Are you okay?

 Asked a good friend, staring deep into the poorly-obscured bruise on the girl’s left cheek. 

“Yeah, I just…”

She paused for a moment and broke eye contact, like people do when they’re about to lie. 

“I ran into a door…”

Her friend knew that this was not the case, and the girl knew that she knew that, and they looked at each other for a brief moment in somber understanding. 

Her friend produced a smile. “I just hope you’re okay, is all.”

The girl smiled back. “No, I am! better than ever, honestly.”

And she honestly really was. Her secret boyfriend slapping her in the face last night with enough force to leave a mark was the most exciting thing to happen to her in many years. 

She had always coveted something like this, and lately her dreams had come to life. It was too good to be true. She couldn’t say all this to her genuinely concerned friend sitting across the table at the cafe, but she hoped to relay it all with her genuine smile. 

But her mind was now somewhere else. It was back in his eerily square, dimly lit studio apartment. The one she always felt a little nervous walking into because the boy who lived there was full of surprises. 

The boy absentmindedly tongues a mint green floss pick, hundreds of miles away, staring out the window, pretending he’s in a movie, thinking of her. 

His mind is with hers. Neither of them are aware. They both worry that they think about the other too much. They’re both right. 

What they do together is wrong. It’s disgusting. It’s gross. At least that’s how he describes it to her when they’re doing it. He makes her feel bad about it, because that makes her feel good. 

He knows her better than she knows her. She is forgetting everything she knows. They are fucking each other to death. 

And she can’t possibly relay all this to her unrelentingly positive and supportive friend, seated across the table, miles away, nursing a plastic cup of Milk Tea with a little too much care.

She can’t relay this to anyone, actually. And as she stares across the table into her former friend’s tired face this realization fastens itself around her neck and she becomes lightheaded. Unfortunately, she derives pleasure from it all.