Shannon lay awake in bed watching snow fall against the dark boughs of trees outside her window. They were sharp, jagged pillars weathering winter storms, their naked limbs fated to be exposed for another four months. If she didn’t look at the wooden bark, the snow just disappeared, its softness consumed by the glare from streetlamps and porch lights. But if she focused, she saw snow falling in tree-shapes.
Alan lay in bed next to her and she listened as his breathing became heavy and measured, abruptly halting into snores throughout the evening. He snored badly, possibly an inadvertent side effect of a medium-sized coke problem.
They had had sex and it meant nothing – less than nothing, even. He came and she didn’t. He didn’t seem like the type that cared about that sort of thing – the type of boy who still fucked like a teenager. He told her about fucking one of his students and how he loved beautiful women. Shannon looked at him with his eyes that never slept and thought about his life of cigarettes and cocaine and all she could think was run run run. But instead of running, she had sex with him. Of course.
Afterwards, Shannon just wanted him to leave, but he stayed and they watched Wonderboys. She had seen it before in segmented clips and couldn’t remember plot lines, only something about Michael Douglas and a dead dog. “This is one of my favorite movies,” he told her and Shannon didn’t care.
As they lay in bed, he drew her up into him and she kept her arms clenched close to her body without the liberation that mutual affection brings. Shannon felt awful and overexposed. Her friend who worked at a restaurant once told her about how fishermen catch soft shell crabs – which were really just regular crabs in between losing their hard shells and getting new ones. In this very small window of time, fishermen scooped their vulnerable little bodies out of the water and sold them at markets, where they would be cooked in restaurants and eaten whole by patrons: every last bit. And so Shannon kept her legs stacked on top of one another, not offering any invitation for play or entanglement. An island in the middle of the countryside.
The movie played and Shannon still had no idea what it was about. The actors read lines and the scenery changed yet she could think of nothing but her own overwhelming, crashing sadness and unwant. She wished he had gone. She wished that she didn’t have to endure an entire evening of their own badly written play. Boy touches girls face. Girl bats her eyelashes and fixes her hair. Boy puts lips on girl. Hearts beat quick. She didn’t want him pretending to like her.
After an hour of the movie had passed she could tell he had gone to sleep. She closed her laptop and placed it on the floor, careful to not wake him. She was thankful to have work in the morning so she could disappear without having to see him in person ever again.
He felt her move and he lifted his head and Shannon said simply, “You fell asleep,” but didn’t look at him when she said it. She turned towards the window, wanting to create a great chasm of distance between them. He felt it, curling away in turn, occasionally offering to wrap his foot around her own, kissing her shoulder once in the middle of the night in an awkward, obligatory sort of way that left Shannon feeling cold.
Boys could have anything in the world if they made a girl feel safe. Any smart man would know how to manipulate that. But Alan made her feel as though he were holding her by her tired fingertips above the mouth of a volcano, joking about dropping her right in.
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