First Date Day Dream

Any similarities the characters in this story possess with real life people are merely coincidental and mean nothing. This is fiction.

She looked in the mirror. She knew she was beautiful but only because she’d been told so, and because sometimes people would buy her drinks at the bar or would yell at her when she walked home from work. Really, she felt basically face-blind to herself. She knew she had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth all in the proper places, but it stopped there. She felt nothing when she saw her own face: not pleasure, not dismay. The only time she could comprehend that she might not be ugly was when she was confronted by someone who was – then she would wonder if this made her ugly on the inside, and what mattered more to her? 

Her lips were bitten, bits of skin flaking but not falling off. The corners of her mouth reddened by chronic wiping – she was so repulsed at the idea of drink or food staining her skin or white foam gathering there in the disgusting way she’d seen it on men who wanted to kiss her that she created a different version of the same issue for herself. She opened her mouth to smile and she could feel the skin on her lips tighten. Winter was coming and she had to go to great, oily lengths to attempt to keep her body and skin soft, often to no avail. She let her face drop, turned on the tap, washed her hands. She left the tap running while she stared at herself for a little longer. Again, she smiled, this time letting the skin tighten until she felt it tear and burst, and she remained that way. Blood pooled where the skin flaked and began to mix with her saliva and swirl around her gums. She watched the tiny droplets splatter on the white ceramic sink and mingle with the running water. Once again, her face dropped. She wiped the blood on the sleeve of her gray cardigan, turned off the tap, and returned to her date. 

He was sitting as she’d left him, their drinks having arrived in the five minute span she’d taken to feel strange in the washroom. She ordered a house lager because it was cheap but regretted it when he made some comment about how they were going to put the bill in front of her when it came, because he’d ordered a cosmopolitan. At least he was paying. 

Based on the way she saw his fingers moving left and right across his screen as she made her way back to the table it was obvious that he’d been swiping on Tinder – they’d met on Hinge. She wasn’t surprised nor offended. 

“So you said you’re a grip?” She asked as she sat down.

He laughed into his drink. “I guess if you mean in terms of what I do for work… yeah. But what I really do is…”

As he monologued about his current projects and famous friends and impressive bosses she imagined all the dispassionate sex they’d have. She imagined him grappling with her bra, leaning on her hair, fumbling his tongue around her pussy hastily, thinking it being wet with his saliva on the outside meant she was ready for him to plunge himself inside. She imagined how self-satisfied he’d be with his rabbit fucking and all the theatrical moans and gasps she’d release, falsely evidencing that he should be. And she fantasized about him leaving after making some excuse to go, taking for granted that she wanted him to, neglecting to consider whether she even cared if he came in the first place. She’d probably let this happen a handful of times or until he got some young girlfriend who wouldn’t know any better. 

“Oh shit, you’re bleeding.” She returned to the date, removing her fingertips from her mouth to see them covered in blood. She had a habit of absentmindedly picking at her lips when she was focusing on something – in this case her near future with Flash Guy, as she’d been referring to him as with her friends (she recognized every single one of his patchwork tattoos). 

“Oh,” She said. She placed her hands in her lap and began using the nails on one hand to scrape off the blood from the cuticles of the other. 

“You good?... So yeah, like I was saying…” 

This time she watched him intently, not returning to the bedroom. There wasn’t anything wrong with him and probably, he was a fine guy. Maybe dates made him nervous and when he got nervous he talked a lot. She knew for sure he was hot, and not just because the bartender flirted with him or because her friends had actually agreed. But she knew that when the date ended, she’d still be left wondering if the date was actually good or if she just liked dating herself with an audience. 

She nodded and laughed at all the right times and probed about all the right things and he just kept going. She wondered if he’d just done a key. He excused himself to go to the washroom and when he’d disappeared behind the frosted glass men’s room door she took a big gulp of his cocktail, both because she wanted to be drunker and because the faster he finished his drink the faster they could get out of there. 

The people at the table next to her gave her a look which she returned with one of innocent confusion. 

When he returned he offered another round. She obliged and got something tasty this time – something with a special name which turned out to be a sour’s bastard daughter. He got a martini with a twist. 

