Her Ugly Little Secret.

"Sometimes, I wonder what I see in you," she says moving her left foot off my face so I can see  her.

She walks away from me, towards the armchair in the corner of the room, and I crawl after the coattails of her words until I am reunited with her feet. Sometimes, I wonder as well. What does she see in me? 

"I suppose," she begins, popping her toe back inside my mouth as I settle on my back, "I respect that you seem to understand...just how far beneath me you really are." 

I do understand that. No one has ever really understood my relationship with her. In the beginning, I didn't understand it either. I had seen her around all year, walking to corridors with her large group of friends, always laughing like she had a private comedy show running inside her head but I didn't imagine she would ever talk to me. One day she came and sat next to me in class, I was so startled I was sure she had mistaken me for someone else. 

"I saw you park this morning," she said, rightfully assuming that i already knew exactly who she was, "You drive a very nice car." 

I didn't really care about what I drove. It was a guilt-car my father had bought me for missing my eighteenth birthday.

"I guess it's nice," I said, completely unsure as to why we were even talking.

"So if you are rich, why do you...look like that?" She asked, "I thought you couldn't afford clothes or a comb." 

She still says horrid things like that without a thought, but that was the first time. Ten years ago. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't get up and walk away from the conversation, or why I didn't explain to her that her out-of-touch view of life didn't really dictate how people lived theirs. I didn't do any of that, no, I laughed. I don't quite understand why, but she amused me by asking me that question. It's a question my mother used to ask me frequently. She'd fill my closet with silk blouses in jewel-tones that I'd bury under my piles of black hoodies and once I moved out she'd have them delivered to my place. I stacked the boxes in the corner of the room until were over six-feet high and then I gave them away and started over. Unsurprisingly, she loves my mom. 

"This is just how I look," I told her, "I think..pathetic kind of becomes me." 

"You're funny," she said laughing and then squinted her eye before continuing, "..and also, pretty weird." 

"That's accurate," I told her. 

She laughed, got up and left. A few minutes later she came back with two cups of coffee, and every day after that, she sat beside me in that class. She didn't learn anything, she wasn't really interested in any of that, and the truth is she didn't have to be. She has a brilliance that cannot be restricted to the study of standard deviation, and beauty that is unmatched. The best description I can muster is that she's the kind of person who looks good in pastels. I don't know anyone else who can pull that off. She's small, yet also tall. Her shoulders and her wrists are petite and frail-looking, but her spine is strong and her neck is long. She has no affectations, but every movement of every body part is a production. Every conversation with her feels like she is dancing for me. For everybody. She was aware of just how beautiful she is, and she's not exactly conceited about it, but she does place everybody on a hierarchy of beauty in a manner that is a little too matter-of-fact, and she's on top. She's convinced of that, and she's not even wrong, I don't mind her conviction on this front, and I have always understood that i am, indeed, far beneath her. 

I carried around folders with term papers and paper cups of coffee, while she did photoshoots for advertisements of handbags and perfume. I understood, very well, the difference between us. On a standard day, in a standard crowd, I'm agreeable to look, put me next to a truly beautiful person and I'm mostly invisible, but next to her, I'm not invisible, I'm uglier. She enhances the imperfections of me. Next to her, I'm the chipped wall in the background of beautiful portrait, I'm ruining the view. I liked the feeling of being a chilled wall. I liked that she she didn't mind that I was her *ugly friend* but she asserted that, routinely, as if it were a fact that needed to be constantly reinstated. 

In the first year or so our relationship was completely platonic, if somewhat exploitative. We went shopping together, and I carried her bags, she tried to force me to buy yellow blouses and burgundy cocktail dresses, and then changed her mind as soon as she saw me in them. She told me to smile more, and then realised not everyone had a face that was flattered by the display of teeth. She asked me to come with her to nightclubs, and I waited for her as she danced and met men. I went with her to the houses of men she had just met, so she was safe, and I sat in the living room while they fucked her inside the bedroom. She invited me to the parties she had with her model-friends, and I sat silently through most of them waiting for everyone to leave so I could "help" her clean up. Everyone told me she was taking advantage of me, but no one really understood that I enjoyed it, no one really grasped that she didn't really need *me* specifically to do things for her, the queue of people who'd do things for her went all around the block, and she regularly dismissed them, she didn't need the advantage of me in her life, i really had nothing to offer her. She never spent my money, even, often buying me things like textbooks and coffee just because she thought I might want them. 

About a year into knowing her we were out shopping one day and I was waiting outside the dressing room with a stack of garments she intended to try on when she asked me to step inside and zip her into something. When I opened the door and went in, she was standing there, completely naked, and being reflected off a dozen mirrors, the endless reflection of her was dizzying. For a few seconds, I couldn't even speak, I was so utterly mesmerized by what I was seeing. It was as if she wore the purloined innocence of a thousand maidens on her skin, it wouldn't matter whether you like women or not, if you saw her naked, you would want to reach out and touch if only to truly ascertain that she really was, real. 

"You're naked," I said, finally. 

"I know," she said, turning towards me. 

She stood two-feet away from me, and she reached out, almost leaning over, and stroked my arm. She had touched me before, like friends do, but it had never felt like that. The jacket I was wearing felt like it was made of concrete, and I had never wished my arms had been bare more than I did then. 

"Do you want to touch me?" She asked. 

I nodded. I didn't know until that moment that my feelings towards her were sexual, in fact, I didn't know myself to have possessed much of a sexuality at all. 

