From the very beginning she was smothered by her own obsession. November was spent longing. Just like the year before, when she’d fallen for another writer, one who lived in Michigan with his girlfriend. This was different. This time the man lived in New York, only he was traveling until December. Having never met or spoken to him before, she asked him out in a message on social media one hungover morning, because the only way she could deal with alcohol withdrawal was by making more plans to drink. They texted for hours, then days, then weeks. She wrote him stories and he told her not to publish them. She tried to sext him but he wouldn’t allow it; instead she asked him for book recommendations and she read them like she was studying for a big exam. He was twice her age and known for dating women half his age. That’s why she’d asked him out in the first place, yet it still made her insecure and jealous. She messaged a mutual friend of theirs to ask about him. You’re an adult, it’s your choice what you get out of it. Just don’t expect him to do anything for you or stick around. He probably just wants some temporary sexual and intellectual stimulus.

When he was finally back in New York, he postponed their date four times. She complained that she didn’t feel desired by him. It is fascinating how you seem determined to achieve romantic abjection before we’ve met, he wrote. Their first meeting took place at a literary reading she was hosting. She’d started drinking at noon on the train to an art fair in Brooklyn. Now it was six in the evening and she was waiting for him to come through the doors of the bar. He was wearing a suit with a hoodie, a confusing combination. She asked him if he thought she was pretty. He said yes. During the reading they sat in the corner on a red couch and he had his arm around her. She kissed him on the cheek repeatedly as if to claim him as hers. The reading was the worst she’d ever hosted but she didn’t care. The readers were trying to be funny and conversational but the crowd wasn’t laughing at all. Afterward they went with some friends to a dim bar and sat in the corner booth. She put her legs in his lap and slurred unintelligent remarks about literature. She complained to the man and his friend—a man who worked at The New York Times—that she didn’t know what she was doing with her life, that she felt like a failure. They halfheartedly consoled her, said she was still young. She asked the friend what he was doing at her age. He said he was working at Bon Appétit.

While the friends were getting drinks, the man pulled her to him and made out with her for the first time. With her eyes closed she felt dizzy and unbalanced but euphoric. They ordered a car to his place, but she whined that she wanted more alcohol, so they stopped at another bar. There, he was bombarded by an ex-girlfriend, an older woman who kept saying he was an old friend of hers. She was annoyed, sitting across from him with her legs in his lap while the ex-girlfriend hogged him. A boy approached her and said her name. He said he’d read a story she’d written. She asked if he’d read her book and he said no. She said he should. She made the man leave before he’d finished his drink. They stopped at a bodega to pick up a case of hard seltzers; the man pulled her away when the boy behind the counter asked if she was single.

His apartment was unfurnished. He was waiting on a check for ten grand. She liked the emptiness, it felt like she was moving in. In his office he sat in the desk chair and she sprawled out on the floor. He opened the window and they chainsmoked while he played Neil Young on his old laptop with a shattered screen. She made him put on Chet Baker, talked about his death, how he fell out of a hotel window in Amsterdam while high on heroin and coke. She said she wanted to die in some tragic way like that. He was getting impatient. She liked to make men impatient when she had the chance. It was fun to hold the power for once. She sat in his lap and he said, Isn’t this what you wanted? But she was too drunk, and even though she was wasted she was still nervous, nervous to have what she’d been thinking about constantly for over a month. He asked if he could touch her tits and she said yes. He unbuttoned her white long sleeve shirt—it had been given to her when her grandmother died in the spring—and he caressed her chest and sighed with relief and kissed her face. He brought her to his bed, a mattress with blue sheets on the floor of the other room. While he fucked her, he showered her with compliments with each thrust: You’re so beautiful you have a perfect body you’re so smart and good at writing you’re amazing. She told him to stop, that she knew he probably said these things to every girl he fucked, so it didn’t mean anything to her, in fact she found it offensive. She preferred to be degraded, to be called a dirty slut, but he didn’t want to do that, so instead they fucked with only the sound of their moans until they fell asleep.

In the morning, the naked windows displayed the winter sun creeping up. She accidentally looked right into it. It made a perfect orange rectangle on the floral wallpaper. She wanted to take a photo but her phone was dying and he didn’t have an iPhone charger. She begged him to fuck her, but he was only half-awake. She said she was bored. He mumbled in his sleep that he loved her. She said, What? He didn’t say anything. When he was fed up with her attempts to wake him, he pulled her to him and fucked her. She climbed on top of him and rode him and he told her to smile, and she giggled, thinking it was fitting that she looked sad during sex, when she was finally getting what she had so badly wanted. She folded her body over his, resting her weight on him and nestling her head in the crook of his neck as he pushed deeper inside her, her arms tight around him like she was afraid of ever separating. He pulled her hair to bring her face to his for a kiss. She bit his arms, his shoulder, and he didn’t flinch like boys always did; it was like he barely felt her teeth sinking into his skin. Afterward he called her Aphrodite. He asked her to rub his back. She did, first with her palms, then her knuckles.

