Champagne Confessions

She could not remember the last time she drank for taste. Somewhere along the way the ritual had turned into survival, the same way breathing is no longer a choice but a reflex. The bottle stood on the counter like a lighthouse for the shipwreck she had become, and she opened it without a second thought. It was Opus One 2016 Magnum, a $500 bottle of wine. She poured it like water, let it bleed into her glass until the edges blurred. It wasn’t celebration, it was anesthesia, a ritual she performed beneath chandeliers and laughter, where no one ever thought to look closely enough to see the ruin.

The first glass was warmth; the second was a tide rising; the third, a drowning she chose. With each sip she built the version of herself she showed to the world: the elegant woman with expensive taste, with men on a string, with a life that sparkled even as it rotted. In the quiet kitchen she was just a girl gripping a bottle like a lifeline, begging the wine to make her less empty, to make her feel seen.

The men were not mistakes. They were studies. They were mirrors she smashed to see how sharp the pieces could be. She learned early that you could starve a man and he would call it devotion; you could ration your touch and he would call it intimacy. You could give him a glimpse and he would imagine a future. Every time one of them reached for her, she felt that old flicker of power, that tiny ember of safety: I am not the one being left.

But she was always leaving.

Sometimes she let them in anyway, let them press their bodies against hers until she couldn’t tell where hers ended. It wasn’t about desire. It was about disappearing into rhythm, about borrowing a pulse when her own felt too faint. The sex was not gentle. It was teeth against skin, palms on her throat, bodies colliding like waves against rocks. She would arch, gasp, shudder, but inside she was somewhere else entirely, watching herself from the ceiling, a ghost in her own story.

Other times, she turned cruelty into theatre. One man begged her to tell him she loved him. She bit his lip until it bled, kissed him with the taste of iron between them, and whispered, “This is the only way you’ll ever stay inside me.” His eyes watered, but he still clung tighter, mistaking her violence for intimacy. She smiled as he trembled, knowing he would replay that moment for months, twisting it into proof that she felt something. But she hadn’t. She was only proving that even pain could be mistaken for love if you starved someone long enough.

Another man called her his escape. He was married. He wept afterward in the bathroom with the shower running, and she lay naked on the bed drinking straight from the bottle, staring at the ceiling fan as if it could lift her away. When he crawled back beside her, still damp and ashamed, she took his hand and put it between her legs, because she wanted to feel anything but pity. He whispered that she was different. She laughed, a sound that came out broken.

In those moments after, when the room smelled of sex and smoke and expensive wine, she felt the weight of her own performance. She would pull the sheets up, light a cigarette, and watch them sleep. She knew they thought they’d been inside her. They hadn’t. She had stayed hidden even with their bodies pressed against hers. She always stayed hidden.

It was never about being loved. It was about being right. About proving, over and over, that no matter how you played the game, she won. That men wanted sex, and she could give it, withhold it, twist it into something they mistook for meaning. That she could be the addiction instead of the addict.

But at three in the morning, with the empty bottle at her bedside and the city hissing outside the window, she stopped feeling like a winner. She would press her face into the pillow and bite down hard, because the urge to scream felt too big for her throat. Her body still smelled of him, but her heart felt like a locked room. She would curl up and whisper to no one, please, just see me.

She wanted to be found. She wanted someone to look at her without hunger, without fear, without the script she handed them. But she didn’t know how to be found without first being fucked, without first being poured another glass, without first building the stage on which she disappeared.

The wine was safer than hope. The sex was louder than silence. The performance was easier than the truth.

What no one would understand is that this was never about sex. It was about silence. About carrying so much pain that she had to bury it under bodies and bottles, because to actually speak it would mean tearing the world open.

She thought about that sometimes, what it would mean to be seen for who she really was. To admit the loneliness, the rage, the hunger, the need. To strip off the mask, bare the ruin. She almost laughed at the thought.

The truth was this: she didn’t want to be loved. She only wanted to know if anyone would still look at her once they realized she wasn’t worth saving.