Stone Blind Love

In Which Prof. J Presents
A Piece of Original FictionIllustration by
Master Matt
After, lying in bed, this is what he says. She doesn’t interrupt him, content to let her head rest on his chest and wallow in the shivers that are still running through her. Her legs wrap around one of his. Her breasts stick to him, remnants of sweat from this muggy night clinging to their skin. This is what he says.
“Nights when I stayed at Katherine’s place, this was back in college, in undergrad, weekend nights when I was at her place, I remember the music that would drift into her room. You have to understand where she lived. Her dorm was nice, more an apartment than a dorm. She had the simplest balcony that overlooked downtown. She used to cut my hair on that balcony. We would drink warm tequila and watch the sun over downtown and she would cut my hair. I can’t hear scissors click anymore without feeling the heat of tequila or that bitter sweetness you get from limes. Something about going to visit her, something about that place, it was comforting. And it wasn’t just that she was there, it wasn’t that whenever I walked in the door she was waiting with candles and wine and that look she used to get on her face right before we fucked, this look that was utterly selfish yet made you want to devour her anyway. It was the place itself. I don’t know, some places don’t need people in them to feel like home.
“But what really made it wonderful was the music. There was a bar across the street. You could throw something from the balcony and hit it, it was that close. And you have to remember, I only went to visit her on the weekends. This was back during school. We could only see each other every other week at the most. Jesus, Marie, do you remember what it was like back then? Twenty and all you can think about is where the next one is coming from and how soon will it get here. You didn’t care about anything else. So, those weekends, we would rarely leave the apartment. We might go walking during the day or something. And there were shops across the river, across the walking bridge we might stumble into. But that was rare. Once we were in that place, in that bedroom, we never left.
“And we’d be lying there on a Saturday night, late on a Saturday night, lying in that too-small bed that all dorms have, and this music would come drifting through the cinderblock walls. More bass than anything, though when the bar door opened, you could hear the whole song clear as if it were playing on Katherine’s tiny stereo. But it was never too loud that it kept you from falling asleep. It was closer to a heartbeat than anything else. And we would lie there and I can remember feeling Katherine fade away, actually fade, as she fell asleep. God, she could go on forever, but when she finally wore down, when she was finally done, she crashed hard. And I can remember lying there playing with her hair, something to this day I can never get enough of, I don’t know why, and feeling her fade and feeling the pulse of the bass matching the throb of our bodies and thinking I could fall asleep like this every night. Every night, I could fall asleep just like this.
“Here, though, this place, it’s so quiet. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I love staying here, sometimes you miss the quiet. But sometimes I miss that bar and the way it would send us, send me off to sleep.
“The last time I stayed at her place, before she came home for the summer and began to hate me because I wasn’t Grant, the boy she had fallen in love with those last weeks of the semester, we stayed in the apartment all day. We never left. We opened our first bottle of wine at noon. We never put on clothes. We took four showers together. That night, we tried to fuck once more before sleep was too strong a force to ignore. I remember watching her move, watching her hips, and when she was done, when that sound that was both laughter and desperation had boiled up from inside her once again, I noticed the silence. There was no bass, no high notes escaping through open doors. When I asked her about it, she told me the bar had closed three weeks earlier. They were going to tear it down. The noise when they did that, she said, would be deafening.
“I’m not saying I don’t like how quiet your place is. I’m not saying that all.”
He feels Marie nod her head, feels her rub herself against his chest. She takes his hand that had been playing with her hair and places it on her breast. This way, he won’t notice what she has done.


When they go shopping on Saturday, Marie pulls her blonde hair back into a ponytail. She does this because it is easy and maybe, for the first time in a while, she is trying not to impress anyone. She still wears a bra so she wonders if that is true. It is warm outside, a pleasant August afternoon, and David is wearing sandals and jeans and as they wander from shop to shop she watches the way the wind plays with his hair.
Inside one store, she finds him flipping through old albums. His fingers sort through them like they do through her sometimes, steady and deliberate. She first fell in love with him when they held hands. He had hands like her grandfather who had died some years ago, the first death she had truly ever known. They were lean hands with long fingers, all sinew and calluses. She liked it when he held her face in those hands.
She shows him a dress she found in the back. Some would call this a hippie store because it sells everything. There are frayed dresses, candles, used albums. There is a small shelf of books by authors few have heard of. In the back are greeting cards, some dirty, some virginal. The shop smells of incense. When she holds the dress up for him to see, she thinks she can see the waves of incense pouring from it. She imagines them washing over her body.
David says he doesn’t care for the dress, that it would erase her figure. David says he loves her figure. As she puts the dress back she thinks about this. She wonders if by figure he means tits and what this says about him. She wonders what this says about her. On the way out of the store, David shows her a book he has found. He says he has never seen it in print. He doesn’t buy it, and when they walk out of the door, she can still smell the incense in his hair.
When they get home, he asks if she wants to fuck in the shower.


