“So,” I responded. He was looking at me strangely, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with me. I leaned my head on my hand and smiled, trying to put him at ease, but I guess the motion still held after images of all the things I wanted my mouth to do and he actually backed up a step. I didn’t love the reaction. I was used to people being afraid of me, sure - I was big, and muscled, with close cropped hair and the kind of dress code that made people who knew things know to be careful around me. Sometimes size is all that does it, to make people scared. Sometimes it happens after a friend would come and see me fight, see the blood and the violence and not really be able to shake that idea, the smell, the sounds from their mind whenever they looked at me in the future.

But this guy hadn’t seen me fight. And I don’t think he was scared of me, not my physique or my way of being. After all, he’d picked me out as the one most likely to buy him a drink, and I’d seen him scanning the bar after. He knew I’d let him walk away. So, what? That drive, that push to figure him out crashed over me like a wave, and as soon as that happened. I don’t know. I think I just kind of lost it a little.

My brain, my fucking brain. Sometimes I can’t get out of my head, especially when I see someone that I want to understand. I’m good at people. I get them. In time, I always get them, build up this version of them in my head that I can run things by, that will react exactly the same as the real version. And this guy, he was so familiar, so different, and I just didn’t understand why I was reacting to him this way, let alone why he would do something so dramatic as back away from me and I wanted, needed to understand him because it felt like there was something there, something hiding just beneath that casual lean of his that I knew.

Because there were, I realized as I watched him, as I built him in my mind, there were things about him that I understood. Immediately, immensely. Intimately. The things he held in his eyes, the way he would run towards any cliff he saw. How I thought he might be disappointed if the fall was only a few feet, if he made it out with only bruises. I got that. I’d been that.

But it was more than that, more than just the things he thought. I felt like I knew exactly how he would react to everything I would do, just after this brief meeting, how each part of his body would exist with me. For me. And at that thought, my brain. My fucking brain.

My eyes were tracking over him, intense and soft and not really here, because he was in my head, and in my head he was with me. It started off simply enough, with a thought of how he would move if I moved forward; he wouldn’t back up again, I knew. That had been a reaction, a startled thing that I doubted I would ever see again. His eyes, dark and daring me to do something, say something, told me that he was not one to back down and then the thought came; I want to run up against those eyes. I want that stare burning up at me while he was restrained, my hands hovering just over his skin, begging me not to stop but too proud to cave. I wanted to make him cave to me.

His brows drew down, then, but I wanted them up, wanted them arched up in surprise, wanted everything about him arched up in a lot of things, wondered if it would be worth it to blindfold him to make that happen. I wanted to see his eyes as I touched him, as I turned him speechless and mindless and transcended and then I saw those lips and fuck, I wanted to see his lips stretched around a ball gag, hear the frustrated noises he would make. He would love that, I knew he would. Control and danger, that was his ticket, and in my mind I had it punched. I could create cliffs for him. I could make him fall forever and then be there to catch him.

I stayed on his face for a moment, just watching his lips, imagining what other things I could get them to wrap around. How he would drool for me. More softly, what it would be to kiss him, gently, warmly, giving him safety and comfort. What trust would taste like on his tongue.

I saw him swallow, and my eyes moved down to his neck. Control and danger, I thought again. I wonder how he would react to breath play. In that moment it almost seemed like he tilted his head back to let me see more, that his hair became less apparent and I noted that somewhere, filed that away but I wanted to see his hair, wanted to sink my hands into it, curl it around my fingers and make it a leash, watch it lie feathered and fanned against my pillowcase as this man came for me. I wanted to make this man come. I wanted to watch it on his face, on his body, wanted him spent and blissful and floating over my sheets.

The bartender put down the glass with a heavy clink, and I started. Shit. That hadn’t been me understanding him, that had been. Mind porn. Inappropriate. I had no excuse for what I had just done. Sure, my eyes had never drifted below his neck, but the things I had thought in my head…

I blinked and cleared my throat, hoping, somehow, that he hadn't noticed.

***

Oh, shit, I thought, as his eyes traced every fucking inch of my body from the neck up. As his gaze watched movies that no one had made, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to see. Oh, shit.

I had nothing else for this moment.

Fuck, how could someone make me feel like this with just his fucking eyes? With nothing? I needed more; I needed him; I needed to find out if all the things he promised to do to me in that brief inspection, if the way his eyes had gone dark and his mouth had gone quiet and fuck, him sitting here in this place, so calm and collected. It was torture.

