Emily J. Weisenberger
Short Fiction
Sticky wetness of the summer night and a stranger’s sweat cling to Desiree’s skin. This crowded party is supposed to have cleaned and shined away her uncertainty, but it has only made the mask she hides behind more obvious.
She whispers to Angelica, who is smoking on the porch, that they need to leave. Angelica asks where Damian is, should they look for him inside, but Desiree shakes her head. She doesn’t want to know. She wants to cleanse her body with cold water, get beneath this film of salty humanity.
He wants an open relationship, he says.
He’s sketching for class on Desiree’s twin bed. She’s at the desk, the darkening window at her back. She’s examining stitches and wondering how much longer the glue gun will take to heat up. She’ll have to get on the floor to check the outlet—
The words reach her, and she turns gray, newspaper gray. Her skin is gray and her eyes, and even the words that come out of her mouth. The moans she made this morning when he licked her ear are no longer technicolor. No, they never were. They were blank as a piece of paper. Now, she realizes, her sexuality is a black and white movie, the kind with a chaste waif with limp hair—a stale, pale prude.
She probes for a complement to his blood-pumped passion. She reaches into that inner place where she draws out her desire and asks it for its opinion. Sometimes it will bubble over into her belly, spread warmth through her legs, make her fingers itch to feel him. Not often enough, not for either of them.
Earlier, in the hot afternoon, the two women stood at the plaza alongside a handful of other activists to collect signatures for the petition. Angelica, clipboard in hand, on the plaza’s grass-bitten, cracked concrete. Desiree, calling herself a fraud.
“I should be so into an open relationship. Isn’t it like peak radical feminist to be sexually free?”
Angelica suggested the party, populated with activists unencumbered by monogamous propriety. “Let your pansexual self spread her wings. Being in an open relationship can be really fun. It’s not easy, but I liked it.”
Desiree wishes she could exist with the energy and ease Angelica does. As children, on their Friday afternoon bus rides to synagogue, Angelica would squat behind Desiree and sneak out of her itchy panty hose. Desiree would scrunch and unscrunch her toes over the rough fibers, refusing to take off her clunky Shabbat shoes; Mom must have put her in panty hose for a reason.
Damian looks up from his sketchbook. His selfish, lusty face wants every pleasure he can take from her, including permission to get it from someone else. To get off on her getting it from someone else. This is the face of the man she loves? That flushed and open face is wearing his gangly body and its supple, grasping limbs.
Desiree did it though. She forced herself to rip off the panty hose and forced herself to call Damian on her cellphone from the plaza. “I want to try it tonight—an open relationship—to see if we like it.” He agreed too easily, and only then did she realize she was testing herself.
Desiree floats off the porch and waits for Angelica, who will walk her home from the party with her arm across Desiree’s shorter shoulder. Her walk will reach a pert, swinging clip. Desiree will lumber. Her walk will give away to passersby that Desiree is weighed down by the person this test is revealing her to be.
Desiree says, “Why would you want an open relationship?”
He says something to her about the friends she introduced him to, like Angelica, who is gorgeously open and more liberated than any monogamous person. Damian’s voice is confident, and why shouldn’t it be? Desiree’s nonconformist—a prideful woman who poses nude for strangers online, who loves collecting sex toys and letting her body hair grow and curl—and they both know what that’s supposed to mean.
The reach of the porch light demarcates a boundary, and from where Desiree stands she is an observer of the huge smiles and raucous jokes of the activists on the other side. These assured partygoers relate to each other as if through threads of light or chains of glow sticks that pulse and dance between their easy back-and-forth. They fill their whole bodies with themselves, their voices come straight from their lungs to the world without a thought, their hands shuffling cards, licking fingers, clapping along to laughter, reaching for their friends.
Desiree hugs herself and spits sugary alcohol into the damp grass. She can’t rejoin them. An hour ago, there had been a drink sweating in Desiree’s hand and a shining woman sitting on a deflated swing opposite her. The woman introduced herself as Carla, asked Desiree about her major, why she chose design, whether she’s single. Desiree thought Carla, with her soothing voice and deep-set eyes, could be the one to seduce her into an open relationship.
During a lull in their conversation, Desiree rubbed at a scuff mark on her boots and tried to reach her slack hand out to Carla’s. Instead, images of Damian leering at someone else lunged up at her. She said, “I think my partner is fucking someone right now.” She wiped her mouth, imagining the wetness on his. The light picked up the warm tones of Carla’s shining, yellow hair. Desiree was taken with the urge to brush it away from her bare shoulder to see the boxy tattoo it was hiding. “Or he wants to be,” Desiree added. “What’s the difference?”
Desiree heard her own words and leaned away from the woman. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to flirt with you.” She stood up, fully exposed in the sultry spotlight of the overbright porch.