“I don’t want to visit your parents this weekend,” she says over coffee one Wednesday morning.
David is scraping carbon from his toast. He is wearing only his boxers and his legs look skinnier this morning than she ever remembers them looking.
“I never said we had to go,” he says.
“I’m just so tired,” she says. “I could use a weekend of not doing anything.” She counts the number of times he scraps his bread. Previously, his record was twenty-seven, but this morning things are different.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll call them this afternoon.”
“It’s not that I don’t like your parents,” she says, and she knows she is about to start rambling, about to start making excuses. Meanwhile, he is on thirty-one and still going strong. She doesn’t know what this means. “I love your parents,” she says. “There’s been so much happening lately.”
When he sits down, he has reached forty-two. She thinks the bread will fall apart when he puts it in his mouth. He tells her not to worry about this weekend. He nibbles at the bread. Somehow, after all he has put it through, it stays whole.


In bed that night, when she is on top of him, she leans back suddenly. “Put your hands on me,” she says. David reaches up and cups her breasts and she moans. David remembers a time when all she said during sex was “I love you” or something close to that. He doesn’t know which one he likes better. When she cries out a moment later, his hands drop to his side.


When she met David he was fresh from his first divorce. She met him at a club where she had gone with three girls from work—she hesitated to call them friends—to see this other girl and her guitar. The music had been terrible until the last song, when the girl, accompanying herself on piano this time, sang “Wild Horses.” It was a small club and Marie had been well on her way to very drunk, but it was the first time she had ever experienced anything like that moment. The entire bar got silent instantly and this girl’s voice bounced across the room, the piano throbbing beneath it. And when she reached the final chorus, she stopped playing altogether, and Marie wondered if she was the only one holding her breath as the notes seemed to grow longer and more powerful with each passing word.
Afterwards, at the bar with the three girls, David had come up beside her to order a drink. She was starting to sober then, having stopped drinking because she suddenly wanted to remember that night rather than lose it, like she had with many before, in the haze of a hungover morning.
“I thought I could go my whole life without hearing another version of that song and be just fine,” he said.
At first, she wasn’t sure he was talking to her, but when she turned in his direction he was smiling. “I always thought,” he said, “if you’ve heard one version, you’ve heard them all.”
“I only know the one version,” she said. “And I never liked it that much. I never understood what he was saying.”
“I’m not too sure he did either,” David said, but she didn’t know that was his name, not until a moment later when he leaned in close and whispered it to her like it was a secret no one else should know. The next morning, when she woke up beside him, she realized that was when she simply stopped trying and gave in.


Her mother taught her needlepoint and on some rainy Sundays she still finds comfort in pulling the thread and the patterns from the sowing bag she keeps under her bed. David has opened a bottle of wine and he is on the balcony sheltered in headphones, an empty glass beside him. She sips from her glass and reminds herself how much she loves moments like these, times when the warmth of the alcohol and the warmth of David and the warmth of this moment can overcome the cold and wet of outside. She is working on the border of a farmhouse and the needle pulls red through the fabric like a growing cut.
After a while David comes back inside and sits down beside her. He refills both his glass and hers and she notices the red of the wine is close to the red of the fabric. David stays quiet and watches her and she doesn’t mind. Likes it even. Rarely does he simply watch her and stay silent. He always wants to comment on what she is doing, and at first, she found this lovely and attentive, everything past boyfriends had not been. Over time though, like so many things about love, this habit became tiresome and there were moments when she had to quiet him with a kiss or a touch or rub up against him in some way. She wonders how many times in her life she has had sex with the express goal of simply silencing her partner.
When it is time to change threads, she takes David’s left hand in hers. “I want to show you something my grandmother used to do,” she says. David leans his face into her neck and kisses her in the spot just below the ear. She holds his hand palm side up and tells him to spread his fingers.
She places the tip of the needle in the center of his palm, the point barely touching. Slowly, she moves it up the length of his pinky finger and then back down to the palm’s center. She lets the point tease the skin, never pressing too hard, never moving too quickly. Now she moves up the ring finger and back down; now up the middle finger. She continues this movement until she is coming down the thumb. When she reaches the hand’s center this time, she moves the needle in small circles before pulling it up like a rocket lifting from the ground.
“My grandmother used to call that ‘sowing mittens.’ Now your hand is protected from the cold,” she says.
“That felt different,” David says. He has not moved his fingers. They remain splayed. “I can’t describe how. Just different.”
“Good different?” she asks.
He takes a sip of his wine and kisses her at the spot her hair meets her shoulders. “With you, different is always good,” he says. He disappears into the kitchen and she slides blue thread through the needle’s eye, as it is time to work on the traces of heaven above her fledgling farmhouse.


