Sticky Sweet
CW: this story deals with verbal and emotional abuse.
Do you remember the night we met?
The darkness of the bar, Cassie’s favourite, where she managed to drag me on infrequent Saturday nights. Flecks of conversation flying over my head like bullets, a battlefield of raised voices and thumping music. Me, taking shelter behind my quiet smile and tilted head. A barely-there presence in the conversation; laughing at the right times, providing an assenting nod, a supportive frown. Cassie on one side, her friends I’d never really gotten to know surrounding us. I had the dregs of a vodka soda in my hand—just ice and a sad piece of lime. I swirled the glass at each lull in conversation. My mind was elsewhere, thinking about the essay on Dracula that I really should’ve started by now. It was a regular Saturday night for Cass and her friends; I felt the familiar vague discomfort that accompanied my rare nights out. That is, until Cassie caught your eye and waved you over.
You waved back and made your way to our table, slotting into our loose circle. You, taking all the air from the room. All talk, talk, talk, hands flying about in wild gestures and a smile that seemed too big for your face. I didn’t know how your cheeks did it, supporting the weight of such a wide grin. Mine ached just seeing it.
I saw you, watched you, enamoured. Devouring your presence as you commanded the energy of these people you’d never met. I was infatuated—it was instant. It wasn’t just a crush, a flutter of the stomach when you looked my way. It was a hunger; insatiable, destructive. I wanted, needed, to know you. The intensity of my feelings shocked me. I wasn’t the type to fall this quickly, yet I couldn’t escape the fact that I wanted to prise you open, see what you were made up of, understand you at a molecular level.
I couldn’t do any of this, of course, so I made do with watching you rapturously, studying your every move. Did you notice? You must have, because over the next few rounds of drinks, your occasional glances my way became more frequent, more lingering.
Your friends joined us, our two groups merging into a messy cluster. Some of your friends knew some of mine, the rest happy to meet new people. When our group left the bar, everyone loosened up with alcohol and ready to head to a club, I danced as close to you as I dared; bodies against bodies, minds light with vodka, our glasses topped up from the silver flask in your bra. It was a routine I’d never performed before, yet I found I knew all the steps. Our eyes shared questions, my hesitance met with your confidence. Your hands found my waist. As close as possible would never be close enough.
The others danced around us, and occasionally I turned to Cassie, singing the words to songs I didn’t realise I knew. You did the same with your friends; each time you turned away, though, you kept glancing back at me, grinning brazenly. Your eyes were a spotlight in the dark room, and I was illuminated under your gaze. My cheeks burned and sweat beaded down my back. Each time you turned away, I was antsy, impatient until your eyes were back on mine.
I’d never told my friends. It wasn’t like I’d been keeping it from them; it had never come up. No one had ever questioned my sexuality, and I’d never offered the information. I don’t even think I’d been sure myself, before you. I’d dated a few men in the past, casual romances that never lasted longer than a few months and ended with only a passing sadness. I think the rush of feelings I felt for you in that first hour was more than I had ever felt in my life.
I don’t think it was possible for our friends to misinterpret the way we looked at each other—or rather, the way I looked at you. At one point, Cassie cocked her head at me, quirking an eyebrow. She had probably never considered this as a possibility, but then she just smiled and turned away from us. Your friends knew about you, of course; with hindsight I would learn that this was a regular occurrence for you. I was not the first quiet brunette you’d unearthed in a bar. For me, however, everything was unfamiliar, electric.
The room became hotter, the crowd growing denser. We let ourselves drift from the rest of our group, happy to lose our friends in the sticky crush of the crowd, when you leaned into my ear, whispering, ‘Do you wanna… you know, go somewhere else?’
I just nodded; of course I wanted to go somewhere else. In that moment I would have followed you anywhere. Maybe I still would.
The first time you came to the house on Queen Street, it was a week or so after that first night. You complimented my stacks of books, said you thought reading was cute and I blushed. Do you remember? In my bedroom, I played shy while you played nothing at all. You were so real, so there, unabashedly grabbing my hand and pulling me to you. With your mouth on my neck I was found; all my shyness fell to the floor with our clothes. My skin hummed under your gaze, your touch. I never knew I could be so entirely aware of my whole body.
A few weeks later, we sat outside the back door. The nights in those early months blur into one. The sky was the soft powdery blue of post-sunset, the moon a fine sliver. I sat on the step, my back against the peeling doorframe, and you leant against the side of the house. Our legs were outstretched, intertwined. The air held that distinct late-February Tassie chill, cold enough to raise goosebumps on my arms but not enough to send me inside in search of a jacket. Our relationship was still precarious enough for me to be afraid of removing my legs from within the tangle, afraid of breaking the spell.
You were chattering away, annoyed about something you’d seen on Facebook, absentmindedly picking at your fingernails. Cassie and Theo were in the kitchen, their soft conversation floating through the open window.
‘I mean, it’s just, like, completely fucked, right?’ You paused to look at me, perhaps to check if I was really listening. If you were anyone else, I might’ve thought you were consulting me for my opinion, but I knew you just sought my loyal assent. I peered at the screenshot you held out for my viewing, not sure whether you wanted me to nod in agreement or shake my head.
‘Of course.’ I decided on nodding, and you took your phone back, pleased with my response. I let out a soundless sigh of relief. I started to pick at my own nails, flecks of black nail polish littering the brick courtyard.
‘It’s so nice to be with someone so aligned with my beliefs, you know? I’ve never been with anyone this similar to me. You’re so easy to talk to.’