Carla’s swing let out a long creak. “I thought you said you were in an open relationship.”
“As of today. He asked. I said yes. A test.”
“Which one is he?” Carla asked.
“Damian. The guy with the piercings and black hair. He’s my height in these boots.”
Carla took a long pull out of her plastic cup. Desiree thought she must be drinking water.
“You feel like you had to, like to keep him around? You hope he hates it like you do?” Carla asked. “Don’t count on that.”
Desiree blinked against the golden woman’s blatant words. Her thoughts tasted like coconut rum. “Why wouldn’t I like it? There’s nothing wrong with opening our relationship.”
“Maybe he’s not worth it if he’s doing this to you.” Carla waved her hand, and her fingernails gleamed under the bug-infested bulbs.
I’m sex-positive. Non-monogamy is liberating and feminist. I’m a feminist.
She hates him. She hates her body’s insubordination, and she loves him. She tugs at her desire again, and it snaps. She comes up feeling grayer, dimmer.
He puts his hand on her knee, and she lets him keep it there. It’s the easier choice.
I’m a feminist.
Desiree found her escape, then, with a man, who seemed safer than Carla because of how quick he was to invite her onto the couch beside him. His sweat clung sticky cold to her skin where her arm overlapped his. His girlfriend wasn’t here tonight. It was her house, but she let him have friends over when she’s away. He was loudly polyamorous, self-assured, a poor distraction. He said, “She’s my primary partner, and my other girlfriend is downstairs with her boyfriend. Do you want to meet them?”
Images of writhing bodies, too many, flashed across her vision. Was Damian among them?
“What?” she shouted, as if the music was too loud.
Hot anxiety crashed across her; the music was too loud. It crowded her out of her body. Maybe Damian had found someone hours ago. Would anyone’s body do for him as long as it wasn’t hers? If he’d found pleasure in someone else, hadn’t their relationship already been tainted? No excuses left. She closed her eyes and reached for this guy.
She looks down at a rattling box of rhinestones, the hot, flamingo-pink banner spreading across her desk. The look-at-me sparkles say she did care about something before his declaration, but now that earlier life seems bizarre and contrived. She can’t grasp how she was feeling when she first started sewing. Pink? What was I thinking? The bright banner is garish and disgusting and a disservice to the community she’s making it for. Slippery red and blue fabric beneath a cut-out of a red umbrella spells the slogan: “Decriminalize Sex Work Now!”
He follows her eyes and says, “You know, I’m sorry. This was a bad time to start a big relationship conversation.”
She laughs. She can see him believe her laugh is a dismissal of his poor timing. He ruffles the peaks of his shiny black hair and relaxes into the softness of the duvet like this conversation is only regular “big”—as if they’re deciding whether to move in together after graduation—and not a betrayal.
Kissing a stranger didn’t feel like she expected it to, though she’d done it before. It was wet, sweaty wet and saliva wet and lifeless. Every time she tilted her neck to relax into his grasp, her muscles seized up, so she ended up kissing him straight on, the side of her nose squashed into his. She tried to enjoy it, bit his lip, ran her hands down his arching back. She urged her desire to flex and stretch out of its safe space, to dance with her body, but his mouth might as well have been a flat, white wall.
He pulled away, smiling, and Desiree was afraid he’d seen she was a fake. After kissing her, he would be able to tell she wasn’t really someone who would have an open relationship. Wasn’t really free.
When he said, “I’d like you with less clothes on,” she pushed herself off him.
Now, on the porch, she feels so dirty, so sick. For having tricked him, for not having wanted it, for making herself play a part. She really needs a shower. She closes her eyes and is assaulted by Damian’s sick, sexualized face. Damian of last night teases her with pursing lips and a jutting tongue as he speaks of the beautiful potential of nonmonogamy: experimentation and intimate communion and fun, fun, fun.
But, today has not been fun. Today, Desiree has been a foreigner to her body. From her vantage on this late night porch, Desiree can see herself as she was this morning, in the apartment full of close walls and art supplies.
Once she woke, she could not escape an imagining of Damian’s hungry face while he is dick deep in a person-shaped shadow. She had never considered the faces he made might not be exclusive to her.
She forced herself out of bed only as her alarm clock neared noon, Students United for Justice already gathering at the plaza to collect signatures for the petition, and fought with herself as she untangled and combed out her hair.
Loving more than one person is a valid way to love—
My boyfriend doesn’t love me the way I thought he did, the way he should—
She chastised herself then. The march to support sex workers needed open-minded activists who were certain in their sexual liberation.
The cramped hallway knocked into her off-balance form on the way to the bathroom. Stumbling to standing, she told herself, Of course I’m open to it.
