Exorcism

The first time I ever let a guy cum inside me, I was in Philly. It was raining. Since we mostly hung out when he was back home, I’d never been in Cal’s apartment before. I wasn’t exactly surprised at the fact that there was a lot of stuff in it. It was still clean, though, and there were fairy lights strung across the ceiling from corner to corner.

My hair was wet from the rain, and once I was inside, I took my jacket off. I left on everything else, even though I knew what was coming.

“Can I use your bathroom?” I asked.

“No.” He joked at first, before pointing to the left around the corner and saying, “It’s right over there.”

I had to pee badly, after spending an hour in the car and an hour on the train. It wasn’t a horrible trip from central Jersey, but I still should’ve had the foresight to pee before I left my apartment. As I washed my hands, I saw in the mirror that my nose was red from the cold and my hair was already beginning to show frizz from the moisture. I smoothed it down with my wet hands.

“How are you?” I asked once back in his bedroom.

“I’m pretty stressed out, not gonna lie. School, you know,” he said.

“Me too. Stressed,” I said.

“Want to watch a movie?” He pushed his dark hair back as I kicked my shoes off. “You’ve never seen The Exorcist, have you?” He raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t think so.” I definitely hadn’t.

“Would you be down?”

“Let’s do it.”

The bookshelf across from his bed was a mix of books and movies, even with the business of streaming services perfectly sufficient to carry almost anything of which he owned a physical copy. He majored in film, and was at least honest about wanting everyone to know it. “I have a lot of movies, cause they’re cool to just have around. To have a catalog of everything I’ve watched,” he’d said to me once before.

I did the same thing with ballet shoes, but not much else. I kept all my old and broken ones scattered around my room to show my progress. Some were in my childhood bedroom at my Mom’s house, while most lived in my apartment. I went through so many more since I started dancing with the company, which I was sure Cal would say about his movie collection and starting film school if given the chance.

The Exorcist played in the background as we fucked. I looked at his dark eyes and stubble across his face, and wished that he’d turned the lights off. I hadn’t been so naked in over a year, and managed to want to hide my stomach and my legs. My A cup breasts. There had been girls since me, and girls before me. And I was there, with the lights on. His fingers chasséd along the side of my cheek as he kissed my face. He moved in synchronicity with the reactions of my body, and his hands were strong and intentional. Everything was slower than usual. He pulled back and looked acutely at my face below him.

“Hey,” he said, “I love you.”

“Um,” I started.

“Sorry. I just wanted to remind you of that.”

“It’s just weird to hear that here. In this context.”

“I know. I just—”`

“I love you too,” I said. I got on top, unsure if the twang in my voice that appears when I lie came through on the word you.

“Can I cum inside you?” He asked.

“I’m on the pill,” I said.

“Is that yes?”

I’d never fallen asleep with Cal before, and at first, I leaned on his chest in a way I knew wouldn’t be comfortable for very long. By morning, his arm was still draped around me as I faced the opposite direction. We were both still naked, and in the daylight I could see a green and yellow bruise on the side of my thigh that I’d gotten a week and a half earlier from falling in a fouetté. I felt like a failure when I did that.

I wanted to ask him if he meant it, or why he meant it. I sensed my insides contracting and I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’d narrowly avoided a traffic accident, reassured that I was still whole, more alive than I’d been before it happened, but still too tense to hit the gas and go on for fear there was something else waiting.

In the daylight, I said “Good morning,” as I rubbed my eyes and made my voice sound sleepier than it actually was. Like I hadn’t spent twenty minutes awake staring down at the puckers and folds of my flesh.

He had class that afternoon, so after a lazy morning among twisted sheets, we got dressed. I put on the same clothes I wore the previous day, and he did not. Outside his apartment building, we kissed, and it was short like a first kiss, a bit bashful and vulnerable. He moved in slowly and the both of us opened our eyes the moment we pulled away to assess the situation and headed in opposite directions.

