Chemical Love

The first time she comes in the bathtub, it sounds less like pleasure and more like she’s drowning the ghost of me between her thighs.

The steam smells like artificial peach and burning. Her breath hitching, wet porcelain slaps, candle wax dripping down the rim like sweat from a guilty priest. One hand inside her, the other gripping the tile like she’s afraid of drowning in a tub three inches deep.

She lights the lavender-scented candle with a match instead of a lighter. Says she likes the smell. Sulfur and nostalgia.

She cries after. Small, ragged sobs.

The next morning, she cooks eggs. No eye contact. No toast. Knife scrapes the plate like she’s cutting into bone. She doesn’t ask why she dreamt of me. Doesn’t ask why she woke up with her mouth dry and her sheets tangled like crime scene tape.

Instead, she says, “Your toothbrush is still here.”

She doesn’t laugh. She never does anymore. Not since she started sleeping on the left side of the bed like it means something. Not since she switched to almond milk. Not since she decided breathing was a full-time job.

I only visit now in the dark.

When sleep shuts her down like a soft reboot.

When the world’s too quiet and her spine forgets how to lie.

That’s when I slide back into her system.

I place one patch behind her left shoulder blade. Another on the curve of her inner thigh—where the blood’s thinner, the skin more honest. Third one, low on her spine. That one’s just for me. My name written in adhesive.

Fifty minutes. That’s the sweet spot. Enough to bypass conscious resistance, not enough for side effects.

She thinks she’s getting better.

Thinks her heart stopped trying to climb out of her chest because of journaling. Thinks she stopped waking up in panic because of box breathing. Thinks the daily walks in overpriced yoga pants cured her existential dread.

She lights candles now. Purple ones. Smells like grief soaked in potpourri. She masturbates with both hands like she’s trying to erase me fingertip by fingertip.

The therapist calls me “an emotional trigger.”

I call her a necessary evil.

Three breakups.

First one, she said, “I don’t feel like myself around you.” 

Second one, she said, “You suck the oxygen out of the room.” 

The third, mid-blowjob. She looked up, teary-eyed, spit trailing from her lip like a snapped thread. Said, “I can’t keep giving you this part of me.”

I didn’t say anything. Just zipped up, left her there, praying to a God who doesn’t take voicemail.

Each time, she comes back. Twitchy. Breathless. Says, “You make everything quiet. Like, on a cellular level.” Says, “You’re the only one who makes the buzzing stop.”

She doesn’t know her body associates me with dopamine now. With balance. With baseline.

She doesn’t know I’m the itch she thinks is love. Doesn’t know she’s addicted to something she never chose.

But every morning, she wakes up smiling. Kisses my chest. Says, “I don’t know what it is about you.”

And I nod. And I peel the patches off before the shower. And I light a cigarette with the hand that pressed them on.

Because she doesn’t smoke. Not really.

But she burns just the same.