bartender.
She takes her drink and sits down next to you. Never mind there being more than a few empty seats scattered throughout the bar.
“Hey,” she says, taking a sip.
You look at her and cock an eyebrow, “Hi there.”
“I’m Hope.” It’s a good name.
She reaches her hand out, and you shake it. Her hands are strong and firm, and you’re almost positive that she burned a path from your hand to your heart with that simple touch, because your heart feels like it’s about to burst through your chest like a ball of flaming infatuation.
“I’m Kelley.”
“So, Kelley” she says. And all you can think about is how your name has never sounded so good coming from another person’s mouth. “What’s your story?”
And so you tell her. It comes easily. You tell her about your first love, your first kiss. The things you liked as a child, where you’re from and how you got here. And she tells you hers. How she plays soccer, and how she was here playing earlier in the day. She has a flight the next morning and she only just accidentally stumbled across this little bar.
She’s a young goalkeeper. One of the best the country’s seen in a long time, and she travels across America sometimes, playing against various teams.
“I’m from Washington,” she smiles. “You should visit sometimes.” And then that’s that.
Mostly, you talk about yourself. You’re happy to do so—she’s a good listener. And suddenly, after hours of talking, in a moment of sober-mindedness, you realize that you’re both sitting much closer than you started off. You can feel the attraction flowing off of each other in waves. Your noses are barely inches apart and you notice her eyes are so so blue. Its the type of blue you can drown in, and Kelley doesn't mind drowning one bit.
You aren’t sure who leaned in first, but somehow, you end up kissing. Her lips delicately wrap themselves around yours as her tongue darts through your mouth. Her kisses are much more experienced than those of anyone else you’ve kissed, and wow . Perhaps it’s the alcohol, or maybe the adrenaline, or even just the genuine lust, but the only thing in your consciousness is her.
Soon you’re pushing her into the tiny washroom, with two tiny stalls. You roughly push her into the stall door. Her shirt is off, and hanging precariously on the door as you push her in. Your mouths are pressed together, leaving your marks on each other’s faces, necks, collarbone.
You worship her, slowly planting kisses down her body. Your kisses are sloppy, often missing it’s mark, and kissing the side of her mouth, her chin, her cheeks, but that doesn’t stop either of you. She pulls you closer to her.One hand grasps at her hair while the other tugs slightly at the waistband of her pants. She gasps your name lightly as your hand slowly comes to a stop between her thighs.
It’s been so long since you touched someone like this, and you don’t even care the bar is half full tonight and that someone could easily walk in on the two of you.
You touch each other, movements flowing like the ballets you saw on TV in your childhood, and the dance numbers you watched on Broadway upon moving here. Her moans are like music; symphonies of pleasure, and harmonies of reverence sounding in your ear.
You pant and gasp and whisper her name. She is so beautiful.
Then she looks at you, smirking, and leads you out the back door. Her eyes are brighter than all the stars and lights in the sky combined.
“My place?”
You don’t answer. You just kiss her again, but soon you’re both in the back of a taxi, heading toward a fancy hotel as if you’re the type of romantic royalty that Nicholas Sparks would envy. And even though it’s been a mere few hours since meeting, you know each other inside out. Touching places that can elicit a gasp from just a small caress. Kisses that bring moans in each other’s mouths. Things that even lovers of years will struggle to comprehend.
Inside the hotel, you struggle to keep your hands off each other. You straighten your clothing as she fixes her hair. Soon, past an elevator full of businessmen and a hallway full of gossiping young women, you’re in her room and your clothes are off again. You close your eyes when she roughly pushes you into the bed.
She’s covered in your markings. Neck covered in reddish bruises, shoulders of fingernail scratches, and the sight of her looks surreal and airbrushed, almost. It’s a sight you want to save to your memory forever.
It somehow, strangely, becomes a frequent occurrence after that night. Her at your place any time she’s in town, which turns out to be more often than expected. There’s a lot of sporting events around here, apparently.
There was never a title behind it, but this was the closest to a relationship you’ve had in years. Not the bouquets of roses and tulips kind of relationship or the chocolate croissants at work kind of relationship. It was the hands wandering, legs tangled together between sheets and each other, kind of relationship. A relationship where clothes are thrown on the cluttered floor of your studio apartment like abstract pieces of artwork. Artwork that details lust, pleasure, and desire, as if those are the only things that matter.
You have your first argument a few months after meeting, but only during one of her first few times back in New York. She’s lying lazily on your bed, reading a book, and she’s dressed in just one of your hoodies and a pair of panties.
Sneakily, you try to snap a photo of her. The mid-morning sunlight filtering through the blinds makes her skin glow and contrast against the white sheets on your bed. But when she catches you taking these photos, her demeanor suddenly changed. She vehemently insists you delete the photos immediately, as if you did something terribly wrong.
“Why can’t I just take a photo of you?”
She runs her hands through her hair in frustration. “Because I don’t want you to!”
“Why not?” You look at him incredulously. “I’m your girlfriend!”
She laughs exasperatedly and rolls his eyes. “No you’re not, Kells .” She pushes you against the wall, kissing your neck. And then she presses her lips to yours, and you don’t object.
Soon you’re lying on top of each other in bed, wrapped around each other, because lust, pleasure, and desire are the only things that matter.
Everything was forgotten by the next morning.
And finally you realize, maybe a bit too late, that there was no proof of your relationship. You knew next to nothing about her, or her life, or who she was. As if she didn’t want you to be part of her life. And it was entirely possible, that the remaining majority of her time was spent not with you, but someone else.
This love could’ve been a masterpiece, but she burned it all down in flames. Because in every relationship, one person always loves the other more.