She fingers the sewing needle that the machine broke on the banner a couple of hours ago. She was almost done. The border needs her to glue one more row of rhinestones.
“I don’t know if it’s the right thing for me, but I want to find out,” he says. The fading light from the window burnishes his tawny brown skin. His set of pastels rolls and tumbles where he shifts his weight and frames his lush body in a riot of colors. The tips of his fingers are ochre, cadmium, carmine, phthalo green. He has a smudge of black over his thick brow, making him appear doubly eager to hear her say yes, say of course I’d love the chance to sleep with other people.
He praises her. “And you’re always so open to new things. I love that about you.”
This morning, in the bathroom, she swallowed the medicine she forgot to take most mornings, the big vitamin, the birth control pill she was supposed to take at night. It seemed like she needed control then. Water cleared the salt down her throat. She washed her face, dried it with a wad of toilet paper. Shreds of toilet paper freckled her cheeks. She considered that if she cried, maybe she could wash them off, and she started laughing.
From the medicine cabinet she pulled out all the skin care pots and tubes that she pretended to forget about every night. They clattered into the sink, and she opened them one by one, innards glistening in the bathroom light, jiggling and perfuming the air with promises of graceful ageing.
She smeared serum onto her face and breathed in the rose scent. Her fingers roved through the containers, choosing a sunscreen next for its sharp, chemical smell. Her face was putty under her fingers, like when she’s had a couple shots of tequila.
The next pot was glass, delicate and full of thick cream. It softened her skin, toughened her up.
She selected a crop top and slid into her highest black boots. She was as tall as Damian in them. She stomped down the stairs, out of her building, relished the clang her feet made on the cheap metal steps as she collected the pieces of herself and arranged them into the woman she hadn’t known she was pretending to be.
He leaves the bed of colors to reach for her. He squeezes her thigh, and it tickles. She represses a flinch. The needle bites into her skin. She folds in on herself, wrapping her arms around her legs. His hand falls away from her thigh. With each breath, her boobs flatten and then reshape against her knees. The pressure in her lungs reminds her it’s her body and she’s still in it.
“I’m open…?” she starts. She shakes her head, feels tightness claim her jaw. It will be a balm for hurt to succumb to anger. Anger will let her indulge herself. It will let her love herself alone, outside of anyone else.
Desiree blinks away the morning’s pathetic memories. Carla was wrong. Damian isn’t doing this to her. She’s doing it to herself. She stares at the porch, trying to see beyond the happy web of connection and light to the people beneath. Are they masked too?
She perceives beyond-natural colors on their lips and nails, gauzy fabrics suggesting kink and confidence, rainbow hair and rainbow pins, loose pants, thick heels. Their appearances speak; They are frank and straightforward. I am who I appear to be, they say. The partygoers are no clowns.
Desiree hugs her elbows and watches as Angelica hugs Carla goodbye, and the glowing lines of camaraderie between them blaze brighter.
Carla hands Angelica something in a napkin. Angelica speaks and points to Desiree hiding in the darkness of the yard. Carla shields her eyes and peers out into the gloom. She shakes her head and passes Angelica another napkin-wrapped offering.
Finally, Angelica joins Desiree in the cool grass. She hands her a cupcake with white icing. It is decorated with tiny umbrella-shaped sprinkles, and Desiree licks at it. She makes herself take a bite. She’s not hungry, but she’s supposed to eat this, she knows.
The cupcake fills up her mouth, fluffy and tasteless. She thinks about semen and how its salty hotness makes her gag. She swallows. She says to Angelica, quietly, so the activists at the party receding behind them can’t hear, “Damian cares more about his penis than he does about me.” She’s not sure if she believes this, but she needs to test the statement aloud.
He says something else about “a test run, just to see” and “rules,” and she can’t really hear anything except the wind gusting from his mouth.
“Let’s talk about this later.” She feels comfortable behind an ambiguous tone. She’s imagining the release after he leaves. She’ll curl up on the floor, sob into the carpet. She can’t wait.
He hugs her for a long time. She lets him, but she doesn’t lean into his softness. She’s a prude as stiff as his cock.
The door closes, the lock bolts with the key she gave him when he carried one half of her couch in, and she holds her breath for five seconds… ten… twelve.
She cries as quietly as she can. Her face is pressed into the carpet, and she can almost smell the tang and flush of spilled Chinese takeout—their Christmas dinner last year. The fibers itch her nose, and it’s disgusting.
Her face is wet and red and puffy. Her throat aches. She hugs herself and wants her mom. She’s too ashamed to tell her mom that her partner wants to fuck everyone and too ashamed to expose her brokenness to her closest friend, free and unrestrained Angelica. “I can’t satisfy the man who says he loves me,” she tries in a whisper into the carpet.
