"that shit sounds like a new short story"
I’ve got a man mad about me/ calls me every other day/ he’d be so much better off if i went away/ but why should i go/ he’d be unhappy without me i know/ i’ve got that man crazy for me/ he’s funny that way
Once, the man I love called me a whore.
It came from his emphatic secret of needing to be kept. Something I am only halfway good at; and, still, he follows me east to west- footing through the wreckage on my inside. He is a boy named Pedro and I love to call attention to his pain.
I used to hear him singing in the walls from the apartment next door, but only when it rained.
Picture me: lowering my lights and kneeling, my back up against the side I could hear him from and falling asleep to the way he hummed. I had been getting away with this gluttony for so long, but that’s the pain too.
A week into secretly listening in on his sweet nothings, I knocked on the door of the apartment I knew he shared with a live-in girlfriend. Relieved to find him on the other side of the opening, I introduced myself as the neighbor needing some honey for sweetening up a whiskey apéritif. He introduced me to his florist on Cornell street later that evening, and, well… eventually went on to call me a whore.
Of course, this was many moons later and after he’d taken up with me next door to his old lady, who I used my ease for gluttony against.
I would whisper shit to him that would make him bang me up against the same wall I listened to him through.
The girl who Pedro lived with (that he didn’t love) before me breached her lease and we knocked the wall down to expand our unit. It was plainly symbolic.
Pedro intensified.
He brought home Gardenia from Emily The Florist and a haloed, round cut, natural green Emerald.
We posed for our wedding photos with his chrome fifty cal. and Vogue Platine cigarettes sent over by Macy, my best friend who just won’t leave Wales for a thing. There was a check as a congratulatory gift and a note in her handwriting that read:
This will be a drag,
Xoxo
I love that bitch and the untraditional way of life that we share.
Macy won’t leave Wales because there are all the red headed boys her brown skinned ass needs there. Her note and the check called me on my gluttony, but I am safe here with the mad about me man who loves a whore.