The wounds healed over as if they’d never been.
Toward evening I scratched a tally mark on the wall and counted the others, drawn before sleep each night. Fifteen.
Fifteen days of torment in this room, and everything I’d been through in the desert now seemed like a trifle, nothing at all. Die of thirst? No problem. Drop dead from fright? Anytime. Keel over from exhaustion? Easy. Die of love? Impossible. Unthinkable. All you can do is suffer.
Still, there’s a way out.
Embrace her, kiss her, and whatever comes after that? She wanted it. She was smiling! She was calling me!!!
I threw myself at the girl again.
There was an upside to me, consumed by passion, hurling myself at the girl and getting whipped, lashed, thrashed for it. I realized passion was stronger than pain. I took so many blows that, had this happened in my old life, I’d never have left the emergency room. Here, I crawled away, recovered, refueled, and threw myself at her again, like a red-eyed bull blinded by lust.
Was this love?
I doubt it.
I didn’t dedicate hazy verses to her or write rosy love letters. I didn’t resort to meaningful winks or sigh, languid and tender, in her direction. I threw myself at the girl the way a dog in heat throws itself at a bitch. This belonged to physiology, to psychiatry, and a little bit to amentia.
The feeling that had burned me to the ground was a passion for the woman sitting across from me, laughing loudly and merrily. Had I known my attempts were unwelcome, I swear I wouldn’t have taken a single step toward her. I’d have suffered the passion out in silence and forgotten it forever. But this little beast laughed, her eyes sparkling with joy every time I headed her way.
So she wanted it? So she desired it? Her laughter beckoned louder than any TV commercial, any rallying cry. I knew it: she wanted me! She was calling!
What I couldn’t understand was something else — why beat me senseless?
Beyond comprehension. Outside the realm of the real. Some kind of female quirk, inaccessible to the male mind.