Marie is on the phone with her mother who is telling Marie about the couple that just left her church. Marie is trying to pay attention, she always tries when her mother calls, but her thoughts keep drifting. She knows her mother will notice if she is not paying attention. She makes it a point to agree with everything her mother says.
When David walks into the living room, he asks who she is talking to. She mouths the word mom and tries to smile. David doesn’t just try but actually smiles. He drops to the ground and begins to crawl towards her. She draws her legs up onto the couch and watches him, still trying to agree with her mother. When he reaches her, he runs his mouth up her leg, stopping at the second skin of her underwear. She tries to kick him away, mouthing for him to stop. When he pushes her underwear to the side and she feels his breath, she tells her mom she will have to call her back, that something is burning in the oven. She promises to call in an hour, then two, then three.


There is a coffee shop just north of Mendenhall that she likes to visit by herself. She’s taken David there before, she’s taken him everywhere, but mostly this is her place. She feels everyone needs a place they don’t share with others. She doesn’t see this as selfish. It is a key to survival. She takes a book or papers from class to grade or something else to occupy her eyes. She buys the smallest cup they have but always goes back for at least two or three refills. On warmer days she sits outside, close to the street, where she can watch the foot traffic and the students walk by. When it is cold or rains, she tries to sit near the windows. It is warm today, warmer than she can remember it being this late in October, and so she sits outside with her coffee and research papers from her sophomore English class. She lets the warm breeze play with her hair.
Sometimes she imagines David dropping by unexpectedly. He says he wanted to surprise her and spend time with her that he normally wouldn’t. She imagines she would be excited about this, even though it would be infringing on her alone time. But the gesture would mean that much and she knows she would let it go. Sometimes she imagines him walking by, his head down as usual, and passing her without noticing she was there. She doesn’t know which fantasy she finds more pleasing.
She is through two cups of coffee and five horrid papers when a young couple sits down at the table beside her. They could be freshman or seniors, she can’t tell, she can never tell nowadays, everyone looks so mature, and she thinks about the switch when one goes from wanting to look old to wanting to look young again. The boy and girl each have their own drink and they are sharing a piece of cake. The girl wipes her mouth after every bite, looking down as she does it. The boy keeps his hand on her leg beneath the table.
“So what do you want to do tonight?” the girl asks, and Marie is fully aware now that she is staring, that she is lost in these strangers’ conversation.
“Weren’t you talking about dinner with Travis and Lisa?”
“Yes, but that was earlier in the week. I didn’t know if you wanted to do something else.”
The boy reaches up and touches the girl’s lips. Again, her eyes move down. “I could think of something else to do,” he says and smiles. Marie is thinking of the different ways the girl could react, but is taken aback when she laughs, a quiet, confident laugh that reminds Marie of the girls that were having sex in high school and actually enjoying it.
“I don’t know if I should be flattered or scared that all you want to do is fuck me,” the girl says, and Marie suddenly wants to tell this girl everything she knows, everything she has learned. She wants to tell this girl she should be scared, horrified even, but instead, she only stares a moment longer until the boy turns and makes eye contact and Marie looks down at the papers before her.
She is there a few more minutes before the young couple gathers their bags. As they start to walk away, the girl leans in and kisses the boy, kisses him hard enough that he almost loses his balance. Marie runs her hands through her hair, a sudden rush of heat running through her, the same heat that comes after that first touch by a new boyfriend. This girl is what men want, she thinks. This girl.


For Christmas, Marie gives David the book he had shown her many afternoons ago. He pulls it from the box and flips through the pages, concentrating for a moment on the title page where she has written an inscription. The scent of the store fills the room. “That smell,” he says, “it’s in the paper. You can never get that out. It’ll stay with the paper forever.”
“That’s a good thing, yes?” she asks. She loves the look on his face, he looks fifteen again, and she likes knowing she has brought such joy.
“Of course,” he says, taking one last sniff of the pages before putting the book aside. He never comments on her inscription and when he falls asleep that night, she disappears into the living room and quietly rips the page out.


