No Batteries, No Kisses

She was standing in the doorway, smiling at me. I’d spent hours getting that apartment into shape—all thirty square meters of it, moving things around, making the space look like someone considered lived there. She came in, took off her shoes, and started looking at everything. The photos on the wall. The desk. The shelves. Watching her move through a room was its own reward.

We ended up on the bed. She’d moved Kuschelpatrick off to the side—the stuffed animal Ana had given me as a going-away present—and laid him face-first against the wall. I picked him up and announced, with some pride, that he could talk. Pressed his little pink belly to prove it. Nothing. Dead batteries, which was embarrassing, because I’d been consciously careful not to press that belly since moving to Berlin. I set him back down.

We’d rented a comedy from the video shop next door. It became irrelevant within twenty minutes. She slowly shifted closer, and I ran my fingertips along her skin, and after that the film could have melted off the tape and I wouldn’t have looked up.

You could feel her fighting herself. She was with someone else—you could practically read the subtitle running under everything she did: no kisses, not that. The approach and the retreat. She’d let me get close and then pull back. I bit her neck anyway. Pressed her into the corner. It wasn’t about taking something that wasn’t mine. The thing was, I didn’t just want the night—I wanted her past it, and that was the whole difference. I wanted to sit inside this wildfire we’d just started and figure out how not to let it burn everything down.

I won’t forget that evening. The charged proximity. The careful withdrawal. Watching her interior wall crack and hold and crack again.