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I couldn't help but flinch when he tried to bundle me into his arms. Making love
– no, who I am trying to fool? fucking Marcel -- was an entirely different proposition
than lying peacefully in his arms like some treasured damsel. Being in his bed was
brilliantly careless and honest, requiring nothing more of either of us than the skilled
caresses we were both more than happy to share, but it was afterward when the distance
between us began to grow again. He is always so frustratingly content and blissful,
always wanting to hold me tightly against his chest, run his hands endlessly through my
hair, petting me like some favorite pet, while I feel nothing but a growing coldness and
resentment. How dare he know me so well? How dare he have the power to set me
shivering at a glance, to leave me trembling and powerless, gasping his name, at a simple
touch? No matter how many times he managed to lure me away from someone with
more class and more money, someone I had sufficiently enchanted into keeping me in the
style I had been angling for, I hated him for it. Every time it felt like I had failed. I
renewed my conviction, after every night when the crackling spark between us erupted
into a conflagration of our own egos and desires, that I would not let him best me again.
I would make him pay for having power over me, for making me love him in my strange
way.
It never worked. It might have, it almost definitely would have, had he not known
me every bit as well as I knew him and had he not harbored his own fierce determination.
If I was ever in the least unsure, the possessive tightening of his arms around me as we
lay entangled in limbs and bedclothes removed any traces of doubt about what it was he
wanted. He wanted to claim me as his own with every bit as much intensity as I wanted
to make him a slave to his desperation for me. We both wanted power, over each other
and over ourselves. Funny how it comes down to something so simple and so
ridiculously human. We'll never win, either of us. Every bit of power we manage to
snatch over each other is counteracted by that much more weakness, that much less
control over ourselves. Every time I manage to catch his eye, or to flaunt a new lover at
Momus in front of him and watch, my blood running like ice in my veins, as he glowers
over his wine and plunges himself into a raging fit of inebriation, I hate myself for the
weakness I feel at still wanting him and at being angry and spiteful enough to spend so
much time to torment him. Our entire relationship is built on this cycle of weakness and
control, except for those few moments when we finally are forced by our own passions to
relinquish that grip a little and allow ourselves to hurtle briefly into something so honest
and human that we have no hope of controlling ourselves or each other any longer. I
wonder sometimes if there is any other time when I really am honest and uncomplicated
and real aside from when I'm so horribly vulnerable and revealed, tangled in a mess of
limbs and damp sheets and hastily discarded clothing. I doubt it, and part of that at least
must be what keeps me coming back to this same spot. Cold, with the same resentment
growing already, and wondering why I can't hold onto the moments that make this worth
it.
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