—
AISHA TOLD me—what did she tell me, actually? What does she ever tell me? She’s what people call an “up-and-coming” filmmaker; far more accustomed to showing than telling. So what did she show me? Plenty, but not everything. We live in the same building and met in the stairwell: I’d locked myself out and was waiting for my flatmate Pierre to come home. It was going to be a long time before he came home: You see, being a key part of the socialization process for Poppy Class is only Pierre’s daytime identity. At weekends he turns into the lead singer for a band, Hear It Not, Duncan, and their gigs go on forever. Of course I couldn’t get him on the phone, and it seemed every other friend who lived on our bus route was at the gig too, so I sat outside my front door going through all the business cards I’d ever been given and dialing the mobile numbers on them, getting voicemail each time since nobody likes surprise phone calls anymore.
Aisha walked past me as I was leaving somebody a rambling voicemail message about the time I was walking past a neighbor’s front door, stuck my hand through the letterbox on a whim only to have that hand grabbed and firmly held by some unseen person on the other side of the door—that really happened, and I’ve never been so frightened or run so fast since. Aisha walked past and heard me saying this, and she smiled. She smiled. I’m a simple lad, unfortunately the kind that Aisha can’t really smile at unless she wants a boyfriend. I told her I was locked out and did all I could to inspire pity; she asked me if I had a car and asked if we could go and pick up hitchhikers and take them to their destinations. She’d always wanted to do that, she said. “Yeah, me too!” I said. We drove up and down the A534 but couldn’t persuade anybody to get into the car with us: Maybe we seemed too keen. We got back at dawn and Pierre had come home; I wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t.
—
AISHA TOOK to knocking on my door as she went past, inviting me to screenings and more, but no matter what meeting time we agree on she arrives half an hour later than that, sometimes forty-five minutes late. I’d probably wait for an hour or longer but she mustn’t ever discover that. Perseverance doesn’t seem to move her: I only ever get to seduce her up to a very specific point. I’ve tried to think this through, but I only get as far with the thinking as I do with the seduction. When entwined, our bodies build the kind of blaze in which sensation overtakes sense—it becomes possible to taste sound—that half hiccup, half sigh that tells me she likes what my tongue is doing to her. And so we each take a little more of what we like and lust swells until, until she pulls away. No penetration permitted, no matter how naked we are or how good the stroking and sliding feels, no matter how delectably wet she is when I nudge her legs open with my knee. I look into her eyes and see craving there, but there’s also what seems to be abhorrence. Then she breaks contact.
Could it be that nobody likes a man without ambition and everything is withheld from him until he changes his ways? Is A saving herself for some fictional character, Willow Rosenberg or fucking floppy-haired Theodore Lawrence or someone like that? Is there somebody else, somebody nonfictional? Is she doing this to make me tell her in words that I want her? I don’t like saying that kind of thing. So for now, if she doesn’t want to then I can’t. This sounds completely obvious but I’ve heard stories, from men, from women, that demonstrate that that’s not how it is for others. Consent is a downward motion, I think—a leap or a fall—and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.
—
PIERRE SAYS it sounds like Aisha “just doesn’t want dick.”
“So she prefers pussy?”
“Perhaps, but the only thing that concerns you in particular is that she doesn’t want dick. I just mean . . . OK, so there’s some guy, and he’s absolutely desperate to get inside you. Maybe it’s a bit off-putting?”