I wondered if everyone on SEPTA could tell what I’d been doing. My hair was still tied in a messy bun and my eyes felt puffy despite the sleep I’d had. There were a few people spread about, and for a few stops, an old woman in a pink blouse and sneakers took the seat beside me. She gave me a smile as she sat down, and I put my headphones in. As the train rattled, we both swayed with the movement, and she looked the other direction, away from the window. She got off the stop before mine, and I sighed in a bit of relief. I’d spent so much time being close to people.

My friend Lina’s apartment contained much less clutter than Cal’s, as she and I had both grown into minimalism by our teenage years. She had stopped dancing by the time I’d gotten serious about it, and moved to Philly for college along with Cal and everyone else. Everyone we’d lost touch with.

Psych textbooks and highlighters arranged in neat patterns lined the desk by her window, and the sunlight hit her tapestry wall with sweet intention.

“So, how was it?” She asked as I dropped my backpack.

“I can’t believe it took so long for it to really happen,” I said.

“Does he have a big dick? I’ve kind of always wondered.”

“Yeah.”

“No kidding.” Her eyes grew wide.

“He told me he loved me.”

“Jesus,” she said, “That’s quick. What’d you do?”

“I said it back.”

“Damn. You mean it?”

I hesitated for a second before deciding, “I don’t think so.”

“Do you want some tea?”

“Yeah, thank you. That’d be cool.”

Lina brewed tea in the electric kettle on the small countertop of her kitchen, selecting two herbal bags from her pantry. I sometimes wished, visiting friends in college apartments, that I went off to study something too. But upon consideration, there seemed nothing that I would be good at studying.

“How’s the trainee thing and the dance company?” Lina asked.

“Tiring.”

“That’s good, though. Being busy.”

“I guess so.”

Lina’s phone lit up as she poured tea into my mug, and she pressed the side button to ignore the buzzing. “It’s Jim.”

“From last month?” I asked.

“Yeah, but like, also from recently.”

“Are you, like, seeing him?”

“Not like that. He lives a floor below me,” Lina pointed downward as if we could see through the floorboards, “And sometimes we fuck. He’s cool though, like, as a person.”

“So, like Cal sorta.”

“I don’t love Jim.”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

Lina’s face twisted as she scrolled through her phone for a picture that she deemed suitable. “I don’t really have any pictures of him. Want to just meet him?” She asked.

“I mean, sure.”

The phone rang softly against Lina’s ear twice before she broke into chipper speech, “Hey, want to meet Sam and have some tea? Sam the ballerina, like the one from Jersey. Yeah. Cool. See you in a sec.”

Jim came down, and sat next to Lina at the table as we sipped our tea. The format of our positioning looked as though they were interviewing me. Like I had a reason to be nervous.

“Jim went to Paris to see the White Stripes,” Lina said.

“Really?” I said, “I love them.”

“Same.” Lina nodded.

“It was such a wonderful experience. We rented a car and drove down through the rest of France. Have you ever been?”

“No,” Lina answered for both of us.

“I want to travel more,” I said.

“We keep saying we want to go to the Mediterranean,” Lina said.

“Great scenery, and such a wonderful culture.” Jim nodded.

“They eat a lot of hummus.” I smirked. “I could probably eat hummus every day.”

“Do you make it yourself? Or do you buy the Sabra stuff?” Jim asked.

“I actually like Sabra,” Lina said.

“Yeah, I usually just buy it,” I said.

“It’s much healthier to make it yourself. Less preservatives,” Jim said.

“It’s just chickpeas.” I shrugged.

We watched a movie in Lina’s bed that night, all three of us. And as I leaned into her shoulder, breath heavy and exhaustion on my limbs, she leaned the other way towards Jim. Like a sandwich of people disregarding the laptop that blared, warm over the covers at our feet. Jim’s arm draped around Lina, and his knuckles brushed up against my shoulder before I moved away. The bed was small, and I neared the edge.

I was the first to wake up in the morning, on top of the covers with a discomfort in my neck, still pushed to the corner of the bed. The laptop was either sleeping or dead, though still in place, and Jim’s arm draped around Lina, grazing my side like it had the previous night, but I didn’t have the space to pull back. I leaned into the two of them, collective motion stirring in the small bed. Lina turned around to face me, shoving Jim’s arm behind her as she opened her eyes.

