Champagne Confessions

What started as a casual affair has burned into more than a dim flame. It is a slow, gorgeous corrosion, something that eats the bright edges off the rest of my life until even my laughter tastes a little tarnished. I feel tainted, as if a coal has been pressed beneath my ribs and I keep fanning it with the heat of my own choices. There is a dark thing in me that wants to be fed: pleasure that smells of smoke, temptation that approaches like a slow, sure theft, greed that masks itself as necessity. The sane part of me tries to starve it; the fearful part whispers cautions. Neither can quiet that patient hunger. I tell myself I deserve this, that the phrase absolves my excesses, but it is a lie that has grown teeth.

What happens when you fuck an angel and a devil?

He, the devil in flesh, arrives like weather you know will ruin everything you’ve planted. Reckless, sunburned, arms map tattooed with stories he’s too afraid to tell aloud. He moves like someone who has always been given the center of rooms; his charm is the currency men like him spend on impulse. They get you with bluntness, with a smile that’s half apology and half threat. He walks that line between “fuck you” and “fuck me,” and he knows precisely which side you will choose when the lights go out.

I arranged to see him on purpose. Pink lips, a conservative dress that read polite from the street, and hundred millimeter heels that declared a private recklessness.

Underneath: black lace that announced itself in the language of the body, a brassiere that cupped like a secret, lace trimmed mesh panties that left no room for surprise. There is theatre in that concealment; I dressed him and I dressed myself for the performance of being ordinary so he would underestimate the blaze beneath.

We performed small talk like amateur actors until the script didn’t matter. We were back at his house before the last laugh had left our mouths. Lips, hands, impatience, the world contracted to the seam of fabric and belt and the stubborn press of skin. By the time we reached his bedroom, we were naked with the urgency of people who have not been allowed to be honest for long.

He buries his mouth into my neck like a man reclaiming territory. His teeth and tongue mark skin with the rough, efficient brutality of a man who thinks hunger equals right. He is fast and merciless; his hands spread me, pin me, treat my gasp like victory. He wants performance: gag me, make me say I am property, bend me to the grammar of his command. He demands, he takes, he misnames my surrender as ownership.

I let him believe it.

There is a delicious cruelty in that consent. I give him the illusion because power tastes sweeter when it is mistaken. While he thinks he is leading, I am counting the beats between his breath and my next move. I let his mouth trail like a calendar of bruises down my collarbone, my ribs, until the air in the room is nothing but the muffled music of his appetite. When his lips finally find the place he believes will break me, he consumes me with the animal precision of a man who has been starving.

He eats me like a sinner taking communion. His tongue is a rude and worshipful thing: urgent, mapping, naming the parts of me he imagines belong to him. My fingers twist in his hair because I want to pull and because I like the impression that I am being moved. His hands are at my throat one moment, on my hips the next, a choreography of ownership. He barks commands and I answer with animal sounds; he creates a world in which I am nothing but the object to be broken and revered.

When he thinks he has conquered, when his chest rises and falls in the slow, smug rhythm of a man who has been given absolution, I take him back.

There is no soft reclaiming. I yank his face up by the hair and kiss him like a theft, hard, hot, a bite that tastes of me, not of submission. I straddle him with the force of a tide reasserting itself, straddling his arrogance and pulverizing it with each measured hip. I ride him not as apology but as indictment: fast, precise, furious. Every slam of my pelvis is punctuation. I slap him and he slaps back, we exchange violence like a lover’s language. I choke him with my hands and laugh as his eyes go wide with the realization that the woman beneath him is a monster he has purchased only in ignorance.

“Pussy,” I spit, a word and a blade. He answers with his own teeth against my lip. We are both bleeding into the bedweave and it makes everything glow.

We break each other and in that mutual ruin there is something like ritual: sweat, bruises like secret medals, bite marks spelling names on my breasts, a busted lip that will later bloom into purple. I finish with a sound that is half triumph, half grief, and when I slide off him and pull myself together, when I dress slow and leave, he stands on the porch smoking, laughing that no one has ever fucked him like that. He cannot see that he was only a rehearsal for the real reckoning. I am at once powerful and monstrous; the knowing makes me cry in the shower later, where the water is not a baptism but a witness as I scrub and find the bruises map my own geography.

There is a devil in me and she wants to come out and play. She wants not only to be seen but to be feared. She wants the world to pay in small, delicious cruelties for everything that taught her to harden.

Then there is him, the angel, the other half of the experiment. He is not heavenly in the cheap sense; he is not perfect. He is shy, careful, a man of routines whose hands tremble the first time he truly kisses me. His world is tidy in the ways I am not: two dogs that curl like punctuation around his legs, rituals of coffee and quiet, a life that folds into itself like a letter. He calls me “baby” like a benediction. His gentleness is not casual; it is intentional. He overthinks the first move because he fears he will venture where he is not invited.

With him, sex is study, not warfare. He does not devour; he venerates. There is a slow, deliberate grace to the way his tongue explores, not as conquest but as reverence. He presses his face into the cradle of my thigh like a man reading scripture, and the way he lifts his head with me in his mouth looks, to my feral parts, dangerously like worship. He is the opposite of the quick, bad weather that the other man brings; he is Sunday morning light spread warm over the bed.

I lay back and watch him with that wary adoration I reserve for things that might heal me. He loves my smell in his beard, the way my hair drifts across his chest. He likes the way I say his name; he wants me to ride him slow so he can memorize the architecture of my pleasure. His hands are maps that do not bruise but that read me in the softest language possible. He calls my name, then kisses the place where my collarbone meets the hollow like he’s sealing it with something holy. His rhythm is patient; he anchors me. Afterwards he holds me until the city is a quieter noise somewhere beyond our door. He offers steadiness and the consent of being seen without being burned.

Yet, when I leave his arms, the calm is a kind of desert. His safety is a civility that cools the fever but does not feed it. He doesn’t chase me into chaos the way my other lover does; he does not set my blood to running with fear and possibility. With him, I am soft and loved and accountable to a tenderness I am not always prepared to return. The chase, the delicious, breathless ache of being hunted and haunting, is absent. That hunger still lives in me, and it wakes when the night is quiet and the light is thin.

I want both. I want to be nursed and to be burned. I want to be worshiped and to make altar of someone’s spine. I want the angel to steady me and the devil to raze me in the same week. There is decadence in wanting contradiction, an appetite for paradox where pulse and peace meet and spar.

So I keep returning to both. To the man who makes me feel feral and divinely profane, who teaches me that my dark can be exquisite and terrifying; and to the man who makes me feel safe enough to risk feeling at all. I am a woman split along a fault line, a beautiful, dangerous geography.

I scrub my flesh clean and then trace the bruises with a fingertip like a cartographer reading an old map. I sip scotch and imagine small fires. I rehearse the prayers the angel might say and the curses the devil taught me. I am tired and wired, scorned and curiously content. I am frightened that I might have recoiled into a permanent ruin, that the devil in me might not leave when the need is satisfied. Yet a part of me, the part that wants to be loved and saved and careless, still believes that the angel can see all of me and not flinch.

When you look at me, tell me: do you see hell? The hurt and the vengeance? Or do you see a woman who wants to be held, a smallness she is ashamed to let anyone see?

I do not know what comes next. I know only that the devil in me is awake and clever, and the angel is steady and pleading. I know I want both of them, in turn, in collision, in coexistence. I want a life where soot and sunlight can live on my skin together.

Here I lay, a woman scorned, content, and weary.

Still the question hums: who will survive me when I choose to stop pretending I must choose at all? The world, be warned, I am coming for you, equipped with both a halo and a knife.