1001 Nights Cast

She prided herself on being smooth, or maybe not so much prided as just simply believed that she was…But this week had been a series of jarring encounters where she had inflicted harm on others, albeit unintentionally. It was as though there was an unquiet in the subconscious which needed to be felt. Of course she understood that there was conflict within herself, but she had long learned to enjoy conflict, to delight in anomaly, to actively create tensions, juxtapositions, hybrid arrangements—that was expression itself, affection, language. These impulsive flows were not to be mastered, controlled or even too closely observed…they were to be felt, lived, acknowledged…and if one can do that she hoped…maybe a sense of things could emerge, maybe the dots could be connected after all.

Tuesday night. She was at her most predatory. Drunk and wanting sex, he was just seventeen, so very young and so very much younger than she…but it was what she wanted right then, that intense combination of vulnerability and drive which is unique to boys of that age and she was having a great fuck—his pierced nipples and his sharp facial features sending electric currents through her. At one point she was on top of him and she suddenly slapped him hard across the face—she had never done that to anyone before, sober or drunk, in or out of sex and it shocked her. Perhaps this time she had just gone too far…but then later she looked back and was grateful for it, she hoped that she had communicated to him the desperation she sometimes felt clawing at her own insides and hoping even begging that someone could break in.

Wednesday. It was the second time they’d met and neither encounter had been one on one but she liked this woman and she wanted this woman to like her. They were seated next to each around a table and she was wearing heels, not very high heals but heels—everyone else had far more casual shoes on, except for the note-taker. She went to get up out of her seat and trod on this woman’s foot in the process. Apologies of course and it wasn’t serious but she knew exactly how it felt to be trodden on and it depressed the hell out of her—that deep churn inside like her gut was groaning and rolling its eyes skyward.

Thursday. Her mind had trawled through their conversations, and from this obsessive replay she came to the conclusion that 1. he loved his wife very much and 2. he needed to do this thing with her. This thing which would be sex if sex were a thing in and of itself—and not an event, a conjuring trick, a performance…And she was cool with this situation—in fact it suited her. But when gazing at him as he lay on his back in his post-orgasm sleep, she noticed a hickey on his neck. She couldn’t remember the last time she had given anyone a hickey and she couldn’t believe how sensitive his skin must be because she had been deliberately gentle with this man. And what would he tell his wife who was sure to notice and it was eating her up but it was none of her business. It was not like they could reassure each other.

What a week, these things and everything else. When flying home on Saturday, she asked to be seated away from her colleague—this person was seriously annoying her. And she thought about whether this was also a collision, this wedge of silence which had welled up between them. But it didn’t seem to connect in that way. This was just a survival strategy and a deliberate message—she didn’t mind being rude or offending when she chose to. It was just these other accidental collisions that were bothering her, when the last thing she wanted to do was inflict harm.