David and Marie go to a wedding three weeks after Christmas. It is an old friend of his, one he has known longer than anyone else. He promises Marie he never slept with the girl, whose name is Kelsie, and she thinks she believes him. He has given her no reason not to. Because it is still cold outside, Marie wears a floor length black dress with a plunging neckline that she knows is too sexy for a wedding. David insists she likes it when people stare. She insists she does not.
During the ceremony, David keeps his hand on her knee. He squeezes when Kelsie says, “I do,” and squeezes harder when Kelsie’s new husband repeats the phrase. Marie tries to remember the exact words David used when he told her about Kelsie, but every time he squeezes her knee, the words become harder to hear.
After, at the reception, she drinks beer from the bottle. David can not remember the last time he saw her drink beer from the bottle, and he suddenly feels weaker for drinking red wine. She finishes two bottles before he has even drained his glass.
“We’re not in a hurry to leave, are we?” he asks.
“No, why?”
“Because you are doing some serious work when it comes to that beer.”
“Kelsie’s had three already, by my count.”
“All Kelsie has to do is hop in a limo and go fuck her husband all night. You don’t need to be sober to do that.”
“She strikes me as the type that never fucks sober,” she says, and loves the way the words sound coming out of her mouth. Sharp, caustic, fresh.
“You shouldn’t say that,” he says.
“I need another beer,” she says, “and then I want to dance and meet your friends.”
The newlyweds’ first dance is to “Stand By Me,” and before the song is over, all of the groomsmen and bridesmaids are singing along. It feels intrusive and joyous all at once, and Marie hopes her first dance will be just like this. She and David don’t have a song, at least not one they call “their song,” and she thinks this is a weak spot in their relationship.
While David is away to get another glass of wine, she mentions this weakness to a girl sitting beside her. The girl is about Marie’s age and wearing a red strapless dress that does little to hide the fact that she is all bones and right angles. “Me and my last boyfriend never had a song either,” the girl says. “Unless you count ‘Do Me, Baby’ by Prince, which he played every single time he wanted to have sex.”
“David likes Al Green,” Marie says.
“I had one back in college that liked jazz, which was like making love in the middle of a choppy ocean. No rhythm at all. There was another that insisted on no music whatsoever.”
“Why was that?”
“He said he liked the sound of us. I dated him for almost two years.” She smiles at the memory and crosses her legs. A hand goes to her hair and Marie finds herself thinking of the girl in the coffee shop.
“It’s amazing what gets us sometimes,” Marie says.
“What got you?”
“He whispered his name.”
“And which one is he, your Al Green loving, name whisperer.”
Marie points to David who is talking with the groom, a hulk of a man that used to play soccer before blowing out his knee his last season in college. Kelsie had hurt her knee running track and they met in rehab. “That one there,” Marie says.
“Quite cute.”
“You want him?”
“Things bad?”
Marie taps her empty beer bottle against the table. “Five beers.”
“That bad?”
“He used to sleep with Kelsie.”
The girl starts to laugh before leaning in closer. She whispers, “Honey, they all did. Don’t love him any less for it.”
"But what if he still wants to sleep with her?”
The girl shrugs her shoulders. “Certain people always chase us. We hate them or never want to be with them again, at least, not really, but they are also the ones we never stop talking about. Anytime we tell a story about love or to illustrate a point about emotional stuff, we use their name. It’s the way it works. Does he use Kelsie’s name a lot.”
“No, he uses another. That’s what worries me.” She sees David motioning for her to come over, he has finally cornered Kelsie and has her all to herself. Marie smiles at the girl at the table and walks away. She wonders if men watch her as she walks across the room. She hopes they do. She hopes David notices.


On the car ride home Marie says, “I feel like the other woman around her.”
David’s eyes stay forward. “What makes you say that?”
“You two have a history, something I’m not a part of.”
“Marie, I told you nothing…”
“No, not that, I don’t mean that,” she lies. “You’ve known her for so long.”
“You’re not the other woman. You’ve been many things, but never that.”
“What have I been?”
“The woman I wanted but couldn’t have; the woman I wanted but wouldn’t have me; the woman who finally let her guard down long enough to see what she really wanted.”
She thinks about how after they slept together that first night, she ran. She saw other people, she put him off, she kept him in the picture but at arms length. Some of it she did intentionally. Sometimes you need a backup plan. Some of it was unintentional, maybe most of it. She hopes most of it. She stays silent for a few minutes after he has spoken before asking, “What did I really want?”
“Someone that kissed you and meant it,” he says.
As they turn into her apartment complex, she thinks, no, that’s not what I wanted. That’s not what I wanted at all.