Do you like when I call you daddy, she asked. 

Yes, but I would rather you say it matter-of-factly than like a screaming child that needs to be rescued.

But I need you to rescue me.

Ah.

She was at his again three days later. She’d gone to a concert and then taken a cab to his place. She was the happiest girl in the world, high off seeing her favorite musician and now seeing her lover. She showed up with a pack of hard seltzers, and went straight to his office for a cigarette. They talked about the filmmaker whose throat was slashed by his son, how crazy the son’s eyes looked. He said his landlord was getting divorced, asked him if he could stay in his office for a month or so for lower rent. She wondered if he would scold him for all of the cigarette smoke. He invited her to his bed, where he asked for head and after a few seconds said he was trying hard not to come. She told him to think of death and bad things like the Holocaust. When she got on top of him, he came within a minute. She wondered if he’d taken something last time to last longer. They talked about music and she was confidently making wrong declarations about bands for the sake of sounding passionate and sure of herself. She had learned from men that it didn’t matter if you were correct, you could make a game of arguing with conviction, and then the truth was clay in your hands to mold. He put on an old movie but she was too drunk to sit still and watch. She said she felt like they were compatible because they were both horny alcoholics. He said he didn’t use that word. He didn’t need to, because everyone else used it for him, but she didn’t say that. In the morning he fucked her once more, slowly and smugly. He asked if he cured her loneliness. She said no, she would miss him too much when she left. She asked if he missed her when they were apart. He said when he wasn’t working. But whenever she tried to work, she had to pause every few minutes to think about him, because she couldn’t stop. There’s a lot different between you and me, he said. Like what, she said. You’re a girl and I’m a boy, he said. You’re not a boy, she said, you’re an old man. She rubbed his back again, this time because she offered. Before she left she asked if she could be his girlfriend. He paused for a second before saying yes.

Every moment away from him, she thought of him. She thought of the way his arms felt around her. She thought of how his chest felt beneath her palm. She thought of his different ways of addressing her: girl, baby, darling, kiddo. She thought of him working, not thinking of her. She understood it was because he was freelance, which meant constantly meeting deadlines. But she assumed that he preferred this lifestyle because it forced him to be detached when it came to love. If work came first then love couldn’t. Men don’t like to put love first because it makes them vulnerable. This she knew. But he’d told her he loved her, said she could be his girlfriend. She lived in memories of their two dates. She heard his voice in her head, stared at pictures of him on her phone. She thought about his ex-girlfriends, especially the ones who were younger than her. She was going crazy. Lexapro safely encased her feelings in a frozen lake. She could see them but she couldn’t touch them. Drinking melted the ice. She wasn’t used to drinking this frequently, but because of the holidays she was off from work for three weeks. She had planned to try to write a book. She couldn’t write at all. No motivation or inspiration ever arrived. She only had the desire to drink and see him, and she didn’t want to write about him because she knew he didn’t want her to. 

The flu, a 101 fever, muscle aches all over like a needle pricking different pressure points on her body. Waking up in the middle of the night disoriented. Writhing from excruciating menstrual cramps. A dead deer on the side of the road. Lying on the shower floor, writing stories in her head, finding them not worth immortalizing once she was out. Kneeling in broken glass, blood dripping down her leg. Renting movies and not finishing them. Snowfall and dreams of beautiful glaciers, dreams of being back in nature and rejuvenated by the Earth. Every day another celebrity dead. 

Her friend had recently informed her that she was being posted on a website for incels. She checked it frequently to see what they were saying about her. They complained about her stories and her thirst traps, saying she was rich, spoiled, narcissistic, shallow, pathetic, slutty, desperate, used-up, depraved. They said she was daddy’s money slut. They said her writing was utter dogshit. They said she enjoyed being controlled, dominated, and maltreated. They said women couldn’t write about suffering because they couldn’t experience anything more than surface level suffering. They said she would never create anything of artistic worth. They said Would rape.

