Violeta Noir

The morning I stopped asking questions, the Wounded Boy started answering ones I hadn’t asked.

This was particularly funny because the day before, he’d apparently fed some of my text messages into ChatGPT for analysis.

The machine diagnosed me as fearful avoidant and highly sexual.

I shrugged.

Maybe.

I don’t talk to virtually anyone in my family anymore, but I consider that less a symptom of psychological dysfunction and more an effective method of maintaining my peace.

If that’s fearful, okay.

The highly sexual part hardly required artificial intelligence.

He, apparently, was merely avoidant.

Convenient.

Later, when he tried to get me to explain something else about myself, I declined.

“There’s no point. You’re going to believe what you want anyway. Stick with that.”

Once, I told him his questions made me feel like I was being interrogated.

Somewhere along the way, he adopted my complaint as his own.

Whenever I questioned something he’d said, I was suddenly asking questions to death.

Usually I wasn’t searching for some hidden answer.

I was pointing at the answer he’d already given me.

You said this.

Now you’re saying that.

Both cannot occupy the same space without me noticing.

Apparently, noticing required too many follow-up questions.

Fine.

So I have retired.

No unnecessary questions.

No unnecessary answers.

If you want to know me, curiosity is required. Conclusions do not come with complimentary explanations.

Apparently, however, the absence of questions created a vacuum.

And that man filled it.

Lord, did he fill it.

He talked all morning.

About work. About people at work. About conversations he’d had with people at work. About pregnancy. About a woman whose grandchild had needed a respirator. About another man with a Spanish woman and the novelas that apparently erupt whenever her family comes over.

I laughed.

And then realized:

Oh.

He’s talking about his wife.

To me.

This was new.

The Wounded Boy has historically maintained an almost impressive firewall between me and the domestic wing of his life. I know it exists, obviously. I’m not delusional. But there has always been an unspoken agreement that I don’t particularly need a guided tour.

Today, apparently, admission was free.

She’s thirty three weeks pregnant.

She’s home now.

He’s paying the bills.

There are conversations about healthcare and VA disability and money and all of the frighteningly ordinary logistics that come after wanting a baby for years and actually getting one.

Once upon a time, information like this would have sent me digging.

What does that mean?

Why did he tell me?

Why now?

Was he testing me?

Was he trying to make me jealous?

He’s done that before.

Admitted it, even.

So for approximately one second, I checked myself for anger.

Nothing.

Interesting.

I went back to listening.

Eventually, he told me he missed me.

Of course he did.

---

Meanwhile, the Pint-Sized Mechanic had resurfaced.

I’d canceled on him last night.

I gave him a perfectly respectable explanation about having a terrible day at work.

This was a lie.

I needed an excuse.

The truth was considerably less suitable for polite conversation.

I was sore from a rather thorough exploration of all my available geography by the delicious Wounded Boy the night before.

I also desperately needed to rehydrate after discovering that, under the right circumstances, my body apparently has aspirations of becoming a geyser.

I needed water.

I needed rest.

I did not need another man touching me.

Some explanations are simply not meant for the man you’re canceling plans with.

So the Pint-Sized Mechanic got a tragedy at work.

You get the truth.

He was gracious about my entirely fictional crisis anyway.

That’s fine. It’s okay. I’ve been there.

I almost felt bad.

Almost.

This morning, however, I discovered I’d made a tactical error.

I was no longer interested in rest.

At all.

I should have gone to the mechanic’s house.

Instead, I was on the phone with the Wounded Boy, listening to the mundane details of the domestic life I had absolutely no desire to acquire.

Eventually, I informed him that I’d found a more interesting way to occupy myself.

He got to listen.

And afterward, as I reconsidered the previous evening’s cancellation, one thought occurred to me:

What a waste.

The Pint-Sized Mechanic would have appreciated that enthusiasm enormously.

Apparently my problem wasn’t that I needed a night off.

I needed a shift change.

This morning, there he was.

Mornin 😘

I told him I missed him.

He missed me too.

I told him to come see me.

Unfortunately, employment continues to interfere with my personal life.

We started negotiating schedules. He works Saturday night. Sunday might work. Then he warned me that his schedule has a tendency to change at the last minute.

“Okay, then I won’t put you in the calendar.”

Simple.

No investigation.

No attempt to secure Sunday.

No but do you really want to see me?

We’ll see.

I am learning that not every uncertainty requires an answer.

Some things can simply remain tentative.

---

This would all be enough activity for a reasonable woman.

Unfortunately, I have never claimed to be one.

There is also “The Stag”.

The Stag caught my attention before we’d really said much of anything because his profile contained a sentence:

Be the owner of the pen about to write our story.

Well.

That’s fortunate.

Because I already own the pen.

And, in an unprecedented lapse of judgment or perhaps an excellent one, I did something I haven’t done with any other man.

