Mild Discomfort

After we were done, I couldn’t do anything besides stand there and look at it. He had gone to take a shower. I didn’t. I’ve got a thing about taking showers with a guy, so I let him take his first. I stayed in the kitchen, the scene of the crime, and looked at the cloudy taupe evidence lying on the floor.

He just left it there, on the linoleum, in the room where I pour myself bowls of cereal and figure out the answers to word puzzles on the back of the cereal box. He just left it there, and somehow I didn’t notice it until I walked to the fridge to get myself a bottle of water and the little jellyfish, still warm, squelched underneath my foot, sticking to my feel when I lifted up my leg.

Instinctively, I flicked it off and it landed approximately where it had lain when I had stepped on it in the first place. I had never seen one look like that, lying so helpless and discarded. I’ve see them rolled up in study circles, or trying to camouflage themselves in the context of a body. But there it was, sprawled out on my kitchen flood, clinging to its last seconds of bodily warmth, but still in purgatory—not yet in its final rest place, buried in the side of my black trash can next to skins of avocados and the packaging of last night’s frozen pizza.

I could’ve picked it up and thrown it away, but somehow I didn’t think that’s my job. It’s my kitchen, I’m supposed to keep it clean, but I wasn’t the one who threw it there in the first place. It was on him. But it was in me. Then again, he was still kind of in it. And similarly, I was still on it, just not as densely. I didn’t know.

Without looking away I set my water down on the table and started making myself a bowl of cereal. I thought about its texture and shuddered; the fake wetness, the subtle ribs marketed as “Intensified Pleasure,” the tightness it must have to stay hugging anything.

He emerged from the bathroom with one of my towels tucked around his waist.
“Hey,” he said and kissed me on the corner of the mouth.
“What do you wanna do about that?” I motioned toward the condom on the floor, and crunched on pieces of bran loudly.
“The…condom?” he asked.
I nodded, spoon still in my mouth.

He picked it up with his toes and nudged it into the garbage. I could still see part of it peeking over the edge of the bag, a blatant contrast from everything else in its new neighborhood.
“You couldn’t have done that?”
“It’s yours.”
“I wouldn’t have worn it if you didn’t make me. You don’t know how uncomfortable that is.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to have a baby.”
“Neither do you.”
Touché.