Low Expectations by Elizabeth Aaron Page B

bed, still sleep-rumpled, smelling of night sweats and duvet. There’s nothing like the whiff of light perspiration on someone you really fancy.
    â€˜Just gonna nip to the toilet first,’ I say, suddenly aware that while a man can look rugged and effortlessly hot in the morning, my streaked makeup and puffy cheeks bear more than a passing resemblance to one of Lindsay Lohan’s mugshots.
    I repair my face and hair as much as is possible with the limited repertoire of products in Beardy’s bathroom. It is a depressing struggle which leaves me seriously consideringhaving my patchy eyebrows tattooed into uniformity with semi-permanent makeup. I slink back into his room and pray for low lighting.
    â€˜Come here, you.’ Beardy wraps an arm around me as I slide under the blanket. I usually love having a lie-in the arms of a warm man, but after my conversation with my mother I feel restless.
    I toy with launching into a confessional about my family situation to explain my weird mood, but decide it’s too early into our – whatever this is – to have a deep and meaningful conversation. I can see how it would pan out. I would feel uncomfortable and over-share, he would pretend to be sympathetic and try to console me with sex, which would annoy me because why can’t men understand that sometimes you just want to be listened to for ten minutes without having a penis inside you? I would get upset and reject him sexually, neither of us would get what we wanted from the situation and we would both end up frustrated. I decide to stick to mysterious silence. He probably hasn’t even noticed I’m upset.
    I stare up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks and wondering when I can reasonably get up and leave. The artificial closeness from the night before has dissipated, leaving me with a dull hangover and a desire to be free of the entwining limbs and demands of the body next to me. He pulls me closer, running his hands over my breasts, stranding me somewhere between desire and irritation.
    I wonder what it is I want from him, if anything. Most of the relationships I’ve had have been less a matter of falling in love with a person and more a slow, inexorable movement towards exclusivity based on the passage of time and a lack of other contenders. They have left me feeling not secure, but trapped.
    I hate to say it, but the exceptions have been the bad boys. With He Who Shall Not Be Named (oh, fine – Anthony), I felt relentlessly insecure but wild enough to forfeit my freedom. He led me to believe a litany of lies so absurd that, really, he deserved credit for his creativity. My personal favourite was his fervent contention that the hickeys on his neck were the result of falling onto gravel. After we broke up, the full extent of his psychopathic tendencies was revealed. In a misguided attempt to guilt-trip me into speaking to him, he pretended he had committed GBH and was going to prison. Why he thought this would garner my sympathies is still a mystery.
    Before that, of course, there was my first love Alexi. His French accent and spaniel eyes were so soulful that I abandoned all rational thought completely, only to be left behind when he stole my money and took the flight to Colombia without me. People often remark that love is blind, but far more worrying is its ability to make you deaf and dumb.
    Clearly, the lesson here is that I should avoid men whose names start with ‘A’.
    â€˜I’m playing a gig tonight with the boys … wanna come?’ Beardy’s low voice draws me out of my brooding.
    â€˜Uh, yeah, I guess so … I’m not sure. I should really get some work done. Where are you playing?’
    â€˜The Bomb Shelter, at ten. We’re shooting a new video for a single this week you know, it’s gonna be great, we have a sort of apocalypse zombie from outer space theme but sort of with a David Lynch vibe. It’s really low budget, just us in it but