On the coldest night of the year David wants to go for a walk. The streets are free from the snow that fell days ago, and so they throw on heavy coats and gloves until their natural shapes are all but erased. Marie wears a scarf that her mother knitted for her when she was a child. David doesn’t try to hold her hand.
When they are almost a block from home, having walked in silence most of the way, too cold to talk, too cold to even try to communicate, David tells her about winters with Katherine. He tells her how there was no warmer place than her dorm, how he remembers lying in her bed watching football while she sat on the floor working on an art project. How they sipped hot chocolate and did their own thing. “It was so dark outside,” he says, “and not just normal darkness, but that winter darkness. And she had on every light in the dorm. She used to pin back her hair when she worked and I loved the way light would dance off the knitting needles she used to hold her hair still. The room was so warm and so peaceful. I never wanted to leave. Getting into a cold car and driving away from someone you love has to be the hardest thing in the world.”
By the time he has finished the story, they are back home. Marie goes into the kitchen to make coffee while David hangs up their coats. When she walks into the living room with their drinks, she says, “I wish you didn’t talk about her so much.”
David takes his cup from her and sips. Then he says, “I wish I didn’t either.”


“What’s your favorite thing about me?” Marie asks in bed one night.
“My favorite thing?”
“Yes, the thing about me you would miss the most if I were gone.”
She feels him sit up beneath her, craning his head towards her. “If you were gone?”
“Theoretically.”
This settles him. “Okay, theoretically.” He is quiet for a minute before saying, “Your back.”
She expected many answers, several of which were parts of her body, but none being her back. “My back?” she says.
“I think a woman’s back is the sexiest thing there is. Something about the way the muscles flow together. It’s like running water back there. Smooth and fluid and taunt all at once. Why do you think I ask you to wear tank tops so much? No, easily the sexiest thing about women are their backs.”
He lets out a small sigh as if this decides it.
“I didn’t ask you about all women, I asked you about me,” Marie says slowly, her voice barely rising.
David is already drifting. He doesn’t answer. She thinks he never heard.


She has been with David for one year and two months when she decides she is no longer in love with him. When she decides she may have never been in love with him. She figures this out at her coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon in February, the warmest day so far, though something about the heat feels false, when a man of about thirty asks to join her. He is a professor at the same school at which she teaches, though she has never had occasion to talk to him. He wears his hair longer than David and smells of something sweet and strong. His hands look so lean and loose she imagines they have never been made into fists.
“You’re here often,” he says. “I’m sure the owners love that about you.”
“You’ve been following me then?”
“Are you the type who is flattered when men follow you?”
“It takes more than that,” she says, and for the first time during the conversation, she smiles. “Do you have a habit of walking up to other professors and hitting on them?”
His laugh is quiet, more exhale than anything else. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“It’s what all men do,” she says, surprised at her confidence. “They hit on anything sitting by itself. They can’t help it. They always feel the need to rescue us.” She thinks about her fantasy, the one where David shows up unexpectedly and has coffee with her. The one where he walks by and never notices. Before, she was not sure which one intrigued her most. Now, she thinks she knows. Under the table, she uncrosses and then crosses her legs.
“I’m not all men,” he says.
“You can do better than that.”
“I’m not all men,” he repeats. “My name’s Stephen.” He does not whisper it.


Years later, she won’t remember the actual fight she and David had when she told him they were finished. She won’t remember the reasons she gave him or the excuses he made. She won’t remember that he started crying, the first time she had ever seen him do that, and that he told her he had started looking at rings only a week ago. What she will remember is the moment at the car, when the last of her clothes had gone into the trunk and David had stopped his crying, stopped his screaming, stopped everything but the simple motion of breathing in and then breathing out.
“It won’t feel right sleeping without you beside me,” he says.
“What will be the hardest part?”
“It will be too quiet,” he says. “And too cold.”
She nods as if this makes sense and then she slips into the car, shutting the door behind her. The window is down and David leans inside as she fastens her seatbelt. “What was the worse thing I ever did to you? The one thing making you leave more than anything, what was it?”
She didn’t have an answer then and so she gently put her foot on the gas and watched David grow smaller in the rearview mirror, the wind playing with his hair for a long time before he turned around, and she forgot him, utterly and forever.