This Time Much Softer
by Kyle Seibel

She was bigger than her photos suggested, but McDaniels didn’t care. She had a symbol tattooed on the inside of her mouth and pulled down her bottom lip to show him.

“It’s from Harry Potter,” she said. 

She claimed to be big into hiking. Fourteeners. Corinne had climbed nearly a dozen. “A big girl bagging all those peaks. You wouldn’t think it, would you?”

They drank their way down Tejon street. She had a rule about Army guys, she told him, but McDaniels’s eyes were the color of gray she liked, so she was making an exception. 

“Where did you get these things?” Corinne said, poking his biceps. “Did you play something?”

“High school,” McDaniels said. “Wrestled varsity all four years.”

“A jock!”

“Well, no.” McDaniels said, rubbing his chin. “Not my senior year, anyway. I didn’t my senior year. Wrestle, I mean.”

They were sitting at a small table in the window at Tony’s. One of his knees was between her legs. Just barely. 

“No?”

“Didn’t want to.” McDaniels swallowed. “Figured, well—I don’t know what I figured.” His eyes went somewhere beyond Corinne, remembering. “Got second at state champs my junior year. It was close too. Guy that beat me graduated. I’m saying my senior year I had a good shot. Then next season I just didn’t want to. The whole team signed this letter asking me to please come wrestle. Coach hand-delivered it to the house. Everyone wanted a reason and I didn’t have one.” Corinne scooched forward and lightly clamped McDaniels’s leg with hers. “Anyway, couple months later I enlisted.”

“Why’d you do that?” 

McDaniels jingled ice cubes in an empty glass. “Don’t really know why I did that either.”

There was a gas fireplace on the rooftop of the last bar they went to and they sat on a slatted bench beyond its oily light, kissing. McDaniels didn’t remember how the kissing began, only that it was happening. He tasted the juniper of the gin and tonics she was drinking and felt with his tongue for the tattoo. Corinne took his hand and moved it discreetly under her skirt. 

Later in his apartment, she asked for a glass of water and drank it in one gulp standing on his small back deck. 

“You must be the mountains in the daytime,” Corinne whispered. “I mean, you must see them.”

“They’re right over there,” McDaniels said, pointing. “You can see them right now.”

“Where were you before?”

“Before Fort Carson?” McDaniels picked up a coffee cup from the outdoor table and dumped out the rainwater. “Some desert.”

“The bad one?”

“I don’t know,” McDaniels said. “Sort of. What’s a good one, you know?”

“But you made it,” Corinne said, playing with her fingers on the back of his neck. “You made it all the way back, didn’t you?” 

“I’m getting better, it’s true,” McDaniels said, turning to her. “I mean, I’m trying, at least. You can fix yourself back together if you try. A lot of people don’t know that. So a lot of people don’t even try.” 

They lingered at the bottom of the spiral staircase that led to the lofted bedroom, kissing again. Corinne seemed solid under McDaniels’s hand. Packed, was the word that came to him. She pulled away and took a step back. Her chin was raw from his stubble rubbing. McDaniels touched the red mark with his thumb.

She said something, but he missed it. Could she hit him, he thought she asked.

“Hit me?” McDaniels said. 

Corinne didn’t hesitate. She reared back with an open fist and slapped McDaniels hard in the face. 

She connected perfectly, cupping her hand to account for the angle of his jaw, pivoting off her toe like a boxer and using her body’s full momentum. The sound of it in the dark room was almost thick, like a mechanical chunk, and it echoed against the high ceiling.

McDaniels grabbed for his face and held where she struck him. It was pulsing and radiating heat. He felt certain it was glowing. He looked at Corinne, backlit by low kitchen light. She was grinning and crouched and bouncing on the balls of her feet.

McDaniels realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a whoosh and pulled in another chestful. It was the opposite of getting the wind knocked out of you, he thought. Somewhere inside him a tight spiral of muscle uncoiled slightly. 

He spat. “Again,” he said and the word hung wetly in the air for a second before Corinne nodded and unbuttoned her blouse and hung it on the back of the kitchen stool. McDaniels pulled off his jeans and sat on the sofa. Some outside force tugged his movements forward. It could have been their millionth night together. What do you call that, McDaniels wondered. 

She hiked her skirt and straddled him. They sank into his overstuffed cushions. 

“Again,” McDaniels commanded from somewhere under her. 

But Corinne didn’t do anything. She loomed above him and crossed her arms. Lightning bolts of blue veins networked across her breasts. She reached back with both hands to put her hair in a ponytail. She was made entirely of pale marble, it seemed to McDaniels.  

“Again?” he asked, this time much softer. 

Kyle Seibel is a writer in Santa Barbara, CA. His work has been featured in Joyland Magazine, Wigleaf, and Little Engines. His debut collection of short fiction, HEY YOU ASSHOLES, will be published by Clash Books in March 2025.

Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.