Friday, April 11  

Patient

Patience is a virtue that Vic has never claimed to possess.

patient: adjective 1. bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint 2. manifesting forbearance under provocation or strain 3. not hasty or impetuous 4. steadfast despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity 5. able or willing to bear.

Not one of the many, many definitions of the word fit with Vic's hasty, high-strung, preference for immediate gratification.

She goes out with some friends to a dark bar that used to be a goth hangout; once infested with scabby, ink haired drama queens, now replaced by (only statistically more palatable) young urban hipsters who sniff each others' business cards and flash money around. And when she goes out, she goes out meaning to, sorry to be so pointed and unladylike, to get some.

So it's a happily impulsive non-coincidence that she finds herself grappling sweatily with a guy named (he tells her after the fact) Jon in, pardon the obviousness, the john within an hour of her arrival.

John's most qualifying feature are his delicious hands. Vic holds masculine, defined hands in great, lusty regard. They rise up to cleanly muscular forearms that in turn disappear teasingly by way of hard biceps into his fashionably fit white shirt. Beyond this and now his name, Vic doesn't know much about Jon.

When they've taken the washroom grappling just about as far as washroom grabbling is allowed by public decency laws to go, she removes her tongue from his mouth, wipes her chin, rescinds his temporary access to her cleavage and says "I think you should call me. Here's my number."

She writes it in eyeliner on some toilet paper. Vic is all class.

Jon smiles at her and says "I knew I would meet the woman of my dreams tonight."

Vic doesn't know how to take this, but it implies an impatience that she can relate to. They make a date for the weekend and she goes back to her table, straightening her skirt.

Sunday, April 6  

Sex

Vic wakes up full of lust. The blinds have their legs spread laciviously, small tight spaces that drip with honeyed sun. It crawls into bed with her and kisses her awake. It feathers over her face, softs round her shoulders. She kicks the thick covers down to give it access to her naked ribs that slope to hip.

Even though it’s been 3 months, she remembers what it’s like to have sex. It’s like being tongue-bathed by sun.

sex noun 1. respectively female or male 2. sexually motivated phenomena or behavior

While in Vic’s sticky experience, sex of any kind is almost always tasty, it’s only ever mounted the peaks of gourmet with a few delicious partners. Whether the others were just unskilled or uninteresting or their spices just didn’t mesh, she doesn’t regret even the loveless fucks, the apathetic, the dried out, the stale. Even those she ate up with joy.

But to those that burst with juice under her bite, those whose skin were thick with butter, sparkling with sugar, who came to her, with her, inside her, on her with love and a hunger that equalled her own. To them she assigns a special remembrance on this sun-suckled morning.

She slips her hands between her legs and remembers them. Andrew with his pale, lithe body and sensitive neck, letting her create herself inside him every afternoon, morning and night for the months it lasted. Louise’s perfect breasts, her small hips moving faster, faster, lips bitten and red. Daniel’s strong hands, his way of turning her around, holding her down in posh hotel rooms, hair pulled tight.

She writes them each a letter on her body:

I miss your bodies like a methodone user misses heroin. When it ends, I can’t imagine that anything will feel quite the same as how it was when we fucked. And even when it does, it doesn’t erase you. I think about your cock and your thighs and your tongue and your hands -- how they were after all, just cock, thighs, tongue, hands. Things any number of people have and could put to good use inside me. But there’s that last element that was a part of us; that electric, that honey, that spice that made me feel my depths around you. Religiously wet, keyed to C, ready to take you on, in, over, always. The way we’d fuck deep, knocking at new doors inside this body I thought I knew so well. Places I’ve never even thought to get fucked before. And your hoarse whispers, I feel mute without your encouragement. And all those things we felt together, my fingers inside you, mouth around you, stiff nipples passing over each other and our skin-high skin over and over again like new every time. Every time as aroused and excited as the first time tasting like gin and the sweetness of fingers dipped behind underwear. And all the things we did in our perverted zeal to discover and molest each other in new ways. The bruises, the scrapes inflicted in a blind pant to get further and fuck faster, grip harder.

God, I miss all of you. We were such good lovers. We could have been world famous for our fucking.

When she turns over onto her side to catch her breath, she whispers, please, please send me another. I want more.

Thursday, April 3  

Pretend

When Vic was a kid, she was a big fan of games that started with a giddy "let's pretend..." She liked to be what she wasn't.

pretend: verb 1. to behave affectedly or insincerely. 2. to contrive and present as genuine.