Usually she could tell within the first five minutes of a date whether it was going to work in the long term and the answer was almost always a resounding no. And yet, she still scheduled, on average, one date per week. She wasn’t sure what made her crave the bad dates and often even worse sex. Sure, a part of it had to have been the funny stories to tell to the girls, but what else? 

They got a third round. 

She hardly noticed that she’d been telling her own stories and making her own jokes and that he seemed to be having a good time. It was as though she could go on Date Night Autopilot. By the time she stopped speaking he was giving her that rehearsed look that men think looks sincere – the one where they lean both elbows on the table and look at you sideways with a distant smirk. The one that says You’re so beautiful and I am done listening to you speak now.

“Should we get out of here?”

She nodded and excused herself to the washroom once more, hoping the bill’d arrive as one and would be paid by the time she got back. 

As she walked away she realized that she was a little tipsier than she thought – drunk even. She’d nearly forgotten she’d had a pre-date glass of wine and no dinner. Oh well. All the better for the rerun she was about to watch with Flash Guy. 

She lifted her boobs in her bra, applied lip liner and coloured gloss to hide the fresh scabs, and wiped the mascara that had fallen beneath her eyes. When she got back, the bill was paid and he had his coat on and was holding hers up.  

They began to walk to hers. 

He talked more on their walk and whenever it was her turn he fiddled with his cigarettes or lighter or conspicuously looked at his phone. At one point he even flat out answered it.

“Hold on a sec, yeah?”

“Oh. Uh.” She wasn’t sure if this bothered her.

She looked out onto the deserted streets – it was a Tuesday. If he did something no one would know but the two of them. He could slam her head into the light-post, painting it with blood and chipped skull, or push her out onto the streets when a car was coming without witness. He could shove her into an alley and…

“Sorry, just some time sensitive stuff.” 

The lights looked quite pretty though, and they were reflecting off of the puddles left from an earlier rainfall. She smiled at him and they kept walking.

She knew that inviting him back to her apartment was risky. Now he knew where she lived and what she did for work and where she went to the gym. It occurred to her just how many men shared this knowledge of her life. She paused for a moment and fumbled with her keys. Once they were in the elevator she smoothed her hair back into her slicked bun. He grabbed her waist and pulled her in and she assumed the role of passenger that she knew all too well. 

His kissing was not unlike she expected: too hard, too wet, too hungry. When the elevator door opened she led him to her front door, and once again dropped her keys. She was shaking, probably from adrenaline and a lack of food. This time, he chuckled, once again, making no attempt to be the one to kneel down to grab them. 

“Do I make you nervous?” he whispered his hot breath into her ear in a contrived I’m Being Sexy voice.

Before she could say no, actually in my memory of this night you will be interchangeable with my date from last week who was a PA and also had projects and friends and bosses he was kissing her again and padding at her breast as though it would earn him the right to go tell his buddies he’d made it to second base. A lot of men hooked up in the same way boys had when she was just a girl. She wasn’t sure if it was sexual regression or arrested development but either way she didn’t come then and she knew she wouldn’t come now. 

While he tried to figure out if he needed to remove her shorts and skirts separately her mind wandered. Would he call her tomorrow? Would he call her tomorrow to tell her to get checked? Would he not call her tomorrow and wait until she got a call back from the clinic? And would he cry when he came or call her by the wrong name or beat her so brutally that his skin would break on the bone from her nose and she would no longer wonder if she were beautiful because the damage would leave her positive that he’d rendered her ugly? He might come too quickly or not quickly enough. 

He didn’t seem to notice that she was basically absent. He was undressing her with the same fervor as one of those guys in her DM’s who would, at the faintest whiff that she might be into it, sext her some of the most explicit, vile, nasty shit she’d read in her life, more or less sexting himself. She felt as though she didn’t really need to be there. Her reactions, she realized, were going unnoticed. She rolled her eyes at the thought of the energy she’d wasted on her moaning and panting. She could have been laying more or less stark still and these guys’d still have gotten their rocks off.

She looked at the clock. He’d been dry humping her underwear into her pussy so vigorously for ten whole minutes that she thought it might blister. She adjusted his dick into her groin and undid his belt. He jumped at the momentum – a self-proclaimed consent guy who’d failed to ask. They both removed their shirts and he manhandled his dick like he was about to shove it in. She stopped his body with her knees and gave him the sort of look a mean girl would give the loser girl regarding her outfit for junior high phys ed.