“Sorry if you were uncomfortable,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I might go make breakfast. Are you hungry?”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” I said.

As we both got out of the bed, Jim rolled over, still groggy and half-sleeping. Lina made eggs and toast in the kitchen, and I sat on a chair, curled up as if I was colder than I really was.

“Want some help?” I offered.

“Nah. I got it.”

“Alright.”

Jim emerged from Lina’s bedroom while we were finishing breakfast, rubbing his eyes in the doorway. “Hey,” he said.

“Want any breakfast? Or coffee or something?” Lina asked, to which he shook his head.

“I have to go. It was nice meeting you, Sam.”

“You too.” I waved from my spot at the table. I assumed that Lina would get up and hug him, or walk him to the door where I was out of sight and share a kiss goodbye, but she did the same thing that I did—offered a wave, fork still in hand.

Neither of us got ready very much before deciding to go to the Mutter museum. I was still dressed in my jeans that I showed up to Cal’s in. The weekend had been a process of removing them and putting them back on again for various reasons. Neither of us had showered, and my skin felt oily and uncomfortable.

In the cold of November, I looked up directions to walk there, and Lina rested her head on my shoulder from behind, gazing at my cell phone before we started on our way. It was crowded inside the museum, and we questioned if this was because it was a weekend or if it was like that every day. The wall of human skulls imposed over the room from behind the glint of protective glass, and signs everywhere read no photographs. We headed straight for its majesty, various taupes, beiges, and browns collaging into an assemblage that almost read as inorganic, even though it was clearly made up of the heads of individuals who at one point lived. Lina and I stuck close through the sea of people as we neared the wall.

“Check it out. I guess they have labels about who they were and how they died,” Lina said.

“And the age they died. Look, some are left blank, though.” I pointed to a small, whitish skull below eye-level with the age twenty-five written on it, but nothing else.

“I guess the information just got lost,” she said.

“Murderer. Hanged at the age of twenty-six,” I read.

“Soldier, shot in the head. Age fifteen. Jesus.”

“Age nineteen. Hanged himself because of an unhappy love affair.”

Downstairs, we stared for a while at a hand in a jar of formaldehyde, which belonged to a person afflicted with leprosy. The skin was blackened, like it had been cooked, and Lina at first wondered out loud if it was dressed in a glove. It was much less crowded there than around the wall of skulls.

Around the corner, there was the skeleton of a giant, seven feet and six inches in stature. “It was probably horrible to be so tall,” I said.

“Would you rather be extremely tall, or extremely short?”

“I’d rather be my own height,” I said.

“If you had to choose,” she pressed.

“I guess too short.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I didn’t want to leave, but before it was even dark out Lina walked with me to the train station. The air was still wet and hung clammy near my nose and hands. As we walked, I pulled out my phone from my pocket and texted Cal, Heading back to dirty Jersey. Had a nice time. With a smile and a heart. He read it immediately but didn’t say anything back.

“It sucks you’ve got rehearsal. Can’t you skip?”

“It’s a dress. I really can’t. You get it,” I said.

“Fuck.”

“It’s cool.” I shrugged. I rested my head on Lina’s shoulder as we waited for my train on one of the benches at the station, and she slipped her arm around me.

“You can come again next weekend.”

“Performance dates for the next three weeks.”

“After that.”

“Yeah, after that.”

The train pulled in noisily and on schedule. People shuffled around. Stagnant, like the skulls adhered to their place, Lina and I stayed for one more moment. I stood up first, and she followed my motions so closely that any onlooker would assume we moved in synchronicity as a habit. Our jackets layered between our bodies, another stack of things in our tight hug before I hurried onto the train. The whole way back, nobody sat next to me.

Jamie Collins Kahn is a writer and yoga instructor with a BA in English and Writing from Cedar Crest College. Her work has been featured in Rag Queen Periodical, Maudlin House, Fish Food Magazine, and Donut Factory Press. In 2019 she was selected as a winner of The Sound Inside writing contest for fiction. Her chapbook of poetry, Hey, was published in August of 2018 with Writing Knights Press. She is also a contributing editor for Crooked Arrow Press.