Author's note: I started reading Female Loneliness Epidemic by Danielle Chelosky and got somewhat excited and wrote this.
On any given night, what I’m looking for is a girl who self-identifies as a socialist. If she calls herself a Marxist then she reads. If she calls herself an anarchist then she either reads or she’s illiterate. If she calls herself a communist then she’ll try to sell me her newspaper before we even make it to the bedroom.
The socialist I’m looking for has books, has started books, but hasn’t read any books. She’s also tall, trans, and isn’t weird about fucking me. I talk to Laura for a few minutes, having to crane up to see her smile, bite my lip at the light, patchy stubble which laser treatment will eventually blast away. She says the magic word and we’re out of the dyke bar, on our way back to hers.
I want the girls I take home to feel almost inadequate, just on the edge. Valerie kept apologising, ambiently saying sorry as we rode the subway. It was all I could do not to grind against her right there, not to moan as she apologised again putting her key in her door.
If she’s got Capital on the shelf, I always comment on volume three.
“Historicising aside,” I said to Janie, pointing at the book amidst the others beside her bed, “I thought the conception of fictitious capital really pre-empts the shit we’re going through now.”
“Oh, I haven’t actually read that yet,” she replied.
I hadn’t either. I saw the words “fictitious capital” somewhere and thought the comment sounded legitimate. Janie squirmed as she changed the subject, but I just kept bringing it back to her books: a dozen titles that every left-leaning lesbian has heard of, all their spines perfectly uncreased.
Sometimes I’ll go further if I’m feeling really hot:
“Nice edition,” I said as I grabbed Carla’s copy of volume one. “The section on primitive accumulation is bullshit though, don’t you think?”
“You know,” she laughed, “I haven’t actually finished it.”
I flipped through the pages. There was no bookmark, no dog-ears. I smiled with one half of my face, which she drenched with cum half an hour later.
That’s what it’s all about, really. These girls – not quite comfortable enough in themselves to really say they’re women – they want to be enough. My cisness is a validation of their lesbianism which is a validation of their gender which is a kind of substitute for personhood, I think. At least, that’s the vibe I get when I’m really negging them. I want a girl who will fuck me like a man. I want a girl who has the books but doesn’t read them, and will put her cock inside me about it to make up for how empty and distracted it makes her: all this dysphoria, all this transphobia. Susie had cinema tickets sticking out of half the books on her mantle, all within the first third of the page-count. In her room were four empty boxes of tissues, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have the time.
Amy choked me hard enough that it bruised just to shut up my recommendations for what she should get to after finishing the manifesto. I’ve never planned to even start and she was halfway through, but honestly who needs more than one sitting for that. I told Saoirse that Engels wrote the whole thing when she answered my question about what Marx she had read. I don’t know if that’s true and I guess she didn’t know either. She drove my face so far into the pillows that I almost passed out, only conscious because she was hitting it so deep from behind. Laura – a different Laura: shorter-but-still-tall Laura – was in tears as she said she still hadn’t finished the graphic adaptation. It was the second time I had come over and we’d worked up enough rapport that I knew I could touch her, feel her getting hard as I caressed her shaking body.
I break it off with Laura – the taller Laura – when she asks to come back to mine. Or, it’s not when she asks the first time but when she gets insistent about it. I can’t handle that. She has such pretty eyes, swirls of cold colours which would gleam as I asked, “Have you started anything new yet?” every time I came over. I don’t want to see them dart around my room, screwing up at the barren expanse I call home.