I gave him this website.

The Stag is the first and only man I’ve allowed into this particular room.

He told me he loves reading things like this.

He plans to read more later.

Interesting.

Most men meet me without access to the footnotes.

The Stag has been given the source material.

Should he eventually find himself somewhere in it, he cannot claim he wasn’t adequately warned.

There were files.

He had access.

Then, as if his profile hadn’t already been sufficiently on the nose, he casually informed me that although he’s single, he is a stag husband.

Of course he is.

And his song?

Brujería.

Of fucking course.

If he only knew.

My Itá once warned me that anyone given the pleasure of enjoying me will become addicted.

I might have dismissed that as spiritual hyperbole had the men themselves not been so remarkably consistent.

I’ve been called a drug.

A fantasy.

A vixen.

A succubus.

A witch.

I’ve invaded dreams and become the voice in the head or more than I can count.

Men from my past have returned years later still remembering the taste of what one of them christened my ambrosia.

And more than a handful have settled on another name entirely.

Goddess.

There have also been restraining orders.

Plural.

Make of that what you will.

So when a man wanders into my life talking about pens and stories, identifies himself as The Stag, voluntarily enters my Archives, and has Brujería playing in the background…

Fine.

You have my attention.

Perhaps he should read a little further before deciding whether he wants to become part of the story.

---

And tomorrow there is The Hustler.

Tall.

Hawaiian.

Owns his barbershop.

Big man.

Even bigger personality.

We’re playing pool.

I’ve already informed him that I’m going to win.

Not because I’m particularly confident in my abilities with a pool cue.

I simply have a strategy.

I intend to distract him with my…

smile.

🙂

I am very charming.

---

Which brings me back to the Wounded Boy.

Yesterday, I told him I wanted him all to myself in bed.

I meant it when I said it.

Then I scheduled fresh nails and a pedicure.

And after sending him pictures of myself out living my life while we’d been apart, I realized something.

I don’t only want him in my bed.

I want to have fun with him.

I want to put on the dress.

I want to be freshly showered and soft and pretty.

I want burgers and French fries.

I want pool.

I want to sit across from him somewhere public knowing things no one else in the room knows.

I want inappropriate thoughts in perfectly appropriate places.

I want the fantasy.

Just not the heaviness.

So I changed the plan.

I told him exactly what I wanted.

Enthusiastically.

His response:

“Ok, guess I’ll meet you there later then.”

I stared at it.

Sir.

Try to contain yourself.

Not exactly poetry.

Not even a particularly enthusiastic sentence.

Then I laughed.

Fine.

Meet me there.

Because perhaps that’s the strangest development of all.

I spent years trying to understand the Wounded Boy.

I wanted explanations. Context. Information. Answers.

Now he’s volunteering them.

His domestic life is leaking through the firewall. He’s telling me about the wife I don’t ask about, the pregnancy I don’t need updates on, bills I don’t pay, responsibilities I don’t carry, and a life I no longer have any desire to audition for.

And I feel…

fine.

I thought, briefly, that hearing about her might make me angry.

It didn’t.

Maybe that’s because I finally understand something I couldn’t understand before.

I don’t want her place.

I haven’t wanted her place in years.

And hearing about it certainly didn’t make me reconsider.

I don’t want to be thirty three weeks pregnant with a man’s child knowing that, just before I told him I was pregnant, he had told me he was unhappy.

Knowing he was with her again.

I don’t want to wonder where the late nights go.

I don’t want to wonder about the overnights.

Because in this story, I know where they went.

They came here.

I don’t want to have given blood and platelets for a man, gotten sick doing it, built a home with him, carried the baby he’d wanted for years with her, and still have another woman know exactly where his late nights and overnights are spent.

Because I do. They’re spent with me.

I don’t want that woman’s place.

I don’t particularly want mine either.

Not in the way I once did.

I don’t want the secrecy to mean devotion. I don’t want the sex to mean destiny. I don’t need his dissatisfaction at home to make me special.

I want him delicious.

I want him inappropriate.

I want him occasionally across a table from me while I’m wearing a dress and no panties that gives him entirely too much to think about.

And then I want to go home to a life that does not require me to solve his.

Meanwhile, the Pint-Sized Mechanic is somewhere in the wings.

The Stag is reading the Archives, apparently unaware that he’s already wandered into The Margins.

The Hustler is waiting to discover the devastating effect my smile has on hand-eye coordination.

There are other men knocking around the edges of the story.

And the Wounded Boy, after years of rationing information, suddenly has quite a lot he’d like to tell me now that I’ve stopped asking.

He can.

I’ll listen.

I might even laugh.

But I don’t need to solve him anymore.

I have plans.

And if he wants to interrupt those plans to tell me things I never asked to know?

Well.

He can buy the fucking burgers.