Daisy Runaway

Daisy Runaway

by

Matt McGuire

We sat perpendicularly that late summer evening, reclined, shoes off, my feet on the coffee table and you hammering away behind a screen, ice blue eyes averted, pecking love notes and sly flirtations to whomever who was wherever you were going as soon as you found an excuse inside your natural blond mind to retreat with. A half-dead pot of Gerber daisies sat between us on my faux oak table, their petals witness to my apathy and your procrastination.

We'd torn at each other the night before, hungry, two rabid Saxons in search of fix and freedom. When I made love to you after clearing the previous week's wreckage from the mattress, you were much too practiced for twenty-two. I suppose there must be a pamphlet or some field manual protocol for sex in the new millennium. Perhaps the Obama administration hands those out with condoms and MRE's and fuckall for the youth. I muscled through valiantly, perplexed instead of passionate.

Yes, you knew what to say, and you said it in earnest, but your eyes weren't selling your screams and your ridiculous, orgasmic melodrama. Eyes never lie, my dear. They may only conceal, but even that trick takes more practice than three months on a pole and six seeking a guardian in a town full of raconteurs. Cupid had opted for a machine gun in lieu of an arrow. Unfulfilled and sated with afterdeed platitudes, we slept.

The day passed with a bullet—lunch, your milk white skin bare to your ass in some collegiate volleyball shorts, words, words, and us both seeking escape. We came home and both faked it once again, and that's when we ended up on my couch, with peaked daisies between us and the Raveonettes crooning early sixties retro blackly in the background. You showered and left me asleep on the arm of the sofa, blazing blond and big thighed as far away from me as possible and into the arms of another man or boy who you might practice on until you finally get it right.