There was the time she unbent a paper clip and wore it in her mouth for 2 weeks straight, telling all her classmates that she'd gotten a retainer. She wanted a retainer rather badly after Nadja, the most popular girl in her grade 6 class (though it's worth mentioning that she was popular for her huge bazooms rather than her braces) got braces.

There was the time she told her best friend that she actually wrote the song "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats. That pretend went quite well actually and lasted a surprising amount of time without anyone catching her out. Vic even got several members of the school choir together at recess to rehearse her already popular song. She thinks in the back of her mind she may have had an alternate recording in mind. Perhaps a world (or at least, city) tour. The grade sixers of Brookmill Public School singing I Don't Like Mondays by child/rock star/prodigy, vic wiseman.

Vic often thanks god that her pretends were never given serious attention by adults or those in the know. She was never called up for the fraud she was. Until junior highschool.

To get out of gym class one sunny afternoon, Vic told the school secretary that she had consumption. She'd just finished reading Anne of Avonlea or one of those later Annes in the series. The one where Anne actually dies of consumption, leaving Gilbert to raise their beautiful red headed children alone. Anyway, Vic was possessed with the beautiful tragedy of consumption -- not knowing that it was the old name for TB and definitely not something a junior highschool girl could walk around claiming to have.

Though that pretend was promptly pointed out by the secretary for the hoax it was, it still didn't stop her from loving pretend.

Today, Vic plays more adult version of "let's pretend." For example, go to a bar and play let's pretend we're a vastly interesting person with many, many redeeming qualities and boobs a size larger than they really are (thanks to the wonders of padded uplift). Vic detests the way she throws her head back and laughs like a breeding mare in heat whenever a potential-candidate-for-some-serious-shagging makes a joke in her general direction.

Tuesday, April 1  

Cheat

There are two kinds of cheating. There's the kind where you mean trickery and the kind where you mean adultery.

cheat: verb 1. to get money by deceitful trickery. 2. to be sexually unfaithful.

You can also use the word as a noun to call a person "a cheat". But that you'd reserve for someone who cheats a lot. Not an amateur cheater, a part-time huckster, a fairweather forger of truth.

Vic's only cheated once (outside small, annual fibs to the revenue and customs agency) so she doesn't think that counts as "a lot". Though it was of number 2 variety which weighs in somewhat heavy on the scale. She was never proud of it, but she believed in some way that she was programmed to cheat. Her father was a cheater. Or, at least, Vic's childhood sleuthing drew the conclusion that he did. Her dad missed dinners, had a distant look about him and didn't seem to recognize her mother when his eyes scanned over her. Her mother spent a lot of time with her head on the kitchen table, sobbing. Pretty easy to draw some weighty conclusions.

As they say (whoever they are), "once a cheater always a cheater", "can't change his cheatin' ways" and don't forget, "your cheatin' heart will tell on you."

Vic doesn't exactly dig country music, but she has to admit, they have an impressive handle on cheating.

This inscrutable evidence (gleaned almost entirely from Patsy Cline and Hank Williams inserts) points out that a cheater cannot be reformed. It's in the blood like alcoholism or a predeliction for heart disease. Both of which are also hereditary. Which meant Vic was destined to be a cheater too. By her reasoning, if she did happen to stray from the fidelous path it could only be blamed on her cheatin' genes.

She has to admit, she felt pretty badly about her one cheating episode, even before she knew she discovered her genetics excuse was a sham.

Vic cheated on William. (why do we say "cheated on" rather than "cheated against" since you're really not doing it ON the other person at all -- wouldn't be very secret that way at all)

It started when he did something that Vic didn't like. He invited his friend Allan to stay with them for a while, to invade their private place with his gym bags and his notebooks and his dark eyes always watching her move around the kitchen.

It middled when William kept not coming home at night, or coming home so drunk, he'd pass out on the bathroom floor.

It ended when Vic started watching Allan back. He saw his chance and pulled out all the seduction stops, going so far as to send potted lilies to her workplace. She never actually fucked Allan, it's true, but she did find herself with her pants undone, his fingers inside her and his tongue down her throat once. Maybe twice.

Call it what you want, that's still cheating in Vic's books. And she feels badly about it. Even when she sees William now, she's still plagued with secret guilt and long to scrawl "I cheated on you. I’m sorry." on a napkin and run out of the restaurant where they meet for lunch every month.

Later in her life, Vic found out that her father hadn't so much been a cheater as he'd just been apathetic. Which left her without much of an alibi.