Come on Skinny Love by Angely Mercado (ready player one ebook TXT) 📕

I had already been awake for a while, but she didn’t know and so I pretended to lay there and drool until I felt her stir. I rolled over and saw Ivelisse’s figure silhouetted by the street lights. I slowly climbed out of bed and looked at the clock on my dresser. 1:30 AM. Most nights I woke up, reaching out for her, searching for her warmth and only felt how vacant the other side of my bed was. It was cold and I wondered how the heck Ivelisse was able to stand so close to the windows with all the drafts that were coming in. I grabbed a blanket and quietly padded over to the window. The blanket was draped across my shoulders and my arms were draped across hers. Skin caressed skin in a warm embrace that Ivelisse refused to reciprocate.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Being spontaneous and romantic,” I answered and kissed her neck.

“You’re a fool.”

I laughed and hugged her closer.

“I’m your fool.”

She leaned forward slightly, trying to escape my arms.

“Well aren’t you comforting,”, I laughed, trying to keep her in place.

“Comforting is my job”.

I didn’t know how to respond and just looked past her shoulder and out the window. The Queens borough bridge shone over the river and twinkled hello to the enormous blue City Bank building who in turn stared wistfully across the water to its relatives in Manhattan.

“What are cities in the Dominican Republic like?”

“Why do you care?” she asked back.

“I’ve never been there,” I sighed “I guess I’m curious.”

“The cities there suck;” she paused to think, “New York sucks too, but not as much as Santiago or Santo Domingo.”

“It’s not that bad here is it? I mean the bridge looks really nice tonight. That’s part of the reason why I got this apartment in the first place. The view, well that and the price. Some other guy was asking for almost $3,000 a month.”

“It’s just a bridge,” she cut me off. I guess she didn’t want to hear about building hunting.

“It kind of looks like a necklace being strung across the water. It’ll look beautiful on you.”

She scoffed and pulled away from my arms and went back over to the side of the bed where our clothing was discarded. Her attire wasn’t super flashy, nor was it overly revealing. I actually didn’t know that she turned on a red light when I had first met her, but then again, the first time I laid eyes on Ivelisse I was nursing a shot glass. I wanted her the moment I saw her, and she, well she wanted my money. But then again, I had seen her through a haze of Bacardi, and in that haze, she was an angel in a tight dress. A tight dress and hips. Lord have mercy.

The first night I had her, I fell asleep with a spinning head and a throbbing chest and woke up to a headache, and to Ivelisse bumping her knee against my night table. She had been rummaging through my wallet and scowled when she saw how little I had to my name. But the rent had to be paid that week, and slowly freelancing in any field didn’t make for a fat wallet.

Soon after, I learned how to cut back on fast food binges, took shorter showers, and remembered to close the fridge more often. All that extra income became hers. Ivelisse kindly declined the proposal of a second session, but I followed her, not unlike how a girl in the third grade followed me for a week after I had hugged her. I didn’t understand how she had felt, or why that girl even bothered following me. But now, it made perfect sense. I tried to treat Ivelisse to meals, mostly Thai take out, mofongo from a family owned place and takoyaki from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chinatown.

Other times, when we were just sitting around in my apartment, before or after making love, I’d try to be silly and serenade her.

“Can you just please shut up,” she screamed after a very bad rendition of a BeeGees song.

            “Alright, alright, I’ll stop.”

            Ivelisse ignored me and pretended to become engrossed in a paperback novel that I had left on my nightstand. I fiddled around on my laptop expecting a comment from her regarding the book or just anything else in general. But nothing. The silence was too much to bear, so I figured I’d go on YouTube to relieve the awkwardness.

            “Hey, what’s your favorite song?”

            “I don’t have one”, she rolled her eyes.

            I fiddled around at the recommendations. None of them looked like anything Ivelisse would enjoy, but then again what did I know, how hard was it to just tell me her favorite freaking song. I fiddled some more until Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” came up. About a year ago a friend made me listen to the song. His long time girlfriend broke up with him shortly before she took a job overseas. I had to put up with his angst for about a year while he would play the song nonstop and explain the lyrics to me. He called every night to talk about it; that was the year I decided to get an unlimited texting plan.

Bon Iver’s 2009 performance at a concert in Glastonbury was at the top of the list, so I clicked.  As usual, Bon’s hair was swayed into a floppy mess as he practically bounced out of his seat with each guitar strum and drum beat. The last chords hummed and the crowd screamed its approval to Bon’s heart wrenching song.

            The sheets next to me rustled and I turned to see Ivelisse practically perched on my shoulder. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, forcing blood into every nook and cranny of my body, especially my nether regions. It was rare to see her voluntarily coming closer to me, especially when it didn’t end in me handing over a portion of my paycheck. I leaned a bit towards her, hoping that the moment would last just a little bit longer.

