Emoticon

I should have known better.

His profile was generic, but his approach was specific—flirty, determined, almost too much.

I was of two minds until he unlocked an eye-popping X-pic and a low-res photo of a rugged man in the woods. When I asked for another, I got, “Buddy, I work out three times a week. ETA?”

I fidgeted at my desk, picking my nails in Adam4Adam’s blood orange glow. Competing needs jockeyed for relief: compulsion, thrill, odd obligation—the hard-wired reduction of don’t disappoint.

I sat back in my chair, rifled through my thoughts, then snapped my laptop shut.

***

Thirty minutes later, I pull up to an apartment building designed to blend into the desert environment. It isn’t working. A patchwork of brown and gray rectangles checkerboards across the foot of its walls, each color masking a generation of graffiti. Four floors up, a pink towel hangs limp from a ledge. On a balcony nearby, a dry ficus surrenders.

This isn’t a neighborhood. It’s a mixed-use district near a tangle of freeways, part of the city I’ve been to before, shopping for fixtures. Today is baking hot, though; everyone’s inside. The absence of life is striking.

I keep the car idling as I double-check his directions. I’ve followed them correctly, but I see no sign of a door, just a yawning entrance into underground parking. My back relaxes. A remote part of me recognizes an opportunity to retrace my steps. More of me resists. There’s no stopping until someone says stop.

That someone isn’t me.

I switch off the engine and open the glove box to stash my wallet. A small, blue notebook sits there, a log of names and dates to help me remember what I tend to forget: hundreds of hook-ups; sex run amok.

I flip through the booklet, amused and appalled by my hastily drawn emojis: a column of slapdash expressions teetering one above the other, each a summation of a moment, a man, and his dick. I count backward from today. Twenty-seven faces this year. It’s mid-June.

I toss the notebook back, lock the glove box, and step out into the heat. The car’s air-conditioned chill is sucked from my cheeks in an instant.

Several feet into the street, I stop mid-stride and try yet again to reconcile what I’m looking for with what actually is. Today, a solemn corridor of commercial debris, dust, and grubbiness. Stock answers surface and sort: approval, a father, a finish line. My shoulders slump, my pulse quickens, then slows. An impatient thumb squeezes the fob in my fist.

Beep. Beep.

Sleazy it is.

As I approach the building, a chain-link gate swings open from just inside the mouth of the parking lot. An arm emerges and waves me on. I walk toward it. The figure turns away and leads me up a tight elbow of steps. I follow into a concrete courtyard, up more steps, and into an apartment. He slots a lock behind me. Then pivots.

I expect a genial man, someone outdoorsy and warm. What I get instead is faded. His hair is a bottled shade of sand. His jaw is so closely shaved I’m sure it’s brushed with foundation. Trimmed auburn eyebrows arch over cloudy gray eyes. He isn’t 49 as he insisted, but closer to 60, an evasion engineered to erase the weight of age once I arrive. I hate that it does. But it does. Our definitions of a three-times-a-week gym body clash considerably. He reminds me of a ventriloquist’s dummy: lanky limbs, a vivid face, barely there.

He doesn’t speak.

Neither do I.

Things happen fast in a trickster’s home. There’s no time for me to be quick with clever excuses. Men who misrepresent themselves rarely linger. On the contrary, they hurry me in and swiftly out of my clothes, leaving me no time to un-promise anything. Today is no exception. And how quickly I cave.

Wanted but lost.

A pleaser, pleasing, as if absence is existence.

In an instant, my t-shirt is over my head, and my shorts are tugged to the floor. With the sweep of an arm, my host is naked, too.

Up close, I can see cosmetics aren’t pasted onto his face. His skin absorbs light. It’s flat, without shine, and he smells like a migraine: Tide, Scope, and Dial.

In the minute I have to interpret who I’m standing with, my intuition races in two directions. This is either an awkward soul negotiating loneliness or a monster plotting his moves. I pray for a maniac, a shock to throw me off course. I don’t know how much more desperation I can take.

His face smashes against mine. His tongue pushes past my lips and presses up against my teeth. I sniff something rotten beneath the mouthwash, unclench my jaw, and let him in.

We disappear down a narrow hall and into a drab bedroom, where he attempts to hold my gaze. Experience muddies my focus. I see but won’t look, not until he’s a shape-shifting blur. A configuration of features can all too easily become a person with purpose—a human being—tricky to resist.

His puppet features click out of hope and slip into plan B.

He tilts me backward over the mattress. I raise my foot, slide it beneath me, ease myself down, and then shuffle up toward a flat, greasy pillow. He falls on top of me like slow-moving timber.

Skin on skin.

I’m immobile.

I’m his.

He burrows into my neck, slides his face across my cheek, then kisses me again. I do my part and handle him everywhere.

Ick, familiar.

Doable.

Fine.

I never abandon myself entirely. A piece of me stands vigil, tracking the fickle flow of need. The rest of me races to his popcorn ceiling, where I drift through a dust-fuzzy moonscape, arms and legs thrashing on the bed.

Magical distraction.

Owen, my boyfriend, crosses my mind. How is it that I have a comfortable house, a loving partner, cats and dogs, and soft things to sit on, while this guy exists in a box full of corners?

Why am I in it?

The word no winks at me from afar, infant in size, yet massive in muscle. It’s a baby assertion rehearsed at home, alone, intended for men like this, at times like now. But not today. My reluctance to upset a keen objective is rooted far too deeply to be ripped up that easily. He’s eager, too, rummaging about like a truffle pig.

His plastic face zooms up from my hips, stops, and hovers over mine. I tip my face away. Undeterred, his hand snakes my thigh, curls around my waist, and slides up my back to catch beneath my shoulders. He attempts to lift me.

I don’t sync.

A motorcycle zips by, its driver leaning hard on the horn. The scream refuses to stop.

Earth to moon: here it is. Rare intervention.

I follow through, my robot needs mostly met, and reorganize myself into a message that can’t be misconstrued. He reads me right. His hand reaches between us and fumbles about until an awkward elbow rattles the bed.

rattle… rattle…

rattle… rattle… rattle…

He stares at me through cataract eyes, then arcs away with a stuttering moan.

rattle… rattle…

rattle…

***

I glide into my driveway.

Owen’s out front, planting the angel trumpet tree we bought this morning. He looks up from the hole he’s filling with water and grins. I smile weakly back, reach for my notebook, and write ‘Dummy’ at the top of a new page. Alongside it, I draw a face, its mouth an emphatic upside-down U.

Then…

No.

The word snaps from someplace compact and cold. I glance over my shoulder. Is the voice even mine?

I flip through my notebook, scan page after page of chicken-scratch names and childish frowns. Something shimmers through the chaos, blurred at first, then sharpening.

I look up at Owen busying himself in the garden—patient, oblivious—just a few steps away, then back at my book. Twenty-seven faces by mid-June. More last year. More every year before that.

I tilt.

A lone green eye finds the rear-view mirror. I stare into a pupil that’s seen plenty, breathing through my discomfort, tracking myself backward, beyond a fog of bodies, past tactics and reward, back to the inscrutable face of just one.

To a time of smiles. When a smile was simply a smile.

Nothing more.

Oh.

This is that. Now is then. Before never stopped, and neither have I.

Owen points the garden hose into the sky. His laughter is muffled by a large, fleshy hand. He’s brimming with joy. Droplets spatter the windshield, then explode onto the roof, fat and loud. Rivers pool across the glass, forming thick sheets of water that merge and smother the car.

***

Originally published in A Year in Ink, Volume 19 (2026)