By Jack Stratton

She promised not to smoke if I just came over. When I got there, she stank of mouthwash, and she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

You could always tell the state of Amanda’s life by the state of her lips. As she moved in to kiss my cheek, I saw that those absurdly plump lips were bitten, chapped, and raw.

“I broke up with him,” she said, walking to the window as I sat on the squeaky futon.

“Him” being Jimmy, who was an asshole. But he was tall and crooked and supposedly some fascinatingly morbid musician. I thought his band sucked. I shrugged and asked if she was okay. She didn’t answer.

Most of the furniture was his, though the lease was in her name. A week before, when she threw him out, he paid some friends in cheap beer to move his stuff to his mother’s place in Jersey.

What was left was a bare but lived in New York apartment. A hundred layers of white paint, cracked and peeling on the walls, softening the corners, blocking outlets, misshaping moldings. A radiator that spit and banged all winter. And looking as lonely and as miserable as she did, a futon sat sadly on the scratched hardwood floor. Against the wall were an array of unopened boxes from Ikea.

She had done the only reasonable thing to do after breaking up with a tall guitarist with beautiful hair; she bought a Malm and an Oddvald.

She didn’t turn to watch me as I took inventory of her life. She just stared out at the cloudy evening sky, her silhouette haunting. A cardigan, open, dangled precariously from her shoulders. Under that were a cut-off white t-shirt with some faded logo of a band I never heard of, a pair of too large boxer shorts, and tube socks that were pulled up to her mid-calf. They were white topped with three lines of red, completing her mourning attire.

I ached for her silhouette. Her thin waist, little tits, wonderfully thick thighs, and a round ass. She seemed to have a love-hate relationship with her hips and thighs. She often hid them under skirts or tried to tame them under jeans. But at that moment, her body was just barely hidden by a few thin threadbare scraps of cotton, and it was killing me.

She called me whenever she broke up with somebody. I mean, we were friends, we hung out all the time, but always at a bar or a show or at other people’s apartments. We had some unspoken rule that said we couldn’t be trusted alone together.

This was partly because I was obsessed with her lips. She knew it. She teased me about it, but it was always there.

“Make me tea and take care of me?” she asked the window.

I should have. My heart was suddenly racing as I eyed her, and my stomach tightened with vague panicky feelings. The clever bits of my head told my body that I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a good person, that instead of helping her, I just wanted her. I wanted her lips and her thick thighs. I wanted her for all the reasons we were friends and for all the reasons we didn’t trust ourselves to be alone.

I walked over to the window and stood behind her. I looked out with her at the rooftops and water towers.

Her hair was shorter than I had seen it in years. Dirty and messy and coming down parallel to the bottoms of her earlobes. Wild strands and split ends glowed like a halo in what little sunlight found its way in through the clouds.

I slipped my arms around her, and she put her arms on top of mine and sighed into me.

“You’re not going to make me tea?” she asked softly.

“I can. I should,” I whispered into her neck.

I pulled away, towards the kitchen, but she held on tight to my arms.