‘Yeah.’ I nodded again. I’d never thought of myself as particularly opinionated, never really been sure of my beliefs. In classes at uni—literature, or gender studies, or the dreaded politics elective—I’d sit quietly, letting the general consensus of my peers shape my own opinions. Maybe I just found it easier to agree, to fold myself into the mould of your girlfriend that you laid out for me. I’d seen the way, weeks before, you exploded at your housemate when she disagreed with your criticism of a female politician, calling your harsh words unfair. How quick you were to anger, swearing and calling her names, unable to handle the possibility of being wrong. That scene played on a loop in the back of my mind.
‘I just—I can’t do this right now.’ You ran your hands through your hair, facing away from me. The sky was purplish-blue velvet through my open window, the moon a white china saucer. The black strap of your dress hung off your shoulder, as if it had given up holding on.
‘This is just a lot, you know? You’re asking a lot of me. I don’t know if I can do this whole exclusive thing.’
‘Sure, of course. I’m sorry.’ I had just asked if you were close with that guy from your work—the one whose thigh your hand had rested on all night at drinks. You had been the one to suggest we become exclusive, to suggest we take whatever we had to the level of an actual relationship. Yet, somehow, I was the one apologising.
I couldn’t hide the hurt blooming like a fresh bruise across my face, and your hands dropped to your sides. Your dress strap slid further down your arm.
‘Shit, I’m sorry. You know I love spending time with you, of course I do. I’ve never met anyone like you.’ Grabbing my hands, you pulled me into you, and all I could do was watch the strap slide further and further down.
‘Sometimes, I… I just freak out because I feel so strongly about you. You know? You’re so beautiful, and so smart, and you’re too good to me. I don’t know how I got so lucky.’
You kissed me, and your words poured over me like honey, sticky sweet. They soothed the ugly scratches that my own words had made as they tried to claw their way out of my mouth; the awful names I wanted to call you, the cruel ways I could throw your hypocrisy back in your face. The words I had swallowed back, pushing forth apologies and compassion in their place. Your honey-words pooled in my stomach, smothering the ache and anger that had grown there. They warmed my chest, my abdomen, spreading their golden glow. I felt them fill me up, radiate within me, and I let them.
My mother used to pack an orange in my lunchbox every day through primary school. Each day, the skin was taut and firm, the colour vivid. My thumbnail would pierce the skin, hands tearing through the outer layer, eager to unearth the sweetness within. But one day, when my thumb slipped into the middle, what it found there was wrong. The core, supposed to be white and sinewy, was a dangerous black mush. Inside was a worm, dead and rotting. Having eaten its way through the peel, the worm had gorged itself on the sweet flesh, then laid down to die among the burning acid.
The juice that covered my fingers smelt earthy and foul, an offensive excretion that sliced the air. Black rot clung beneath my fingernails.
In the bathroom I washed my hands, scrubbing the pink soap into my skin with unjustified force. My hands seemed stained with that vile blackness, no matter how hard I scoured.
Its scent lingered long after the rot had swirled down the drain.
Sometimes I felt naked under your gaze. No, not naked; flayed, like my skin had been peeled from my body in long curling ribbons that pooled at my feet. I was completely on display, opened up for your enjoyment, everything inside me yours for the taking. Sometimes, whether we were reading quietly in my room or out for dinner with our friends, you could look at me in a certain way, and I knew I’d never be able to hide anything from you. It made me start to think that maybe we are not supposed to be known so fully, so wholly by another. Maybe there are parts within us that are meant to stay hidden; maybe this was my downfall. Our downfall. But, when we did fall down, it was really only me who fell. When the world around us began to crumble, somehow I was alone in the wreckage.
That Saturday night in June, you tumbled out of an Uber and I followed close behind, more sure-footed. There was wine on your breath as you spoke.
‘You’re so fucking needy, you know that? It’s like I can’t fucking breathe around you. You’re just always fucking right there.’
How ironic that these words came from your mouth when you’d taken the air from the room since the moment we met.
The sky was black and unforgiving above, no stars or moon to cast light on the scene. Your street bare of streetlights and cars, just the rustle of possums in the roadside scrub to fill the silence as I processed your words.
I wanted to cry in that moment. Instead, I watched you blankly, my vacant expression masking my thumping heart. Your words, once sticky sweet in my stomach, had soured, and I felt them turning to rot. There was nothing I could say, no rebuttal I could form against you.
This was one of the only arguments we ever had because I usually worked so hard to avoid them. I’d apologised when I’d done nothing wrong just to make you stop looking at me like I was that orange, and my rot was staining your skin.
This time, though, I was tired. Really, really tired, of watching you flirt with guys, flirt with girls, flirt with anyone who offered you a moment of their attention. Tired of second guessing myself, tired of apologising for my existence. Just really fucking tired. My bones felt heavy in my skin, disfiguring my shape as gravity pulled them downwards.
‘I don’t think—’ You stumbled over your words before settling on the trite cliché: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’
I wasn’t sure what ‘this’ was; you didn’t seem to carry any of the damage. Your usually wide grin was twisted into a grimace, but that was the only change I could detect from the girl whose flask I’d sipped from months before.
Turning away from me, you walked into your house without looking back. I knew this was the last time we’d fill these roles, the last time this routine would play out. The dance was over. As you pulled the door closed behind you, the lightness in my chest felt wrong. No, not lightness; a hollowness, making my heartbeat echo through my body.
Thumbnails into my skin, breaking me open, you’d feasted on me and I’d let you. Encouraged you, even, like some kind of masochist, mesmerised by her own destruction.
Why, then, was I surprised when you left? Your hunger satisfied, you threw me away like a useless peel, already seeking new flesh to fill the mould.
Why was I surprised when you didn’t come back?
There was nothing left to come back to.
Macey Smart is a writer and editor from lutruwita/Tasmania. She recently graduated from the University of Tasmania with First Class Honours in English, with a research project on women and food in contemporary literature. You can find her work in Togatus, where she was the Deputy Editor for 2023, as well as Playdough Magazine.
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