He went by another name. Intellectual Property reasons, he said. I didn't even know his real last name until one night he made me come so hard that I thought my brain would fall out of my skull. I asked out of a passing curiosity, not because I cared. He could have lied to me for all I know, in fact, I almost wish that he had, because he told the most wonderful lies. His greatest skill was his own self-deception, a game that I had always wished more people were better at playing.

When I saw him for the first time, taking off his jacket in a smoke filled hole-in-the-wall (a place he had chosen no doubt for its suggestive ambiance) I thought, he's not very tall, but he carries himself like a diminutive Adonis. He never drank very much. Something told me he didn't need the courage. He sat across from me, and the stories began, religious beginnings giving way to a loss of the innocence that never really existed (people always recognize their own kind). There were the psychotic breakdowns of the women he'd left in his wake. The emotional destruction of most of the women that knew they could tame him. The way he would wave the warning flag over his head that clearly told me to get away, but that look on his face that said I'd regret it if I didn't stick around. He was a master at spinning his tales, leaving out the most important details, which he would reveal one at a time over the course of weeks and months, as if he were deciding what I deserved to hear. Yet, that first time seeing him, I was not blown away. And when he kissed me goodbye at the end of the night, he had all the constructed grace of a man who knew what he was doing, who usually did much, much more. Later, he would tell me, I was one of the only girls to get kissed at the end of the first night. I wondered why he was trying to be sweet with me, it wasn't like him, but eventually I came to realize he had left out "instead of fucked" from that sentence.

Later, I would find out, he fucked like an expert, with the potential to be a specialist. He liked to be who he wasn't, and the nominal truth of his stories didn't hide the fact that he would never see things how they were. I liked that. He liked to play a part, the part of all-knowing, but I knew better. Or, at least, he let me think I did. It was like he wanted to be the God we had both rejected years ago, omnipotent but fearful that I knew better, and I wanted to be punished for knowing the truth. I told him all the filthy things I wanted to do, all the ways I wanted him to hurt me, and of course he told me I was just trying to impress him. Push. Pull. Until finally, he did what I wanted, under the guise of giving him all the power. It was a certain thrill to believe that I was schooling this self-imagined Casanova. Even if it wasn't true that he had 'never really done this before', he spoke the words with such a sincere fragility that despite its possible insincerity, still made me swell with the depth and commitment to playacting for my own benefit. He wanted to be the young, mysterious stranger in the bar as much as I wanted him to be. He wanted to be destructive, to be allowed to cause pain, to hurt, to create something hauntingly beautiful and violent, and he wanted to take the credit. I wanted to be crushed. Broken. Ruined. I wanted love the only way I knew how to take it - begging, in short, painful, and mysterious spurts, with a stranger I knew very well. I sit across from him, and light up a cigarette. I don't normally smoke, but I exhale gently in his direction, and he gives me the face that I can't get enough of, the face I see when I ask him to choke me, when I tell him to fuck me like the little slut that I am - in an instant, he is repelled, and fascinated. For a moment, we're everything we aren't, and nothing has ever felt so good.