The Infatuation – Odelia Wu

November 12, 2024

I’m listening to ASMR history facts and trying to sleep. She keeps talking about the fossilized shit of a 5th century viking, the largest coprolite ever found: 8 inches long and 2 inches wide.

Now I’m thinking about the first time we had sex, prefaced by Trisha Paytas ASMR. Trish is a McDonald’s employee punching numbers into the register with pink acrylic claws and a hardness nudges me from behind. Sharp inhale. Just the Happy Meal today? He’s biting my ear lobe and Trish is tapping on a plastic ice cream cone and I’m trying to figure out how far her lip filler has migrated since her last video where she was a medieval tavern wench. I push my hips back and he pushes his forward. In one swift motion he shuts the laptop and shoves it off the bed and we flip over like a capsized boat.

When it’s done he gets up immediately, like he will do each time after this, and hands me a towel. He pulls his boxers back on, and then his flannel pajama pants, because he doesn’t like to feel my skin when we cuddle. It’s not me, he swears, it’s been like this with every girl.

The next morning, he’s grumpy because he didn’t sleep. He never sleeps well when I’m there, but I like to imagine it as a kind of romantic affliction with a tenor of erotism. Edward lurking in the corner of Bella’s bedroom, watching her slender, unconscious body shift under cotton percale sheets and listening to her frail mortal breaths come and go, so intoxicated by her presence that even if he wasn’t a vampire, his unbridled lust would keep him up all night.

Later, he tells me I just take up too much space.

The cafe I read about on The Infatuation is closed so we eat at the Giggling Sausage instead. He’s taking a class on Sade and Sacher-Masoch and tells me I should read Justine. I say I don’t need to, I already know all about being tortured by men, and we laugh so hard we cry and everyone in the Giggling Sausage is looking at us like, those frigging tossers, or whatever British people think when they see two Americans having fun and flaunting our perfect teeth.

But we don’t care, we keep laughing with tears streaming down our faces, stopping only for mouthfuls of beans and black pudding. We laugh the whole way home, clasping gloved hands as we hurtle through roaring subterranean darkness. This city is old and we are very young.

When we finally stop laughing, he turns to me and says. Sometimes I throw things just to see how far they can go.