"If you want to touch me, I have to see you naked as well," she said, sitting down on the bench by the back mirror and spreading her legs just a little. 

I hadn't smelled another woman until that moment, and I haven't smelled one since her, I wonder if they all smell as exotic, like an aphrodisiac being released into the air. That she released inebriants from inside her was the only explanation for how quickly I got out of my clothes. I was never a fan of my own nudity, there's nothing really *wrong* with my body, it's *fine* but there's nothing quite right with it either. It's just a body, it has skin and organs and hair. I didn't think of it as much use to anyone, nor myself. 

"I'm so sorry," she said immediately, upon seeing me naked, "I can't imagine what I would do if I..looked like that." 

Her casual cruelty, which I now know to be deliberate, used to seem so bizarre to me, not because it was unempathetic and thoughtless, but because it was so non-chalant. She spoke it like fact. Like the answer to a math problem. 

"I'm sorry," I found myself saying to her, as I looked down at my own body, somehow seeing it through my eyes was easier, and kinder than looking at it reflected through a maze of mirrors. 

"Look up at yourself," she said, standing beside me, "Look at how we look together." 

I saw it. We looked like a couple that would make people turn their heads and assume that I must be rich to be able to have a girl like her. 

"I know you still want to touch me," she said running her fingers over her body, from her waist to her hips, "I'll let you, but you have to be naked around me for a week." 

She likes playing games. For the entire week, every time I saw her she made me take my clothes off, reminding me of that moment in the dressing room to motivate me, but she didn't need to, because ever since I saw her naked i couldn't think of anything else. She body haunted me, the smell of her body returned to me at the oddest moments and I had to stop, physically stop whatever I was doing and steady myself. Eventually she let me touch her, she let me put my mouth where she seemed to carry all her power, and I was never the same again. I became obsessed with her, an obsession that carries on to this day, and may never subside. I disgust myself with the way I long for just another moment of contact between her body and my tongue. 

That was nine years ago. She's still as beautiful, I think, as she removes her toe from her mouth and tells me to sit up on my knees. Behind her, on the wall, her big beautiful white dress hangs from the nail I put it on. Her hair and make up are done perfectly. She looks more beautiful than ever. She's wearing a lavender skirt, it has thousands of little pleats, and it matches exactly with her broad head scraf, I could never wear things like that, but I love watching her wear them. I didn't think I could ever be interested in something like that, but five years ago she hired me as her stylist and assistant. I didn't need the job, and she didn't really need an assistant, but I think she liked the idea of having me professionally-tied to her. She couldn't, nor would she ever, call me her girlfriend, and she knows, we are not friends, but being her assistant makes something official. On my end i view the professional part of our relationship as me finally playing with one of the thousand Barbies my parents bought me when I was a young girl, only this one is alive, and far more entertaining to dress. I like picking out her clothes, I like buying them for her, and I don't know how I developed the kind of expertise that even makes it possible for me to do it. 

"No one else really understands why I keep you around either," she says, pulling my head under her skirt, "But they don't know, do they? They don't know just what you'll do for a whiff of..this." 

I hate myself in these moments because I am never as weak as when presented with the opportunity of pleasing her. I inhale her like I'm  starving for her, even though she spent all of last night in this hotel room with me, and my tongue moves without conscious thought exactly as it was trained to do. 

"Hurry up," she says, more impatient than usual, "You know you have to help me get ready." 

She's marrying a man. She was always going to marry a man. She has been dating him for a year, and he knows me only as her assistant. He's a financier that my mother tried to fix me up with a few years ago, and while he never called me for a date, I did tell her about him. I never believed that she just ran into him at a club, but it doesn't really matter, she is better suited for him than I am. The first time she slept with him she knocked on my bedroom door right after she came back home so I could taste him inside her, I don't know why she did that, i don't like the taste of men, but after that night she came to me every single time she slept with him. I don't think it pleases her to sleep with men, I don't think it could, but she wouldn't consider marrying anyone else. She tells me that i will move into a separate wing of their house once they married, she has it all arranged with her husband, and I don't really mind. I like my place, and I liked having her live here, but really, I could live anywhere just to be near her. 

As she nears the orgasm I am so accustomed to feeling her have against my tongue, there's a knock on the door. 

"Will you be much longer?" Her mother asks from outside the door. 

"Just a few minutes," she answers, pulling away from me and standing up, "I guess I should put on my dress." 

I stand up and look around for my own dress. Her wedding was the perfect opportunity for her to finally get me to wear a pastel, I look horrid in it, and she agrees, but she's amused by it, and I by her amusement. She walks over to the suitcase, and takes something out of it. She walks over to me with a blue velvet box. 

"I got this for you," she says, "Open it." 

It's a bracelet. It's completely plain, and it looks like white gold. 

"Look inside," she says excitedly, as she steps out of her skirt, "It's engraved." 

It reads,

*My ugly little secret, forever.* 

It makes me laugh, it shouldn't, but it does. 

"You know you're not marrying me," I saw in a tone that betrays more emotion that I usually allow myself. 

"And I never will," she says, breaking my heart for the thousandth time. 

I turn away to hide the emotion in my face, and she turns away to bring her dress. I picked it, she didn't even really care, which I suppose is possible when you look magnificent in everything.  

"Don't cry now," she says, "You don't want to look worse than you already do." 

I laugh. She laughs. We laugh. 

There's nothing else we can do. No one would ever understand.