I wanted him to collect me. I wanted him to do unspeakable things to my body, until the screaming in my stomach was just as calm as the expression on his face.

Dangerous, I thought again, and this time there was no irony in my thoughts, only the slightest shudder of appreciation. This man is dangerous.

***

I glanced up at his eyes and found them wide. His breathing was faster too - I’d missed that when I was so wrapped up inside my head. Shit, had I scared him? It wouldn’t be the first time; I often came on strong, even when I didn’t spend the first few minutes of meeting someone imagining them naked and tied up in my bed.

“Take me home.”

“What?” I was taken aback. I met this guys eyes and saw it again, that desperation, that need to fall. He’d seen a cliff, and he was running full tilt. Fuck, I thought. I really didn’t want to be that for him. This was something I did not need in my life, not anymore. “No.”

The guy practically moaned when I told him that, and I shot him a look. I don’t think he was told no very often. An image of me telling him no, making him wait, not letting him come until I wanted him to…

“Why not?” he was saying, and I tried to rip myself from my mind back to the real version of this person that stood before me. “You obviously want me.”

I couldn’t deny that, but there was something else there. I thought about how to say what I was working on in my head, the things I was still trying to understand. “I don’t think you want me in the ways I want you,” I decided on. And it was the truth. There was fantasy, and in my fantasies he was compliant and happy and willing to let me push him, willing to let me catch him, and then there was reality, and the reality was there was something in him that probably shouldn’t be pushed, not when he loved standing so goddamn close to cliff edges. Something that would catch me up in his desperate search for things to smash into. He wasn’t looking for the same things I was. And I couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, what he was looking for.

“Come on,” he begged me. He arranged himself against the bar, knowing exactly how to be so that his limbs were perfect, gorgeous, but I could make him look better. With a little rope, and just the right plug… “I’ll let you tie me up.”

I took a breath. It was like the stupid man was inside my head. Which, of course, he was.

Tied. Naked. Glorious. “No.”

“Fuck.” He looked like he was actually getting mad. “We could do it in the bathrooms, if that’s more your style.”

Seriously? I shot him another look and he threw up his hands.

“Why not?”

I looked at him, the frustration clear on his body. The need to fall. How close he was to shattering, how much he wanted to just explode on. Impact, I thought. After all, that’s what he’s looking for.

I would not be that for him.

“No,” I told him a third time, turning away from him with some difficulty, but I was really fucking tired of being made into a violent idea by other people. “Go find someone else to break yourself on.”

***

Someone else to break yourself on.

Fuck. What the fuck had just happened?

I chugged my drink angrily, feeling the vodka slip into my stomach and burn, wanting to set fire to my soul. Burn that fucking man’s words right out of me.

Someone else to break yourself on.

He wasn’t supposed to be like that. He was supposed to be soft, and easy, and so when I’d turned and seen him looking at me with that level of hunger I had been totally unprepared. I knew what guys like that needed, how they operated. Should have seen it in the way he sat so calm in a room that fucking screamed to instigate all the shit inside of you. Controlled.

Fuck, I hated guys like that. Fuck, I needed someone like that tonight.

I knew he could hurt me, could hurt me good. I saw it in his eyes, the things he wanted to do. And I wanted to let him, wanted nothing more than for him to just fucking go to town on me, use me however he could, but when I’d offered he’d said no.

And then he’d said.

I snarled, not letting myself think the words again. Fuck that guy.

I didn’t stop to think about what that might mean, to be broken. I was broken; of course I was broken. The whole world knew it. I knew it. He should have also fucking known it, looking at me, watching me. How could he have stared at me for so long and not gotten that? I think that’s what pissed me off about that guy so much; he’d had the audacity to imply that I was something worth preserving. Couldn’t he see that I was already completely fucking cracked?

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my metal pill case, unscrewing the lid without bothering to check if anyone was around. They didn’t give a shit about that here. Besides, I’d blown all the bouncers already and I’d do it again if it meant getting to keep my pills, my fun, my escape. I dumped a few in my hand rolled them around, trying to decide what I wanted, but I ended up thinking fuck it and tossing back the whole mix. Whatever happened, happened.

See, you dick? I thought. I could break myself just as fucking well. I don’t need you.

I chugged the last of my drink and thought about slamming it on the ground, but I hadn’t found a single fuck here and didn’t want to get thrown out yet. “Fuck,” I shouted instead, and the curse lifted just enough of the pressure inside me to allow me to put the empty glass on some side table and throw myself onto the dance floor.