Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Codes: MF, sm, viol, caution, cheat
Then came the apologies.  There was no telling her it wasn't her fault.
There was no arguing, no fighting between them.  The apologies were a form
of rage, though.  Precipitated upon despair.  Her desire to drag both of
them down in the grave with him.  Her grip on him, death's grip on her. 

Each time he felt it.  The only choice was to get free.

   She kept his room exactly the same.  They said it was typical that she
wanted to remember and he wanted to forget.  It was like dying all over
again each time he thought of it.

   Why did it feel like he had died, too?  In previous decades, hadn't it
been common for children to die before their parents?  It was anger,
mostly. They had clinical names for sadness, happiness, and nervousness,
but none for anger.  That was just your fault.  He understood.  But, he
said to her, the two of them were still alive, weren't they?  So why did
she choose to die a living death?

   It wasn't too long after that that he started seeing her.  They would
meet at a bar uptown that he had frequented in his younger days.  Other
times she wouldn't be able to make it and it would be random women he
picked up from there.  He could come back to life again as long as he was
with someone young and beautiful, someone who still had some hope left in
life.  Sometimes he found a girl who would hang out in there sometimes in
the evenings who was informally doing it for money.  But mostly it was just
her.

   Sometimes it was just the two of them, sometimes there were others.  But
it was she who made him go out looking in the first place.

   He had met her on the afternoon bus, on the way to the park-and-ride. 
She was taking the bus all the way home from the pet store, with a goldfish
in a plastic bag.  He had to strike up a conversation with her.  The other
passengers on the bus were titillated by their conversation, the way she
had told him all about her unusual lifestyle, and he had listened with more
interest than normal.

   She had a son the same age, who had muscular dystrophy.  She was raising
him on her own.  There was respite care available on Fridays.  He called
her while he was at work the next week and that is when they agreed to
meet.

   They only knew first names.  She was not so bad for her age.  He figured
he wasn't.  Still it was sick to think about.  He would be disgusted at
work on Friday afternoons, with the anticipation he was feeling.

   There were even times she would kick him out of bed afterward, or out of
the room.  He would sit on the floor and watch tv, or stop in the alley for
a cigarette before driving back to the suburbs.

   There was one day he came across a picture of him in his valise, inside
the lining with various other incidentals.

   The next time he saw her, he was determined.  He had to be the one to
make them both forget.  He could see her guilt, which only subsided in rare
moments.  He would have to pin her against the wall, one hand against the
wall and the other reaching under her shirt.  While he did this he would
have to kiss her neck.  It was really very hard to please her, since she
required quite a bit of distraction.  He was allowed to bite.  They both
left marks.  There was no longer any danger in what they were doing.  His
wife was a million miles away in her head.

   There were times he felt as though what he was doing was nearer to
worship.  Not as a fetishist, but as a monument to his own loneliness.  He
stayed on the floor those times, next to her scent, with his face buried
between her thighs.  That way, he could still feel a million miles away. 
It was animalistic.

   She scratched him until his entire back was bleeding.  She did not
apologize.

   For his part, he understood that the beautiful roughness was not good.
It was not good and neither was he.  None of this could help.  She teased
him.  He could not bring himself to feel angry.  She beat him with her
fists.  She ordered a meal and ate it all while he sat crouched beneath
her, serving as furniture.  She spat gristle onto his back.  It landed on
the carpet next to him, she told him to eat it.  He swallowed it whole.

   Often, there were tears.  Their own or somebody else's, that came to
them during an act, where they had not occurred before.

   She bit him back, at the nape of the neck.  They had no pretensions of
being animals, as younger people might have, of trying to tear eachother
apart.  They certainly were not trying to "spice things up." It was vulgar.
He was fucking her from behind, throwing her around like a rag doll. 
Finally she insisted he lie on his back, and straddled him.  He tried not
to scream, when her fists and choking hands allowed him a breath.  Outside
again with his cigarette, he would be reminded momentarily of the very fact
of respiration.  He would go home and forget.  She would follow.