Man And A Woman
Desire is rarely clean. It leaks, it clings, it stains. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject names the collapse of boundaries between self and other, inside and out, where figures in transition resist categorisation. More than disgust, the abject unsettles by exposing the fragility of identity, bending rules and casting prohibitions aside. What seems like charm or chance encounter corrodes into fixation, possession, consumption. She moves, speaks, forgets; yet the narrative bends toward his hunger, his projections. Here, intimacy becomes contamination, and desire, erasure.
A BAKERY
“Tall flat white with caramel. Uh, Skim Milk… No, I don’t want foam. Thanks.”
He said it in between breaths and an uncomfortably loud phone call. His voice cracked on skim. He wore a navy blue suit, an Omega watch, a black tie and silver cufflinks. His hair combed back conservatively. His stance prideful as if to separate each vertebrae and place them apart. A man, ordering dignity with caramel syrup. Charming.
She stood behind him in line, a balancing act of deciding on her order while listening to the conversation of the man before her. He was loud but not urgent; he wanted to be overheard. “Tell them we’ll restructure, but don’t mention compliance yet,” he said into the air, as though the café were a conference room. She thought she knew him, faintly—the suit, the gleaming watch, but couldn’t quite press the tip of her finger on the memory. Maybe a face from a meeting? Maybe from nowhere at all.
As she stepped forward, he took in her elongated frame. Soft hands with sharp French-tipped nails. He always liked the look of a fresh manicure on a sophisticated woman. Even more so, he liked the image of those nails dragging across skin, leaving crescents of blood where polish had chipped.
“Iced Americano with a dash of milk. And… perhaps a bagel. A sesame with lox. Thanks.”
It was sacrilege to order otherwise. Bagels without lox were counterfeit. Her mother had told her so, in one of those hand-me-down cultural edicts, three things were certain: bagels are not to be scooped, and above all must have lox. Her mother had also told her never to trust a man who wears a navy blue suit to work, not
even Anderson Cooper, despite (or because of) her inexplicable fixation on his TV presence.
“Crazy you even have to say you want lox,” the man chimed in.
His voice, loud enough to suggest he was waiting for her response. She glanced over her shoulder. He smiled, teeth shining. Too straight. Bad sign.
“The ultimate sign of New York City gentrification,” she said, accent trailing behind her teeth, Queens-born.
He smirked, enamored with the cliché uppiness to her voice. Later he would remember the phrase not as a sentence, but as the shape of her lips when they formed gen-tri-fi-ca-tion.
“I’m from Buff-alo,” he muttered with mock sheepishness, though it carried a strange pride, as if Buff-alo itself were an inside joke.
They shared a moment—or rather, he thought they did. She looked away quickly. He lingered. What she didn’t see: his gaze fixed not on her face but on the way she pressed her thumb into the counter as she waited, leaving behind a faint grease mark. He imagined folding that mark into his pocket. Keeping it like a pressed flower. Later, he would walk past the counter again, checking to see if it remained. The smudge became a fossil of contact, an oily secretion congealed into permanence.
Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones.
Their names were called. She took her drink and bagel in one hand, slipping her other arm through the purple knit she carried. She brushed past him with the faintest smile, already forgetting him.
He stayed behind, fingers grazing the counter where the grease spot had been. Moist, still. Warm.
A DRINK
Later. A bar with too much glass, the kind that reflected everyone back at themselves. Their companies were ‘partners’, at least on paper, though he had never crossed paths with her formally. Coincidence, he told himself. Or inevitability.
She was already there, talking to someone from finance. Mark, or maybe Mike. It hardly mattered. Finance guys were all cut from the same sheet: straight-laced, boring, ambitious in the way that crushed the life out of everything. Mark’s hair was slightly wet, maybe even oily. Mark leaned close when he
spoke, too close, his eyes crawling over her blouse. His laugh was damp, sticky. Mucus clung somewhere deep in his throat.
Men like him only knew rhythm and collapse, movement without imagination. She would lie there waiting for it to be over, her lips pressed together so they would not groan in disappointment.
She lifted her glass, set it down, lifted again. Three sips in five minutes. He counted them, quietly, like beads on a rosary. This is something Mark would not notice. She adjusted her necklace, the fine chain catching the soft light. He felt it as though she were tugging at his own collar, tightening it around his throat. He imagined it marking her skin, leaving a faint groove. He pressed a finger into the ring of condensation left from her glass on the bar and, when no one looked, touched it to his tongue. Diluted gin and lime, faintly sweet, faintly metallic, faintly her.
They locked eyes in the mirror.
He edged closer, letting the moment tip toward coincidence.
“Funny, isn’t it, how we’re partners and yet strangers,” he said.
She tilted her head, squinting slightly as recognition bloomed.
“The bagel guy.”
He laughed, feigning bashful charm, though inside he was thrilled she remembered. He had replayed her accent in his head for days. The way her lips had rounded and jutted out when she said gen-tri-fi-ca-tion had left an imprint, like teeth marks.
She asked about his work, and he gave answers too long, always circling back to himself. He told her a story from childhood, about collecting scraps of fabric from his mother’s sewing box, arranging them by texture, by cling. He delivered it like a cute anecdote. But the way he described nylon’s static crackle, velvet stuck to sweaty palms, the suffocating heat of polyester on bare skin—too much detail. Stomach advanced toward her oesophagus.
