Remembering Rain and Chocolate

The first time I met him, he told me his name was Victor. He was watching me buy a painting from a street vender, a painting that still sits behind my sofa, covered in dust and nearly forgotten. He said he liked me before he asked my name. He scribbled his telephone number on the back of a take-out menu. I called him that same day. He was clear about it all. Nothing heavy and don’t fall in love because Victor doesn’t do love. Victor does women. It was the simplest thing I’d considered all year, maybe all my life. In his cluttered apartment over the souvenir store in Chinatown I forgot everything. I forgot all of my overdue bills, my shitty jobs, my indifferent husband and my screaming kids. He was an escape, he was my holiday and he never asked me a single question. He just knew. He knew who I was and what I needed and that I was just a little messed up at the moment. And he didn’t care.


And each time he sensed that my body was on the verge of ecstasy, he put a small piece of chocolate on my tongue before a scream could escape my lips. Each and every time he did this and each and every time it felt like he pushed me off of a cliff and sent me freefalling into abandon and oblivion. When I would get up to leave he would say not yet. Sleep for a while. Then it would start raining and I slept. I slept so perfectly.
For six months I visited his cluttered apartment to hide from the world and eat chocolate in his bed and then he was gone. I longed for him for a year, but never heard from him at all.

Until a rainy night last Spring after I’d been alone for a long time.

He told me after that his name was Drake and he missed me, so he came in through my window with the rain. He said he hadn’t intended to wake me, he thought I would believe it all to be a dream. He wasn’t wrong. I did believe it all to be a dream at first. I thought I was dreaming of Victor. I felt his hands, and his tongue and his long hair brush against my back. And I woke up expecting to see him, but I saw no one. I only heard a voice that felt like a cool breeze on my neck. And then I tasted chocolate all over my tongue. I called to him and he told me Victor was merely a prop. He said his name was Drake. I said his name was Bliss.

He told me he dwelt among mortals infrequently and I was the only one he couldn’t forget. I asked him to stay and he said no. It wasn’t where he belonged. But he stayed for a while. I slept with him playing about my body, wrapped around me like warm mist. In the morning, my skin was wet and chilled and he was gone again.
Now, I leave my window open when it rains and he comes in like a storm, overwhelming me completely and I surrender to the invisible and the real. Then he leaves just as suddenly and I return to the illusions of my life. This is what it feels like to be in love with a demon.