“We never talk,” he said, gathering his clothes off the floor. “If my dick got soft, you wouldn’t even know me.” His defection took me by surprise. “I feel like a stud horse,” he muttered. Like that was a bad thing. That last night we lay spooned in what I thought was the afterglow. For the first time since I’d left for college, I felt my life was together. He looked like Robert Redford, his body farmhand hard, already leathered; he smelled like sunlight on the plains. I called him “Nebraska,” and when I thought of him, I pictured him with a blade of straw between his teeth the exact color of his hair. We’d meet Wednesdays and Saturdays, screw our brains out. Sometimes I’d even cook him dinner.
First published in KYSO FLASH Literary Magazine, 2015, Nominated for Best Small Fiction, 2015.