“You’re a strange one,” she said at last.
A playful tone, the sort of banter one throws across a bar without thought.
But he heard only: You’re seen.
He shifted his Omega watch higher on his wrist.
“Strange is memorable.”
Her laugh broke against the mirrors, multiplying.
Later that evening, someone spilled a drink. The liquid spread across the counter in branching veins. She dabbed at her skirt with a napkin. He watched the fabric darken, clinging to her thigh. The cold must have sunk straight through, wet cloth plastering itself to stocking and then skin. He thought about keeping the napkin, still damp, holding the faint print of her leg. He thought about keeping all of them. A collection. A history.
A DINNER
It wasn’t a date. Or it was. Neither called it such. She agreed because—why not? She liked to test herself against people like him. Men too sure of their own charm. She liked the thought of a free dinner, not because she couldn’t afford it herself but because it was riddled with expectation.
They chose an Italian restaurant, all candlelight and brick walls. The kind of place people picked to seem ‘authentic’. He sat opposite. Posture rigid, eyes darting. He studied the way she cut her food: knife slicing with precision, fork balanced delicately. He timed his bites to hers, though she didn’t notice.
He watched her take glances at the man at the table beside them, her face blushing slightly. He had become a cuck on his own date. He wasn’t listening to her words anymore, only the mechanics of her eating: jaw opening, tongue darting, teeth sinking into the soft, wet pulp, grinding and pressing until it yielded, each bite slick with saliva, each click a reminder of the messy world inside her mouth. He pictured the half-chewed bread inside her mouth, pulp dissolving with saliva. He thought of her body as porous, dissolving, leaking: the reminder that borders between inside and outside were never clean. He felt himself drawn to the horror of it.
“You watch people very closely,” she said suddenly, breaking his trance.“Occupational hazard,” he replied. Far too quickly. “I deal with details.”
Silence followed. The waiter poured more wine. She reached for her glass. He imagined the taste of salt
on her wrist, the slick between her fingers. He imagined the body as a wet surface to be entered.
As the evening wound down, she looked at him more steadily. She wasn’t sure if she was intrigued or repelled. Maybe both. He paid the bill without asking, eager. Walking her out, he brushed close, not touching, but near enough. She caught a glimpse of his hand twitching at his side, as though itching for something to hold. He flexed his bicep through his shirt deliberately, a silent performance of strength. She noticed.
He noticed her noticing. And in the split second before the night ended, he imagined her mouth open around the same bread he had torn, imagined crumbs dissolving in saliva, imagined the line between what was his and what was hers erased entirely.
A TRAIN
He spotted her at the end of the train line. Black stiletto boots, a grey pencil skirt split neatly at the back.
She shifted her weight, one foot circling slightly on its heel. She hoped the slit wasn’t riding up too high, but didn’t check.
The train arrived with a rush of warm air, carrying the faint scent of oil and iron. She stepped inside, selected a seat without calculation, two rows from the door, back against the wall. Safe.
From a few seats away, he watched.
He could see the lacy edge of her panty line. He imagined what it would look like on the floor. Her white button-up clung to her skin, tugging at the edges. He could make out the red strap of her bra through the thin white cotton. He wondered if it matched her underwear. Her glasses. Red, sleek, thin-framed. On one arm a smart handbag, on the other a purple knit jumper. He told himself he was only noticing, only attentive, but his noticing spread, growing sticky. The lace trim faintly visible through the skirt, the curve of her waist dipping, then spilling outward.
He touched the seam of his work trousers, drawing his finger down, retracing the line he imagined of her body. Again, and again. He thought about fabric — ninety percent cotton, ten percent polyester — and how polyester held heat, how it trapped sweat. He pressed harder, until the warmth beneath his fingertip felt like friction, as if her body might appear from it.
She crossed her legs. Maybe the shoes pinched at the ball of her foot. Or maybe, and here the thought unspooled too easily, she was clenching in. He pictured kneeling, sliding the boots from her feet, peeling down tights taut from static, placing her legs over his shoulders. She shifted again. He watched her mouth set in concentration, eyes lowered to her phone. Her thumbs worked quickly. Detached, efficient. He wondered who she was writing to. He imagined her fingers pressing into him instead, gripping his wrists hard enough to leave marks. He pictured himself slipping off his Omega watch, placing it neatly on the nightstand before climbing over her.
Her hair fell forward when the train halted. He saw sweat clinging to her forehead, strands pasted against her temples. He could hear it. He could smell it. The air in the carriage seemed suddenly thick. She looked up once, briefly, across the aisle. For half a second, her gaze might have swept over him. Or not. It didn’t matter. He felt the charge of it anyway, invented and then seized as truth. The train rocked on. To anyone else, she was absorbed, absent. To him, she was speaking already, her body full of sentences only he could read.
He wondered if she was thinking the same.
She wasn’t.
And still he imagined. He kept imagining because the imagining had already replaced her. She was no longer a woman on a train, she was the outline traced on his thigh, the red of a bra strap, the edge of lace, polyester holding heat.
The train lurched forward. She sat in silence. She sat untouched.
But in his head, she was already undone.
Designed by Ege Yurdakul