ATTENTION WHORE: CH. 2

I’ve been working on my first novel for 5 years now. I’ve written, rewritten, edited, reworked, and overhauled it. A piece of art might never be ready, but I'm ready now to give you ATTENTION WHORE.

I’m disgusted with myself. Not because I’ve humiliated myself a million times over, harassed and reached out dozens of times to a man who wants nothing to do with me, who specifically requested my silence. Not because I infiltrated a marriage and pursued a taken man. It’s not even the murder that I may or not have committed. It’s the fact that I’ve gained over twenty pounds this year and I can’t get rid of the extra weight, no matter what I do.

My appearance sickens me. Fat sticks like globs of glue to my lower abdomen, my hips, my thighs, my upper arms. It’s finding new places to loiter where it hasn’t been allowed in years. It’s bulging under my skin and leaving horrid, unsightly stretch marks that I fear will never leave me, will scar me forever in pale little stretched lines across my pallid skin. It’s attacking me. It’s a personal attack on me every time I look down at my body or into the mirror.

The scale taunts me. Screams at me. There is a hook sourced from the base of the devilish thing, drawn out across the room and fixed to the arch of my feet. My frozen feet, my toes that are an arctic shade of blue, that are probably about to fall off. The cursed scale yanks me out of bed, pulls me into the bathroom, it has no regard for the fact that leaving my bed with its four layers of throw blankets means I will surely suffer from frostbite. It is August, 80 degrees, but still I am freezing.

I don’t want to see the number that’s about to pop up on the little digital screen of the scale, and yet I can look nowhere else except the three by two inch square that holds my already doomed fate. The screen turns a hellish crimson red, flashes, and then appears the number that I had feared, the digits that threaten to topple me over the edge of instability. 129 lbs. I knew it. I could feel those two pounds that I’d gained since yesterday. They were sitting on my belly, hips, and ass like gelatin. I could feel them shaking with every step I took whenever I made my rare exits from my bed to procure another Diet Coke, use the toilet, weigh myself, or smoke a cigarette.

I knew what I was doing when I crammed all those carbs down my throat last night. I knew that I had waited too long when I threw it up in the restaurant bathroom stall an hour later. You know better than this, I chastised myself in the mirror, disappointed by the unimpressive pile of processed pasta that I had deposited into the toilet. Right away. Always get it out right away. You fucking fool.

In my defense, I had to get significantly wasted to withstand conversation with my company for the evening. Dinner sounded like a good idea when Jared, 32, Murray Hill – Hopeless romantic. Trying to find that Forever vibe… Let me wine and dine you! had suggested it, mostly because I was starving, broke, and needed to distract myself from the severe lack of attention that I was receiving from Theo, the same condition that I suffered from for months prior, but which suddenly felt so much more poignant.

I was certain that it was a mistake as soon as I saw him standing there in a shiny pair of red Sperry Topsiders. It was already over before it started. He was asking me about my “career” and where I “summered” and so I suggested a bottle of wine rather than the glass that he had in mind and when I had quickly finished that bottle, I searched for our hipster waiter to order another. I waved him over from where he looked bored by the kitchen, picking the crust around his dangly earring. My words slurred a little when I asked for another bottle of this delicious natural wine. Jared side eyed but didn’t stop me. We hadn’t even ordered entrees. So I requested one of everything: cacio e pepe, spicy rigatoni, pesto gnocchi with roasted mushrooms, calamari and a pepperoni pizza.

“Hungry?” The douchebag asked after I’d ordered.

“Starved.” I resisted rolling my eyes. I would still need him to pay. “Tell me more about your life changing trip to Thailand.”

It was clear that he is not the man for me and probably not even the man for this evening. I could tell just from looking at him that he was barely five inches fully erect. And he would definitely be one of those guys that can’t stay hard for long. He wouldn’t be able to fuck me right. I already knew. So I ordered more food. I had to be satisfied somehow.

While he told me all about the benefits of his new Equinox membership, I was struck with this vision of him, in fifteen years, married to some bitter old bitch who hates him, barely fucks him, definitely never sucks his dick, they have two ungrateful kids and he’s gotten a really awful and painful hair transplant that his wife, her name is probably Megan, or Rebecca and Megan-Rebecca mocks it when he’s not around and she laughs at him with her friends, they all crack up about how their husbands all have these beer bellies, these fat guts that plow into them when they’re having sex in missionary (the only way they do it these days) once every blue moon because it’s their anniversary or Valentine’s Day but Megan doesn’t know what good sex is either though, she’s never even had a proper orgasm, and that’s why they work so well. That’s why they’ll choose such a pathetic path in life.

Monogamy is a delusion, a sickness, one of the only ones that I do not suffer from. Anxiety, depression, anorexia and bulimia nervosa, and maybe occasionally some severe stages of psychosis, yes. Borderline personality disorder, obsessive/compulsive behaviors, perhaps. But monogamy, no. That test came back negative. In this area, and only this one, I am sane. I am realistic. I understand the reality of the world we live in. I can see men’s true desires clear as day. Marriage is nonsensical, a legal nightmare, a litigious inevitability. You can call me crazy, you can critique every other neurotic way I’ve handled things and I might agree with you, but I won’t falter here.

