She fucked like she was fighting, rolling off the bed midway to get water twice. He stroked himself watching her walk to the kitchen and back both times.
It struck him that he was wrong. She flounced. She flounced to the kitchen and back both times.
People who flounce had flouncy hearts.
He did not know if this was true but he knew people who did not flounce and they did not have flouncy hearts.
At the whorehouse the previous night he had picked a Senegalese girl and even in the purplish dim light he could sense that she was the kind of beauty kings would have beheaded entire villages just to rape her for a night. There had been no space in the cramped clammy room to flounce but she had spread and bent ungrudgingly. He would have bet his remaining change that if she wasn’t on the clock she would have flounced.
He had rushed out soon after he came. For cigarettes. When he finally made it home early morning his fingers smelt of women, eggs, meat, and the insides of vomit laden jeans pockets.
In a fit of generosity that comes from store-bought-release, he lost more money. Enough exactly for one more woman. Not on himself. For a young boy-girl duo standing outside the locked door counting their money. The girl had said, “I’m just being a good friend”. The guy looked pimply and shy.
Later when he had finished and was walking out he saw the girl sitting alone sipping water at the bar. Looking around he realized the boy must’ve picked the Hawaiian girl from the flesh parade.
The Hawaiian was good too even if a bit old. He remembered that the Hawaiian did not like her hair being touched. Luckily there were plenty of other places to touch and she happily opened every one of them. He chuckled at the thought of the Hawaiian explaining to the kid about her hair as he fumbled in the dark for lubed crevices.
It would be funnier if she was not guiding him.
That was last night.
This night, the third time she got up to get water she didn’t come back for a long time. She had rolled off from on top of him. Craning to see overhead he saw her with a glass of water watching him. He stared at her upside-down figure wondering how he looked from where she was leaning on the kitchen door frame.
Later she cried and talked through her tears, unconcerned, through the night. He was dismayed that it didn’t affect him.
She had wanted to start a political party she said. “You won’t do, you are a vagabond.” she dismissed his silence. He thought she had sounded both angry and sad but that could also have been because she was bleeding that day. Through the red haze, she sounded frustrated and passionate and dreamy.
He had drunk enough for all this to make sense.
It was at his drunkest that he made the most sense. Like when he had walked into a tattoo parlor asking for a tattoo. On his liver.
“Just pour the right amount of ink in beer. I’ll drink it.”
“Fuck off”
“You don’t have enough ink or beer?”
He finished himself off slowly, each of them watching the other disinterestedly, the green light from the digital clock on the microwave splayed between her legs, her face in the shadows.
The Reluctant Book Worm 
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