screw

It started after he left her. To be accurate, she did the leaving. The lease was in his name and he cleared off for the weekend to let her pack. “I don’t want to carry on,” he’d said plainly over dinner on Friday, as though cutting short a game of cards because he was ready for bed.

She slept on the sofa and woke to find scissors, heavy-duty tape, and cardboard boxes stacked beside her. He was practical like that. He made calendar memos for everything, kept fastidious budgets and she realized while deconstructing the dining room table that she begrudged him nothing, that she could still be friends, have him over for dinner, sleep with him even.

It was this thought that started her blog. She called it Screwing My Ex and since the stories were fictitious, she thought it was only fair to use her real name. Did she also hope the man whose memory she was conjuring, contorting, and screwing on a bi-weekly basis might find and read the blog? Naturally.

The stories came easily to her. She followed basic rules: keep sentences short; make liaisons feel unlikely but inevitable; trust imperatives; offer no names; keep foreplay long and screwing brief; use speech for the characters’ most delicious and sordid desires.

Her blog was a hit. Readers “constantly lusted for more”, as she would have put it. She wasn’t sure why. For although she changed his appearance…