Angelica puts her arm around Desiree like Desiree knew she would. Angelica says, “Maybe not. Maybe he thinks an open relationship will bring you closer together.”
They are close to the metro stop now. The silence of their walk is disrupted as a car whooshes around the corner. The wind it generates whips the hem of Desiree’s crop top and her long skirt. Beads dangling from her skirt knock against her boots.
Indistinct figures inside the car honk and shout catcalls out of their window. Angelica shouts back at them as she drags Desiree into the safety of the metro stop, but Desiree slows to smooth down the front of her top. She feels obscene. She is lying to everyone with her body.
In the morning, Desiree stands hungover amid the results of months of grassroots energy.
Movement blossoms across the once-arid plaza and spotlights Desiree’s cracks. Desiree is aching from the dull, gray place again, but she begins to wonder what her feelings matter beside the incandescence of a community asserting itself.
Marchers move in rhythms and waves beneath twirling red umbrellas, bumping and jostling each other into flurried excitement, catching up onlookers into their thrill and swelling across the pavement, the grassy patches, the sloshing fountain, the base of a statue of an old man on a horse.
Police on foot and on bikes sweat at the perimeter of the plaza. Everyone ignores them, but their presence adds shades of tension and strain, like the marchers are putting on a show for the wrong audience.
Angelica directs a couple of volunteers as they clear a space in the center of the plaza and wheel in speakers. Golden Carla, who, last night, told Desiree she was arrested after a client robbed her, taps speaking notes furiously into her phone.
“Decriminalize Sex Work Now!” a chanter begins.
Under a lopsided blue tent, Desiree takes a turn passing out water. It’s blisteringly hot, but the act of handing fragile cups of icy water, from her pale hand to a sex worker’s hand, a stranger’s hand, a friend’s, and the necessary coordination between her and each individual as they work to keep the water from spilling over, soaks into her skin and startles her. She shivers.
Behind the clunky speakers, Damian hangs the banner. The glossy pink, blue, and red catch the sun and gleam like a beacon. She doesn’t know why she expected him to, but he doesn’t look any different. His physical being has not been transformed by whoever he did or didn’t get into while she was trying on a new mask at the party. It did not fit her body, and something in her hopes it went better for him, even if it hurts to look at him.
He stops a few feet from her, his thin body arching toward her. His face looks normal again: angular, a little dark under the eyes, hungover and lean. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what this conversation would be like,” he says.
Desiree agrees. She adjusts her ponytail, tugging until the strands yank her scalp. She pulls the hair tie out and rolls it onto her wrist, and then she tells him that she is sure she doesn’t want an open relationship. “Maybe it’s for you, but it’s not for me. If I were to agree to it, it would be because I caved to pressure to let you be ‘free’ and to be the ‘cool girl’ who’s just so fun and leftist.” As she speaks, a hole opens up in her future. Is he there? Is he not? Where will she live next year?
He’s swiping at his eyes and knotting his fingers, and she has no idea what he’s going to say. Yesterday, she would have wanted him to say, I love you enough for monogamy, but today, she opens herself up to the idea that he loves her enough for nonmonogamy, and, though it’s not for her, that is precious too.
Black hairs are peeking out above the dip of his t-shirt, and Desiree yearns to touch him, to run her fingers over his soft skin and hair and rest her face in the crook of his neck where she can always smell the mildness of his soap and the musk of his body.
A hush passing through the crowd breaks her focus on Damian with his blotchy face and his white shirt. Desiree is under an open, blue sky among a surging red crowd. Posters flutter and feet shuffle as everyone turns to the center.
Desiree laughs, high and birdlike, just to hear her voice. After this, she will tell Carla that what she glimpsed last night—the gray, unsparkling woman wrestling between fraud and fear—is all her, but so is the bright Desiree, this woman who feels color spreading over her being. It’s red, it’s sunshine yellow, it’s the crystal shimmering blue of the water she hands to her people. It’s the mask that crumbles away, leaving her free to savor the light.
Emily J. Weisenberger can’t help but write about the way culture and the individual collide. In an attempt to understand other people, she collected two degrees in anthropology before taking up fiction writing. Her publications include short stories in The Vanishing Point and in the anthology Unrealpolitik.
Photo Credit: Katie Hughbanks’ photography has been recognized internationally, including two honors from the London Photo Festival. Her poetry and narrative writing have appeared in Trajectory, Calliope, Kentucky Monthly’s Penned Literary Edition, Kudzu Literary Magazine, The Courier-Journal, KSPS’s Pegasus, and the Louisville Eccentric Observer’s Literary LEO as well as online on Dodging the Rain (Ireland) and Flight Writing (Ireland). Her poetry chapbook, Blackbird Songs, was published by Prolific Press in 2019. She teaches English and creative writing in Louisville, Kentucky.
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