I didn’t do anything

She wriggles from my delicate grip, delicate because I know she will bruise and I can’t trust what is going to be said about those four blue fingerprints on her arm tomorrow, to her friends, to the people she trusts more than yours truly. She burns through the night like a comet with a tail that sounds like the echo of platform heels down cold and wet alleyways. I chase her, imploring to her that I didn’t do anything.

And I am certain that I didn’t…somewhere between the froth of a fourth beer and the sting of a sixth shot I dropped a memory or two, and maybe now is too late to go back to the bar and find them…but still, I’m certain that I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. Because me, I wouldn’t do anything…not even femme fatale herself could reel me in with my own rod. This is a man in control. This is a man.

But there were many men. Vague memories of Lacoste polo shirts and white singlets, the stale musk of sad desires, a frenetic blur of men priming themselves in their own feedback circles. But still, those men, they were not me. How could they be. I abandoned that gig. Well, abandoned… let’s say I chose not to renew my membership at the infernal masturbatory brotherhood of women hunters. And I gave that up for her, and now I suffer this. She is angry. And I didn’t do anything.

Oh, but wait one moment. A memory, triggered by a voice that sounds something like I have heard in a place not far from here. In a bar. A crowded bar. A voice that if it was followed, it would lead me lower than the tacky pop music, brushing just alongside her sparkling left earring and to a pair of lips nested within a beard, and these lips are whispering something to her, and the hands that were once hovering tentatively over the small of her back have now landed and she is smiling and I think she has got this but her smile is plastic and inside she is drowning and I am watching her drown, watching alongside his friends, sharing a bucket of popcorn with the brotherhood, waiting for something to happen, waiting for the sign that she has already given me by letting me be the only one in the world to place my hands where his now rest.

And so into the night I follow her, into the black that she is running to for comfort and safety because she now knows she won’t find it from me, and I can’t help but laugh at myself, at how pathetic it is for a man to be so ignorant that he would bellow at the top of the lungs his own indiscretion and expect that it would save him. It is true. I didn’t do anything.