Manat slept nude in her bed on summer nights. She burrowed inside her pillows, sleeping beneath thin sheets and softness within her skin.
She lay empty in dreams of some terrible fright, of pounding on her windows, entry through her door, but her body still lay delicately, as if it was utterly ready for one’s porous touch.
Her fear lay in the open window she watched as she fell asleep, and in the empty crying of her thoughts and the day.
She felt as if she wrapped in the floor and ceilings of her apartment, and even if someone did attack her at night, she would only be able to imagine the horrors of the next morning.
Her fingers nimbly remembered her routines of coffee and pencils and keyboards, and even in her most consolatory sleep, her fingers swiftly moved, as if they were drawing her fears onto the bedspread.
She came to want the attack. She came to dream of the men she met on the streets and the disgust she felt as they watched her, and the remorse that overcame her when she was overlooked.
Her skin woke up sallow and distant, as if she had just spent hours memorizing slow timetables that not even the hottest water could wash away.
As she fell asleep she watched for movements in the blinds, of a sudden predator watching her sleep, as if he wanted to catch her in her most vulnerable.
So she took her clothes off, peeled them off like the skin of a banana, as a dare, as if she was threatening this predator.
“I am your prey,” she whispered in the dark. “I am your desire and you are my fear. Come and claim me, I can run quickly.”
Instead, the man didn’t show up for nights upon nights. Instead, the leaves outside gossiped and critiqued Manat’s naked body.
“Watch for him,” she told the leaves as she gracefully declined further from her conscious. “Tell me if he comes.”
During the day while she distantly attended to the streets that brought her closer to nighttime, Manat watched for her assailant. She boldly surveyed men in the streets; daringly looked through their eyes to see if they had been the ones inspecting her as she lay sleeping. She wanted him to know that she was waiting for him, wanted to tempt him, to frighten him, and above all, seduce him.
The man that looked back into her eyes as ferociously as she looked into his stopped her path. He stood before her and compelled her to move. His height covered her body with shadow and he extended his arm. She flinched, as if right there, on the street, the man would sink her clothing off her body with a single strike of hand and force her into a slumber.
Instead, he laughed and took her hand, shaking it, telling her his name.
Charles.
She stood shocked for moments until she realized the famous saying. She would keep her enemies close, she thought as she proudly announced her name and proclaimed that she knew what he was trying to do to her.
He looked at her with what she was resigned to call feigned surprise. He invited her for coffee; told her he was intrigued. She had coffee with him, always watching him with her half moons of sultry struggle as well as with misgiving.
She refused to let him take her home, and instead wound her path through blocks of unneeded streets, so that if he didn’t already know how to find her, he couldn’t.
He waited for her at the same street the next day, giving her a kiss on the cheek when he greeted her.
“He’s planning his attack,” she told the dark light that very same night. “But I am smarter, I can run more quickly.”
He waited for her for days, and each day she came looking for him. Merely out of spite, she told herself. She could be strong in this game, with this man that was trying to take away the night.
And one day she ended up following him home. She stood at his doorstep, in front of the big door that covered her with a shadow the same way the man did when she first met him.
And she knocked, as if she was attacking him before he could attack her. She was now the intruder. But he didn’t look frightened.
When he saw he again he laughed and took her by the arm and showed her his kitchen and bathroom and office.
And suddenly, not being able to stand waiting for him to attack her, she began to peel off her clothes. It was more difficult this time, her clothes seemed harder to grasp and her fingers seemed less nimble. It was as if she was peeling off the skin of an apple.
And when he saw the apple peel on the ground, and the white smooth before him, he took it into his arms and held it.
She suddenly realized that he had planned a passive-aggressive attack that this was how he was going to consume the filament of her body and spirit.
So angry words frothed at her lips like excess saliva, but before she could utter them, these same lips pressed themselves against his skin without her consent. And with each compulsory movement she felt as though she was talking to the leaves and night came over her body, sending softness through each flesh.
And when she was done touching him, when his clothes were also peeled off, he wrapped her in between himself and the sheets that swiftly removed the day and sent her grasping into the swollen air of promise and forgotten regret.
Manat slept nude that night. As so did the lover that lay at her side.