"Ceci N'est Pas Vie"
Or
"This Is Not Life"
Lisa Reisert gazed sullenly into her coffee cup; pale hands steepled together underneath the table. Outside, the rain plinked against the window. It was 9:30 in the morning, and she was sitting here, in a white tank top and striped pajama pants slung low around her hips. It was 9:30 in the morning and she was sitting here, letting tears drop slowly into the white porcelain mug below.
Jackson had let himself into the apartment last night. She had asked him the first time, in the aftermath, if his bosses would be angry because he was here. He had replied that it was his night off, and his bosses didn't give a fuck what he did on his own time. Last night hadn't been any different than the times before. He had shucked his shoes, left his tie dangling of one of the kitchen chairs, a trail of clothing to her bed. From there, the passionate need had prevailed. Lisa had woken with his arms around her.
He sat across from her, wearing those wire-rimmed reading glasses with the square lenses she loved so much. The paper sat in front of him, spattered with pictures of impoverished nations and words like "nuclear arms." And his blue eyes, so pure and so sharp, were skimming this paper the way his hands had skimmed over her the night before, a delicate caress that whispered of unfulfilled needs and broken promises.
As he pushed his chair away from the table it made a caustic screech on the tile, soothed almost immediately by the quiet, smooth padding of his bare feet. He was beside her then, crouching at the edge of the table and looking up. She couldn't look back. His voice was without guile, falling into perfect syncopation with the rain spattering outside. "Lise?"
It was only her name. Only her name...blending into the hiss of the drying machine down the hall, into the roiling grey clouds outside, into the millions of little raindrops being blown apart on the concrete, into the millions of tiny deaths and separations. And when he said that, the resistance inside her died, too.
A gasping, breathy sob that teetered on the edge of a scream and she pushed her chair away from the table with violence and dropped to the floor and clung to him, clung to him, her nails digging into the skin of his bare back and the solid weight of his chest against her cheek was the only thing keeping her here.
Because as much as she wanted to be here, to be with him, every moment was like its own little, tiny suicide. Every moment she spent in his arms, in his bed, enveloped by his scent and his taste and his suave devil-may-care attitude, every moment she killed a little part of herself.
And she wasn't sure what would be left, after Jackson and her own little, tiny suicides.
He held her with a tenderness she hadn't believed in before and she slowly, slowly drew back from him, leaving him only with her tears on his chest and ten, perfect crescent moons pressed into his back. Receding, she propelled herself backwards until her back met the cool, whitewashed wall. And there she stayed, looking at him, looking as if she had never really seen him before.
He was like quicksand, she decided, with her spine pressed to the kitchen wall. She had taken one step and she was irrevocably lost. She could not pull her way out. Not that she wanted to.
Slowly, tortuously, he moved to be beside her. With quiet, unassuming breaths he took one arm, then the other, and looped them around his neck. She was only too willing to comply. He pressed a kiss to her bared shoulder and set her gently on the kitchen table. He made love to her, then, and with such raw honesty...As she arched herself against him, she kept her eyes open and trained on him until the end, and it was the worst and the best part of it all. Even as she brushed her kiss-swollen lips feather light against his sweat-slicked forehead, she kept her eyes open. She wanted to remember every cadence of his breath, every sharp crooning sound, every whispered, half-gasped, half-formed "I love you."
She had to remember it, because she couldn't be sure of how many times she would experience it again. And when he shattered in her arms, quivering and coming apart at the seams, she felt another little piece of her die. It was self-destruction, she knew, for both of them. They were only whole when they were together, but being together killed them.
She panted his name out in warm, steady streams across the curvature of his shoulder, wondering in the deepest, loneliest part of herself that even he couldn't touch, if this would be the last time.
The last time a piece of her died, and the last time she ever really lived.
Life without him was not life, but life with him was death. And she thought these things while his pale, long fingers twined themselves in her auburn hair. And she acquiesced to the not-so-gentle tug he gave, her head falling back. He kissed a pathway along her shoulder, up the slender, pale column of her neck to the corner of her lips. And as thunder cracked he winced a bit, and when lightning streaked across the sky he kissed her.
And the kiss, she knew even as she held him tightly, was an apology for not being able to save her from those million little deaths. But she shook her head, even as he withdrew and wiped a single tear from her cheek with his thumb. She shook her head because she had known from the beginning that there wouldn't be a happy ending.