The day before Christmas Eve she met him and his friends at a bar. She showed up with a case of hard seltzers and hid them underneath the table. She bought a lager on his tab. The bartender asked how old she was and she felt flattered. She talked with his friends and felt proud of herself for entertaining them. They seemed to like her, but she was easy to like when she was drunk, blabbering and friendly, a different person, a freer one. Afterward the pair set out to his place, hand in hand in the quiet streets, and on an unremarkable block of identical brownstones he paused, grabbed her, and kissed her frantically, clumsily bending down because he was a whole foot taller. They continued the routine of smoking cigarettes in the office and then fucking on his mattress. He was supposed to have furnished the apartment by now, but he said his friend had asked to borrow money. She wondered if that was the difference between herself and this older man—that he sometimes lent people thousands of dollars if they needed it. While she was on top of him she told him she loved him. He said thank you. 

They went back out to another bar. He introduced her to the friendly, self-deprecating owner who had a severely bloodshot eye and asked her for a cigarette. She begged the bartender to stop playing shitty music. He put on one song for her and she spun in circles until she almost fell to the floor. The man disappeared, the owner said to get cigarettes, but she realized it was to get drugs. He dragged her to another bar to meet his friend, an author. She was wasted, flirting with the author in front of the man. He was fifteen years younger than the man and soft-spoken, palpably overwhelmed by her attempts at affection. She couldn’t help herself. When she was drunk it was her favorite game—to test her ability to seduce. Only in this case the stakes were heightened by the man’s presence, the man she was hopelessly obsessed with. She wanted him to make a scene, or at least punish her later. Then she would know if he truly cared for her. They went to the author’s place and passed around coke on top of a book, snorting it through a rolled-up dollar bill. She didn’t do it, having never done coke and not wanting to, but she helped pass it around. She put her legs in the author’s lap and asked to kiss him. He said it was a bad idea, nodding toward the man sitting right across from them as if to remind her of him. She gave up and returned to the man’s lap, curling up like a cat and watching him snort the drugs. That was her final memory of the night, though they went back to his eventually, taking a car, ascending the stairs, and falling onto the mattress intertwined, all of which later existed in her mind as a pitch black interval.

And then the sun was coming up again. Her consciousness reentered in the middle of a handjob. She was making him repeat her name as she stroked him. She was still not fully there; she was mentally absent and moving mechanically, and giggled with surprise when the come spurted onto her stomach. Then he went to the shower. His sister was on her way to pick him up to drive to New Jersey for Christmas. She followed, uninvited, drifting into the bathroom, getting in behind him and reaching her hands out to feel the hot water and his skin. He cut himself shaving, blood dripping down his chin. She shivered and he wrapped her in a towel. She felt not yet hungover, still drunk, somewhat blackout. Then she remembered that she’d told him later in the night again that she loved him, and he’d said it back. It was rare that a man she loved actually told her what she wanted to hear. Men always withheld what she wanted from her. But he didn’t. At the same time she didn’t know if the words held any weight, if he meant anything he said.

Her hangover was unforgiving. Whereas it used to be physical—a throbbing headache, an upset stomach—now it was mostly mental, a ruthless dissociative anxiety that made her wish she was dead. It was like she could feel her brain cells dissolving one by one; she could feel the Lexapro losing its effect, her old panic-ridden self returning. The day seemed never-ending, and it instilled in her a potent desire to be sober, to get her life together, so maybe she could find pleasure in reading and writing again. She broke up with the man on Christmas. He said he was too busy with work for a serious discussion. She expected to feel free from her suffocating obsession, but instead she felt a heavy weight in her chest. It would be days, maybe weeks, of heartbreak, she realized. She’d forgotten what it felt like. She hadn’t felt it since February, when she’d fallen for a twenty-one-year-old line cook who ghosted her after two hookups. She had loved him because he was an alcoholic. It was only alcoholics who had the power to break her heart. She sent the man an email that night. He replied with apologies and regrets. She was surprised by his sweetness. The next day she emailed again, explaining her problems with alcohol. He replied with harshness. He said his dad was dying, that he didn’t care about her hangovers, that she didn’t even drink that much. You make everything much too dramatic. Life is very simple, you just have to do your work and get money. Chill out and read some books and you’ll be fine. I miss you or I’ll miss you or I’ll see you later. Have fun in the snow.

There was her answer: He could say she was his girlfriend, he could say he loved her back, but it was like someone nodding their head after not hearing what was said, doing what the moment seemed to require of them. It was worse than the men who’d refused to give her what she wanted, the emotionally unavailable men who were at least upfront about being emotionally unavailable. But what had she expected? She had been warned about him, she had been fixated on him before she’d met him, she had known this would be just another doomed winter love affair. Still, she thought of a quote she’d underlined in a book the man had told her to read: Everything can be foreseen, except the feeling aroused in us by what we foresee. The feeling was awful, crushing.