            “Did you like the song?” I asked

            She nodded slowly and leaned her head on my shoulder in order to have a better view of my laptop’s screen.

            “Play the video again.”

            I obeyed and slowly reached and hung my arms around her shoulders and received no complaints.

            “It’s not a sad song, it’s like he’s mad or something, but I don’t know why,” she said, thinking out loud.

            Ivelisse frowned and stared down at her stripped sheet covered knees. Her eyes peered into mine. I have met Dominicans with yellow eyes, green eyes, hazel eyes, light brown, dark brown and even once an Afro-Dominican who had one hazel eye and one dark brown eye, but I had never seen one with such dark eyes. Onyx could be the only way to describe them.

            “What do you think?” she asked.

            I snapped out of my strange admiration for her eyes and held myself back from giving Ivelisse the same damn-girl-do-you-have-a-map-because-I-just-got-lost-in-your-eyes line that I had said the first night I met her.

            “What do I think about the song…?”

            “No idiot, what do you think about the lint in your belly button,” she shot back.

            I laughed and leaned closer to her.

            “I guess it is mad, at one point in the song he says, and if all your love is wasted so then who the hell am I. He also says ‘I’ll be holding all the tickets and you’ll be owning all the fines’. My guess is love didn’t work out so well and now he’s upset about how the woman he was with decided that their time together wasn’t worth anything.”

            “But what if it their time together ended badly? What if some things aren’t worth salvaging?”

            “That doesn’t mean the time they spent together can’t still have meaning,” I responded “It’s like when a married couple divorce, they might not feel the same way, but what if they learned a few valuable lessons, or if they had a kid or two? Those children still love them, and they love those kids right back, so it wasn’t a waste.”

            I paused for a bit.

            “I guess I’d feel insulted if someone told me that all the effort I had put into a relationship didn’t mean much,” I concluded.

            Ivelisse peered at me; I could practically see her absorbing my take on Bon’s angst.

            “I think I get it, but if something’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of time.”

            My fingertips skimmed her bare shoulders leaving behind a trail of goose bumps. Despite being amazingly skilled in her line of work, Ivelisse didn’t seem to enjoy intimacy. She met every one of my caresses with  her frigid can-we-just-get-on-with-this attitude. She didn’t tremble, she didn’t sign in response to me trailing my hands over her waist and down to her thighs, and she didn’t beg for more. I barely knew what counted as a sensitive spot on her body; Ivelisse on the other hand was skilled at each and every one of my weaknesses. So her suddenly sprouting goose bumps from a simple touch was just as likely as Empire State building walking over to Paris in order to have brunch with the Eiffel Tower. I trailed lower, trying to gauge how long it would be before Ivelisse would smack my hand away.

            “Is this a waste of time?”

            My lips brushed hers as if asking a question, she responded by leaning in. Another rare occurrence. I was usually swatted away with a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you but I figured that Bon had worked some magic. It had to be the acoustic guitar. The first time I had seen his performance of “Skinny Love”, I had felt a slight man crush growing.

 My heart fluttered as she deepened the kiss and slowly skimmed her hand around my shoulder and onto the back of my neck. Her breath mingled with mine, warming the cool air around our heads.

            Skin caressed skin, and the pale washed out teal of my sheets stood out behind Ivelisse’s flushed olive complexion. Her nails left a soft ticklish trail on my back as we slowly moved together towards something uncertain. Her silky black hair coiled around her head and formed hieroglyphics around us. I tried to decipher them, but I felt Ivelisse reach up and run her thumb across my jaw. The small black beauty mark next to her left eye lifted slightly as her lips turned up on the corners. Her genuine smiles were strange, not straight-line strained like her sarcastic smiles, or puckered like her pissed off smiles.

The rest of the night became a haze of the lack of space between us, heat, and her shy smiles where the right side of her lips tilted up before the left side.

***

            Most mornings after began with me in an empty bed and a note on my night stand informing me that money had been taken out of my wallet.

            For once in my life, the universe, God and Buddha had joined forced to smile down on me through the simple act of Ivelisse sleeping in. I closed the curtains to ward off the day and crawled back under my blankets. We spooned for about another hour until she stirred and pulled away the moment she realized that it was past 7:30.

            “Your hair looks nice,” I said, laughing at her desperate attempts to untangle the black locks with her fingers.

            “Good morning to you too.”

            “I thought you didn’t like morning,” I said.

            “I don’t.”

            She threw one of my shirts on and padded to the bathroom. I straightened out my bed and hurried over to the kitchen. I figured today would be the day that I would have my