Jared was still talking, this time it was about his fantasy football league, how excited he was to meet with his friends come fall when they would all meet at his and have a circle jerk or something, but I wasn’t listening because the three pounds that I gained since last week were poking me in my side and preventing me from properly enjoying my binge. The number that I saw on the scale that morning rotated through my mind in harsh, blinding flashes that stabbed my forehead, in that spot right behind my eyes and at my temples too. My hands shook and fingers rattled and knees knocked. Maybe I was just starving.

Somehow I ended up going back to Jared’s two bedroom “bachelor pad” in Murray Hill. I nearly blacked out before we even got back to his house. I don’t remember much except that one moment I was riding him while he sweated profusely underneath me and the next moment I was puking natural wine and gourmet pasta on his CB2 rug. He shoved me awake in the morning, stood over me in the harsh sunlight, looking down at me with disgust, and said, “I think you should leave.” I peeled away the pieces of vomit coated hair that had stuck to my face and shrugged, left quietly.

Since then I have lain awake in my twin bed, restless. Unable to sleep, barely able to breathe. I haven’t slept soundly since the day that I ran from Theo. Night terrors, dreams of him chasing me, he’s turned into a blood hungry snarling monster and I’m just a frail little doll with porcelain legs that crack with each frantic step I take to escape him.

It quiets my mind to look at pictures of him, scroll through the Internet’s rendition of him and remember that he’s more than just my sleep paralysis demon. To remember that he’s a star, a celebrity, a very important person who at one time also deemed me important. I shiver under my sheets, clutching my phone and staring at him on my screen, the blue light blazing my tired eyes in an otherwise pitch black room. It’s almost as if he’s there, right in front of me. I’ve seen this face so many times, in the flesh and on my screen. I can recall it even without the visual aid: the sweet slight downturn of his sad eyes, the gaunt hollows beneath his cheekbones, the sensual swell of his pursed lips.

I’m finally feeling comforted, almost dozing off, the sleeping pills I took midday are kicking in and I’ve nearly succumbed to my fantasy of him, a sweet dream where his attention solely belongs to me, when I am so rudely interrupted, infiltrated by the awful reminder of her perpetual existence in his life. A photo of Theo and his nauseatingly perfect wife pops up in the image search results. Some sickly sweet embrace, the two of them cuddling, limbs locked together on a couch somewhere, probably backstage at one of his shows. She’s always at his shows. She’s been to nearly every concert he’s ever played and I’ve been to one. Just the one, I was hardly even invited and then it went so poorly that it resulted in my immediate dismissal from his life.

I’m well aware that she is far more suited to him than me. Theo’s wife, Jacqueline is poised, well dressed, gorgeous, practically perfect. Model, actress, wife, mother to their son, Luca. Even before I had the misfortune of meeting her, I’d studied her appearance from photos all over the Internet, obsessing over every corner where her flawless face and pristine body lived on Google Images, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr. Countless stills from photo shoots over the years where she looks stunning and receives an endless stream of complimentary comments. She’s somehow gotten more beautiful, more enviable with age but still she has aged and that’s all I’ve got to cling to. She is Theo’s age, thirty-four. Eleven years separates us and makes all the difference. Eleven years made me worth fucking and made her worth betraying.

“I’ve never felt a pussy as tight as yours,” he told me once, or maybe it was several times. I can practically hear it, the sweetness of it still coating my ears.

I laughed, vindicated. “Don’t let your wife hear that,” I said.

She may have given him the miracle of life but I could give him a tight, hard body, not distorted and loosened by the woes of childbirth. She serves a purpose in his life and so did I. A man needs both: a mother and a whore. There is no way she would ever degrade herself for him the way that I did. Whereas I had no problem with it. I was more than happy to oblige. Our sex was dirty, disgusting, sickening, addicting, unmatched. Still, to this day, I have never been fucked like that. The magnificence of it twisted me, made me into an awful person, a monster who could do terrible things. I was despicable when I was with him. Nothing else mattered but pleasing him, even if it inconvenienced, injured, insulted me or anyone else. He was my whole world. There was no point to my life other than my servitude to Him.

The fact that Theo was married, legally dedicated to another woman and committed to their child and family didn’t upset me the way that perhaps it should have. Only the time and attention that his wife and child took away from me was a nuisance, a persistent disappointment. It’s not the moral damnation or the reprehensibility, it’s the fucking inconvenience. The weekends he was forced to spend away from me, the calls he would take in the other room, the millions of hits that appeared on Google when I searched for his name “+ wife”, “+child”, “+family”.

Their existence didn’t negate my importance in his life. In fact, it defined his need for me. In the end it’s for the good of the family. It’s for her benefit, for theirs, that he handle his depravity elsewhere. I learned quickly how I could make myself indispensable to him by catering to his every whim and satiating his ever growing desire. Whenever I was reminded of his devotion to that other woman, I wanted to claw away every trace of her. The tattoo on his inner arm with her name scrawled in poor penmanship was so abhorrent to me, I wanted badly to scratch it off of his skin while he slept, replace my name, let the ink sink deeper in so that no one could do the same to me. I’m not a home wrecker, I’m not the “girl who broke up their marriage” because the truth is, I had very little impact on their lives. He changed me entirely, he was a plague I could never rid myself of, and in turn, I was a thorn in his side that he removed fairly easily. Try as I might, I could do little to affect them.

I should feel totally hopeless tonight but my stomach has been emptied, I can feel it rumbling now and there is a bottle of wine on the nightstand and music playing from the house next door and I have sent another text but I really think he’s going to respond to this one so I feel this sense of, “everything’s gonna be okay.”