Give Me Your Cigarette, Pt. 1
A study in power play, denial, and the erotic guilt of being terrible.
I made a man get on his knees on a dirty sidewalk to beg for his friend’s shirt back.
In the morning, I wake with the distinct sense that something has been misplaced. Not dramatically. There’s no blood, no broken glass. Just a quiet misalignment. An astigmatism in reality.
Also: I’m wearing a Harley Davidson shirt that isn’t mine.
My body is curled into the same single-serving pretzel it collapsed into the night before. There are no limbs to navigate around, no second source of heat. Just me, stale cigarette air, and the early light folding through broken blinds.
Then it comes. Not memory, exactly—something sharper. Voltage. A pulse behind my eyes. A tremble in my hands. Not quite shame. Something duller. Residue.
I lie still and wait for the facts to arrange themselves. I’m Jason Bourne, reconstructing a night that I don’t recall, and yet I’m somehow still responsible for. Fucking hate being single.
The texts on my phone read like evidence. The conversations—tethers. There’s no way any of us are texting each other back, right?
Alice — hot girl walks.
Steve — let’s get a drink in New York sometime.
Unknown — haha hey shawty come thru for coke and karaoke.
I vaguely remember saying it was a temperate night. It’s something I do now, some social atrophied tic that I’m forced to say. What a temperate night. Hi, I’m someone’s aunt in Sarasota, nodding at a stranger walking their goldendoodle, saying Oh my, what a temperate night and what a lovely dog that is.
What I remember from that night is that there was a painter in my bed. He’s beautiful in the way that makes you reach for your phone, no flash, just shadows accentuating his lines. I keep taking pictures of him: smoking, shirtless in white denim. Look away from me, I say. Just slightly, chin down.
I don’t want to kiss him. He’s still life.
“You look amazing,” I say too many times. “I love you on my bed.” I don’t know if I mean it. I just like how it sounds. I like the way his eyes and nose squint in that embarrassed, little-boy way. For a split second, I hallucinate us in some version of domestic ease, standing in line at CVS, picking up Plan B, joking about enemas in the same aisle as the sleep gummies. Then I feel disturbed, like I’ve crossed some unspoken line of early courtship. My heart calcifies a little more.
We start making out on the bed. Drunkenly, I spilled his wine on the ground, and I had to stop kissing him because I needed to wipe it up and spray it with Clorox immediately. It’s the ants, I say helplessly. I can’t relax.
You seem so anxious,” I tell him. Deflection. Shitty of me. He gets on the floor with me, we kiss, he wets his fingers, and pushes them into me. His beautiful hands, long, elegant. I do that writhing, whimpering thing that works for me sometimes. The no, no no, yes, but no please no, but it doesn’t work this time.
My brain is like: This is the part where we melt. And we are melting—but only because there’s no air conditioning and I’ve lit twelve candles in a misguided attempt to feel romantic. It’s hot and wet in here like fuck-ass Florida (I lived there, so I can say that). I’m too cheap to buy an AC unit.
I guide his hand between my legs and arch like I’m trying to impress the hot person next to me in yoga. I clench. Nothing. He starts grazing the right spots, but it’s inconsistent like a DJ fucking with my high. And suddenly, I’m enraged. He’s not hitting it the way I need him to. No one is. I don’t feel anything, and I want to snap his fingers off inside me. Or rewind the whole night and skip it entirely. Billy Joel is playing, accidentally. Ugh.
I gently slide him out and ask, in the flat tone I use when something’s bothering me, but I want to sound chill:
“Do you think we’re sexually compatible?”
I say it like I’m asking about the check engine light.
He blinks. “That’s an excellent question,” he says. “I don’t know.”
Yeah. Me either. Mostly, I think it’s me. But I don’t say that.
What just happened was kind of a miracle. Not the good kind. The weird kind. The kind where you look at your life like it’s playing out inside a diorama, and you suddenly want to lie down in the miniature bed and close your eyes forever.