“Right. Haha. Good thinking.” He was already sweaty. He grabbed a condom from his pocket and the fact that he didn’t even bother sliding it into his wallet wasn’t lost on her. 

“I need foreplay.”

“Oh. Sure, yeah.” He kept stroking himself for the forty-seven seconds he spent tonguing everywhere but her clit. She wasn’t even disappointed when he came back up and neglected to put the condom on, letting it be lost in the unmade mess of blankets and sheets. She laid there, trying to remember the good scenes from the lesbian porn she’d watched earlier, hoping it would do the job he’d failed and in all likelihood would continue to fail at. He slapped her vagina with his penis a couple times and slid it in. Her bun was hurting her head and she really wanted to take it out. 

She moved her head to one side, then to the other, but she’d been wearing it for too long and it was really tight, plus her hair was thick so it tugged at her scalp. She was about to move her head to face him again when he placed his big, gangly fingers over her face and shoved it hard into the pillow. She hated that shit, but it wasn’t uncommon for men to assume women liked it rough, and it was even less uncommon to assume that even if they didn’t they wouldn’t object. She removed his hand from her face and he swiped it across, calling her a “good bitch” after he hit her. What the fuck? His likely unwashed hand found its way to her neck and his grip tightened and she could feel the delicate bird bones shift within. 

Oh god. She thought. This is it. She revisited the scene from the alley where he broke her skull on the light post and the scene from the doorway where he broke his fist on her face and she wondered if they’d come true if she moved his hand again, if he would be merciful and pretend he didn’t want to hurt her even though he was doing something that he knew would. She pulled his wrist away from her body and he switched his grasp from her throat to her lower jaw.

His fingers were in her throat and his skin tasted salty. She imagined biting down on them until she felt the knuckle dislodge and then she imagined continuing to bite until blood ran into her mouth and down her chin. But it was anyway. Her chapped lips had cracked again, and badly; she could taste the familiar copper. He pulled his hand away and wiped the blood down her chest and as he did he made a stupid sound, pulled out and covered her chest and stomach in his warm, sticky white fluid. 

She looked down at her body and imagined that if a crime had been committed the scene might not look so different, except it would be seen from a bird’s-eye view by a bunch of men in black khakis who would shake their heads and refer to her as “the victim.” She wondered pointlessly if seeing her in resemblance to a crime scene was what made him finish. She knew that it was. 

He flopped down next to her and through his gasps and pants he sighed “that was great,” and kissed her forehead. She’d hardly moved an inch since he’d begun having sex to her. Her disaffectation was suddenly replaced with repulsion. She wasn’t angry. And she was by no means surprised that he assumed she’d be turned on by a diet beating – it had not been the first time and it certainly would not be the last. She was sickened.

She took inventory of all the things that he took for granted in coming over. She imagined his surprise in discovering that she kept a baseball bat with a sock on the end under the very bed that he was catching his breath on and how much more laboured his breathing would be if she’d used the bat to mash his nose into his face and his teeth onto his tongue. She imagined that the scrunched-up expression he’d made when he came all over her was probably not too far off the face he’d make if she reached into her purse and released mace close range into his eyes. She imagined calling his mom at her work to reiterate the events of the night to her and the soliloquy he’d go on to explain to her why he’d choked and gagged and hit a random girl. 

She looked over at him, his eyes closed, his chest still heaving, making no move to get a towel, nevermind finish her. She ran her hand up her body and cupped all the cum and blood and sweat that had accumulated on her stomach and in her belly button and under her tits. Once she had gathered all that she could into her hand she sat up and examined the pearly pink jelly concoction that she’d created. She reached over and smeared it into his mouth and across his face.

He gagged and sat up and spat onto her bed, rubbing his mess off his face onto his hands which were also covered in her blood and saliva and discharge and his sweat and spit and cum. He was yelling a slough of words all variations of What The Fuck and Oh My God and What is Wrong With You. He was fumbling with his underwear, putting both legs in one hole and using his inside out shirt like the towel which by now he surely regretted not grabbing for her. She sat on the edge of her bed watching the scene, smiling, an overwhelming sense of placidity spreading over her goosebumped body. She remained that way until he’d slammed her door. 

Then, she ran a bath, called the girls, and celebrated a successful end to another first date.