Sometimes she hates that she didn’t possess the requisite lunacy to board that train, and the itch to mend it, to do so in some other way, has always stayed with her. It festered into an impulsiveness that will not disappear. She thinks: I hate that I didn’t get on that train, I hate that I watched him go and fade to nothing, and at first she thinks she loves Rinaldo Damiani the same way she loved the boy on the train. As if watching him go will haunt her for the rest of her life.
But then they fight and she thinks: Maybe this is different. It’s not a very big fight, but the important thing is that they have it, that it happens. Surprisingly, this isn’t how she knows he loves her. This isn’t about him at all. She already knows his brain is something foreign to her, something that contains little pockets of mysticism that she will never understand, no matter how intently she can dig her greedy tendrils. So when he says, ______, she says, _____, mostly just to challenge him. Later she will forget what the argument is even about, only that it happened, and most importantly that when she said ???, he said !!!, and did not dismiss it. He didn’t say, Regan, do you really want to do this now? Regan, I’m tired, let’s not. Regan, go to bed, it’s late and you’re arguing just to argue. He doesn’t do any of that, instead he !!s when she ??s and when she !!s he ??s, and she should be annoyed, she knows. She should be irritated or tired, the way people always are with her, but she isn’t. Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.
She knows better than to confuse apologies with affection. People are always sorry, so when he crawls towards her on the mattress she knows to wait for it, to sigh and say, It’s fine, only instead he surprises her, says: I love your brain. She doesn’t know what to deal with first, the use of ‘love’ or the fact that it isn’t what she was expecting, or the idea that anyone can possibly think fondly of her brain when she has put almost no effort into molding it. Her body, that’s easy to love, and her personality, whichever version it is, is specially crafted for every occasion. She has always been studious of other people, despite what her mother thinks. Her mother believes she rebels just to rebel, just to provoke, but that, Regan thinks, is just another form of study. She understands what people want from her, knows when to give it or not. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the success of a rebellion, knowing what people want, so to vehemently deny what others so desperately desire?
Regan has always been good at that, at making people hate her or love her depending on her mood, but she has never given any thought to her thoughts. Then he says it, I love your brain, and she is so stunned she wants to fight with him all over again. She wants to fling things at him wildly—God is a myth! Time is a trap! Virginity is a construct! Love is a prison!—just to make him say it again, to make him prove it true. Oh, you love my brain? Well, do you love it when it does this thing, or this thing? Do you love it when it means I’m lifeless on the floor, curling my tongue around a pill or a stranger’s dick? Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent?
Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?
She thinks so loudly that she wants to quiet her thoughts with sex, which nearly always works. Oh, she likes sex with Aldo, she craves it, the thought alone makes her entire body sing. The way he fits with her, inside her, she wants it in excess—she wants, as she always wants, to be smothered by it, to drown in it, for it to be so vast and devouring it swallows her whole—but she has felt that way about sex before, about men and boys before. She has already lost herself many times, many ways, so she wants to do it again and thinks it will be familiar. But with him nothing is familiar, and sex is the least of it. It isn’t nothing—she sleeps with her hand wrapped around his cock just to comfort her subconscious with the shape of it—but this, I love your brain, is more. She already knows she is in love with him and now she suspects he is in love with her, too, in a way that makes her inclined to believe it. She yanks him up to her, ready to reward him with the places she can bend, but he laughs, slows her rushing hands. We can take breaks, you know, he says. She scoffs a little in her head—Oh, her brain, that’s what he wants? Okay, then have it, all of it. She pulls his head to hers, bites his lip, says: I’m going to tell you my secrets.
He licks at her mouth. Tell me, then.
She starts small but moderately sinful, not quite convinced he’s ready to hear the big things or worse, the meek. She tells him about how she flirted with a professor, got him to change a grade. She tells him about the neighbor boy, the first person to cup her breast in his hand and say, Nice. She tells him about the chemistry class she nearly failed except for the boy who sat next to her, who did her labs because she batted her eyes, sent a few dirty texts, okay fine, so there are pictures of her tits out there somewhere on someone’s cloud account, probably, so what. Aldo listens with a smile, a smile that says, Mmhmm.