The Last Time
In the hotel room of a dead rock star Border Land Delia makes love for the last time. A short story that explores the difference between sex as devotion vs sex as loveless compulsion.
The following is an excerpt from I Can Only Give You Everything, an auto-fiction book based on my coming of age in the punk scene and my battle and recovery from alcohol and sex/love addiction. I am currently in search of a publisher and/or literary agent for this book.
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Sunny and I stopped in Joshua Tree on our way to Texas. It was the last time we made love. And I mean to differentiate between sex and love, because we had sex in Austin that final alcohol fueled year of our marriage, but it was never conscious. Sometimes it was dirty and passionate and hungry in a way that felt pornographically good, but it was never sweet again like that night we spent in Joshua Tree.
We had been driving for eight hours. The night before, we slept on a friend’s couch in San Francisco. I had a panic attack on the LA freeway. Cars zipped past our cloud-covered minds at one hundred miles an hour. We almost died changing lanes outside Santa Monica. Finally, we made it to our exit and the desert, and its flatness soothed our anxious minds.
It was dark when we pulled into the Joshua Tree Inn. The same hotel where country rock legend Gram Parsons had died. It was a weekday in the summer in Death Valley. So, we had the whole place to ourselves.
Sunny sang me a song under a framed photo of Gram Parsons in the room where Parsons OD’d at twenty-six. It was a Gram Parsons cover, and he was damn good at it. When I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was Gram’s ghost singing to me from beyond the veil. And I was grateful Sunny wasn’t a ghost. I was grateful he was nursing his ulcers and detoxing ten years of late-night drinking and drugging with bottled water and taco salads we had bought earlier that day under a palm tree on Venice Beach.
There was something about the song Sunny was playing about a man who can’t face his woman leaving him. So, instead, he closes his eyes, grabs a bottle and some pills, and finds a young girl as damaged as he is. When Sunny sang, he was looking right at me, peering into the past. I could see myself in that song, threatening to leave if he didn’t stop jerking off to porn, looking at girls, and drinking all night long. Threatening my love as if it were just a physical object I could give and retract at will. As if I could control anything that he did. But for some reason in that dead man’s room with the last echo of sunlight ripping across the midnight blue horizon, the past no longer mattered. All things were still and soft, just like they should be at twilight in the desert.
I lay on the bed. Sunny set down the guitar and lay beside me. There was just no question we wanted to mend all the black out on the floor crying nights. We wanted so badly for things to be as they were when we first met. But we didn’t know how.
The comforter was warm and brown. My heart was a bird wrapped in the sympathy of his eyes, looking into me, looking into him. There is just something about the last time. When you know it’s coming to an end. Nothing else matters. His lips were wet. His touch like velvet. I didn’t have to reach for his hand because he grabbed mine as soon as the thought crossed my mind. He knew all the right places to touch me. But why wouldn’t he? We had been together for four years. It wasn’t really about that. It was shelter. Shelter, I had never known until I came into his arms. His face took refuge in my breasts. His skin was hungry for my touch.
You take away all the implications. What does a woman want? What does a man want? What does anyone want? And I think what it was that we wanted was just to be seen by the naked person lying across from us. And he saw me. I saw him, and all the hang-ups fell away.
It would be years till I figured out how to have sex like that again. It was not a natural occurrence for me to be present, especially not during sex. There was just too much shame from my stepfather, from Red, from Dean, and so many others.
After the sex was over, Sunny and I swam in the hotel pool. He placed his arms under me so I could float on my back and look up at the stars.
“Delia, I still have some Adderall in my bag.”
He might as well have said, I don’t love you anymore. But then he told me he needed to get rid of it. And in that instant, the sky above us no longer felt expansive. I could tell we only had so much time. That our bodies would only hold that light for so long. I knew that I wanted the light more than life itself, and so did Sunny. But that night, making love in a dead man’s hotel room, there was no chasing the sun. No need to fix Sunny. No need to fix me.
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May the New Year bring you restitution, joy, and freedom from suffering.
Peace, Love, and Gnosis, your pal,
Border Land Delia-Ann
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I think it's a rare talent to draw one in to care so deeply with so few words. Thank you
The desert setting and that hotel room give the story a haunted, suspended-in-time quality that makes the intimacy feel earned rather than dramatic. I also love how the pool scene turns on a single line and suddenly the fragility of it all is exposed. The closing paragraph circles back to the idea of light in a way that lingers.