You. Zoran Drvenkar

      “Better believe it.”

      He thinks for a moment, he looks to his left, he looks to his right.

      “I have an idea,” he tells you. “Will you come with me?”

      “Now?”

      “Now.”

      Now it is your turn to look around. Your girls will be gone for more than an hour. You could die of boredom or you could go on an adventure.

      “You lead, I will follow,” you say to Neil.

      So he leads you down the street and stops next to a Jaguar, smart and red and with Hamburg plates.

      “Wow, where’d you get that?”

      “Swiped it off my mother,” says Neil and opens the door for you.

       RUTH

      Once upon a time there were five girls and I was one of them. The fairy tale could start like that. One of them. That’s exactly how you feel, lying on your back, above you the moss-green ceiling that you painted one afternoon with your girls because the pink was getting on your nerves and you needed a change. You’re living with your parents in an old stylish apartment block they bought when you were born. Your top bunk is six feet up. Every morning it’s like waking up in a forest. Now the green reminds you of the sea that you saw while traveling around the Bahamas with your parents. Of course you had to dive, and it nearly happened there in the water. You lost yourself for a moment. You were part of the deep and you didn’t know what was up and what was down. It was the best experience you’ve ever had, and since then you’ve been wondering what would have happened if you’d made the wrong choice and gone on deeper. How do you lose yourself? Do you disappear or do you become part of the water?

      Now you’re lying on your bed, and the moss-green ceiling is within reach of your hands. Even though you’re sure no one can just go missing like that, you’re not so sure what’s happening between your legs. Is it his tongue or is it his finger? You look down, his head is moving, so it must be his tongue. God, he’s taking his time. You’re sorry it has come to this. Why did you just let yourself go like that?

       He asked so nicely.

      That’s all?

       That’s all.

      You tug gently on his hair. Eric looks up. His lips glisten. He gives you a quizzical look, and you wish he would make another face.

      “What are you doing?”

      “What does it feel like?” he asks back and disappears between your legs again.

      You wish it was his finger and not his stupid tongue, then you’d definitely be more aware of it. There are boys who don’t know how to kiss. They swap gallons of spit with you and want to hear you gasping with passion. You want to be kissed so that your lights flicker. Flicker and not go out. Boys should learn from girls. Nessi kissed you once. It was New Year’s Eve, you were sitting drunk on Taja’s bed, and suddenly someone suggested making out and your mouth landed on Nessi’s mouth and it was the hottest french kiss you’ve ever had.

      Eric definitely doesn’t know how to kiss, and you’re annoyed with yourself for not telling him on the very first day. Now you are in the second week and he goes at it like a heartsick frog. Taja warned you, and this is what you’ve ended up with—a guy who busies himself between your legs as if he is working with his tongue on a scratch card.

      You count the books on the shelf, you tense your belly and admire your belly button with its little ring. You wonder which pizza you’ll have afterward and whether the movie will really be as weird as everyone says. Then you say the alphabet backward and at F you’ve had enough and drag Eric up to you by the ears. After a certain point enough’s enough. You kiss him, and he does his frog face again, but it’s better than all that fumbling. You taste yourself on his tongue, and your own arousal arouses you even further, and it’s like something coming full circle. Eric’s leg slips between your thighs, the pressure is good, you push back, your lower body twitches and it happens so fast that you have to grip the back of his neck so that you don’t lose yourself completely. His mouth lands on your neck, you want to warn him that if he gives you a love bite he’s dead, but you can’t warn him, because all your lights have blown out, no flickering, just lights out, as the orgasm glides through you like a red-hot knife through a block of butter, without getting stuck once, and that happens twice in a row.

      Eric isn’t aware of any of that, he’s too aroused to notice anything. He kneads your breasts and breathes in your ear. You let go of his neck and sink back. The knife has disappeared, now you’re nothing but melting butter. It would be perfect if you were alone now.

      “Oh God,” sighs Eric, as you take him in your hand. He twitches, he presses himself harder against you, full with desire and the constant panic that he might come too quickly.

      You look over his shoulder at your watch. You’ve got five minutes.

      Your hand opens his zipper, you’re lethargic and lazy, it’s as if you’re moving under water. His knees tremble. You push him off you and onto his back. He’s so helpless, you could do anything you wanted with him. His boxer shorts are damp in two places. You touch him and he shrinks back a little. Eric said your face was too much for him, and you imagined him pleasuring himself while gazing breathlessly at the class photograph. Now his eyes are wide open, as if in terror. This isn’t love, you think, it’s something else. You pull down his boxers without breaking eye contact. You smell his cock before you see it. The scent, the expectation.

      “Shut your eyes.”

      Eric shuts his eyes, as quickly as if his life depended on it.

      You lean down and kiss the head of his dick. His skin is hot to the touch and he tastes bitter. You insisted that he wash beforehand. You have principles. You take him gently into your mouth and feel him twitch and grow and let him fall out of your mouth. He comes in frantic spurts, it’s flowing out of him, onto your hand, his belly, the sheet. He whimpers. Sweet, you think, and put a finger on his bobbing cock and can feel his heartbeat. The twitching subsides, the fever has passed. You look up. Eric stares at the ceiling, he can’t look you in the eye, it’s been less than a minute.

      Eric waits downstairs while you adjust your lipstick in the mirror and wonder what you’ll look like in fourteen years’ time. You don’t plan on turning thirty, but neither did you plan to be licked by a frog when you were sixteen. Now you’re sixteen and standing in front of a mirror with a pony sticker in one corner and a black heart in the other and wondering why time has to go by so incredibly fast.

      Taja painted the heart three years ago with a felt tip, when your girls were on a sleepover. “Forever,” it says below the heart. You don’t know who it was who came up with that. Nothing is forever, everything has a sell-by date.

       And sooner or later I’ll turn thirty.

      You’re not a beauty. You’re what lies between beauty and boredom. Your eyes are like cloudy water, your hair is smooth and so pale that it’s almost white. You remind a lot of people of somebody, but no one can say exactly who. If it wasn’t for your friends, you’d probably be invisible.

      Your girls are alike in many things, but what fundamentally makes you different is your hunger. None of your girls knows how you feel. There’s a hunger in you that never ends even when you’re full. The hunger makes you start awake at night. You want more. More music, more talks, more time and sex and most of all more life. Your room has fourteen square feet. You lust for more.

      Your girlfriends don’t know anything about your plans. They think you’re going to spend the next hundred years moving around Berlin, sharing everything and never parting. You have no illusions. Take a look at yourself; you won’t get very far with your face, your mind will have to take care of the rest. And your mind’s not really bad.

      The