June Flash Lit #9 - That Time I Knew Better

            It was the moon that did it, in all its white cold distance.  Well, the moon and the belly full of beer and the night air.  Reg knew it was just a matter of time until she would lean into him for warmth.  He had that, if not much else, these days.

            The porch needed painting, but that was not his problem.  He just rented a room in this house, a room both empty and too full.  His body was too long for the ridiculous purple couch that he slept on.  He had six boxes of books to knock against his shins, a laptop, clothes in various states of cleanliness, a pair of skis with assorted accessories, a handful of DVDs, and a three-foot stuffed rabbit.  It was what fit in the car when he drove away from Kate’s house for the last time.  Not the couch.  Kate’s new boyfriend dropped that off out of the back of his enormous pickup truck.

            The woman next to him was not Kate.  That was pretty much the essence of her, as far as Reg was concerned.  He found her slightly too soft.  She did, however, laugh at his jokes and there was a shy way she looked at him and a reflex in her to reach out to soothe his pain.

            She had her own, he knew.  And he was going to make it worse.

            She sighed up at the moon and then, as he expected, she leaned back against him.  “I shouldn’t,” she said.

            He said nothing, but he didn’t move away.  He knew better.

            Sex on the purple couch was not a thing.  They rolled on the floor under the watchful pink eyes of the rabbit.  He imagined that he was stabbing her, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing.

            He knew it wouldn’t work.  She was still there in the morning.