I WILL SLEEP WITH YOUR MAN & THIS IS HOW IT WILL HAPPEN

I will meet him somewhere neutral: a coffee shop, a bar, a bookstore. I will be cute, but in the way that you never are. With a light sundress that grazes the mid-thigh and a smile that says, “It’s okay, you can talk to me, I don’t bite.” Lately, you have been stressed with work and you have forgotten that layer of sex appeal that you used to lacquer on before your dates together, the way it used to glimmer in the light and catch his attention from across the room.

He is not a bad person, and neither are you. Times are just difficult and everything loses its shine after a while. The first time he will touch me, his hands will burn because they are still used to the temperature of your body.

When he talks to me in the coffee shop, or the bar, or the bookstore, he will have forgotten how to talk to boys. What once used to come naturally to him, a language he felt he had created himself, will now be stilted and uncomfortable. Everything, he thinks, is going to be a giveaway that he already has a boyfriend and that he shouldn’t be doing this. I already know, of course, but that’s part of why I want him. That’s most of why I want him. He will edge around what he really wants to say, and I will brush my hand against his forearm and he will remember that it wasn’t words at all.

When we go back to my apartment, everything will look different to him, and different has replaced actual sex appeal as the most attractive thing in his world. In my apartment, there are no problems. There are no fights. There is no going to bed in some ugly tee shirt and forgetting to touch one another because you have better things to do, such as play around on your phone. Everything in my apartment will be for pleasure and for now. There won’t be any more complicated subtext.

My friends ask me why I always go for men who are in relationships. I tell them that I don’t know, but that there is something about all the sneaking around they have to do which makes me feel special and rare. I know that it means I am a secret that they need to keep hidden, but the more childish part of me still thinks that secrets are special. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I know that it can never work, and I don’t really want it to.

As soon as our fucking becomes like the sporadic encounters he has with you, as soon as it carries with it even the slightest note of drudgery or repetition or obligation, he will leave. He will make up a reason and go back to you, a cleansed man who will probably find someone new to replace the monotony with. He thinks that I thought he would leave you, but I knew he wouldn’t. I am a placeholder in the shape of an anus.

You think that he cheated on you because you weren’t hot enough. That’s not true. He cheated because he was the kind of man who cheats, and I sought him out because I like men like that. They thrill me even in the predictability of their deception. You let your love run cold, yes, but only in the way that humans do. A more decent man would have stayed with you through the tougher times, stayed honest, and worked with you on building something that can create sexiness in its stability. He would have found you both comfortable and exciting, because he would be capable of seeing more than one facet of your humanity.

You would be better off without him.

I will sleep with him by reminding him of everything he can no longer have with you, and I will lose him by showing him that, after the warmth of the first couple of fucks dies down, I am just like you are. I am just another partner who gets colds and looks messy in the morning and snores after drinking and argues with his mother over the phone. I will sleep with him as a whore, and I will lose him as a human.