Because I stopped. Mid-sex. Mid-performance. I just… stopped. He was inside me, and I asked that question, the one that makes me feel like I’m orbiting above, watching myself worry about how disappointing it all feels. Or if I’m the disappointment.
He said, “That’s an excellent question.” And I said “yeah,” like it was a temperate night.
We met up with my friends later at one of LA’s new hot spots. He wore my pearls, like a silvery choker. Mine. I introduced him as a friend I was fucking. It felt funny at the time. I didn’t think about how he felt. Were we friends? How do you introduce someone you’ve slept with twice but don’t know?
The night was bleary. Smoky. It moved. I danced to I Kissed a Girl or some other relic of early-aughts rebellion. “I feel like I’m thirteen again, dry-humping my stuffed animals,” I yelled to my friend.
The painter was flirting with some girls. He said he wanted to have a threesome. I told him he could do whatever the fuck he wanted, man. I had reached that sweet equilibrium of substances. Nothing bothered me. Everything was electrifying.
There are nights when I’m on one. Fueled by powders, but not always. Nights when I feel like the hottest thing alive. My skin buzzing. My clit throbbing. Jokes like arrows faster than I can say them. I feel the essence of life, like I’m absorbing vitality and surrendering it back to the night in equal measure.
I flirted with everyone. Not even because I wanted to. It was just the only thing I knew how to do. Monster, I thought to myself. Who are you?
But I was already gone, high on youth and paper cups of huge pours of natural wine.
Friends trickled out. I lost the painter somewhere along the way. He didn’t say goodbye, and I don’t blame him. I was in another dimension. Untouchable. Unattentive.
I called a very famous, extremely successful musician a fucking loser to his face. Completely unprovoked. He laughed. It felt good to be mean.
Men came up to bum cigarettes, and I asked them to tell me their biggest life traumas in exchange. I learned nothing. I wasn’t listening.
When I was ready to leave, I said my last round of goodbyes. A man stood next to a friend of mine and noticed I was shivering. “Are you cold?” he asked. “Why, yes,” I said. Grinning. Drunk.
In front of everybody—I'm talking about a crowd of hot people—he takes his shirt off. No undershirt, just bare chest. And without a word, he hands it to me.
We stand there for a moment, just looking at each other. I let the silence simmer. Tense. I take the shirt, pull it over my head, and say, “Give me your cigarette too. Since you’re my bitch.”
He hesitates.
“I’ll give you a fresh one,” I add. “But I need the one in your mouth. Now.”
He hands it over. I pass him a new one, take his in my mouth, give him one big toothy laugh, and then I turn on my heel and walk away.
I don’t look back.
“Excuse me, miss!” A man is running behind me, trying to keep up with my stride. “That’s my friend’s shirt! He doesn’t have another one, and he loves that shirt. He got it on this trip. He lives in Hawaii, and he leaves tomorrow.”
This is where the night tilts into absurdity. I am far, too far from my feelings. I glance at him and say, “That sounds like a him problem.” I keep walking, cigarette in mouth.
He keeps pace beside me, huffing. “We’re best friends,” he says. “I know he won’t ask for it back.”
That anger from earlier, when I wanted to snap the painter’s fingers off inside me, comes back. I turn to him, blow smoke into his eyes, and say: “No.”
He’s astonished. But he keeps following. Three blocks now.
“Please,” he says. “He needs his shirt.”
“I’m going to teach you something about power play,” I say. “Your friend is going to masturbate to this for a week. You’re cockblocking our consensual exchange. Let it go.”
“You don’t understand,” he insists.
“Oh, I don’t?” I laugh, manic. “Then what will you do to get it back?”
“Anything,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “Then get on your knees on the sidewalk and beg me for his shirt back.”
And he does. He gets on his knees. It’s 3 a.m. at a crosswalk. No one’s around. Just us. A private little ritual.
I barely glance at him. I flick my cigarette onto the sidewalk, crush the ember beneath my boot, and say, “No.”
Something shifts. A butterfly wing flinch. No telling who the ripple is really meant for.
I leave him kneeling. I keep walking home.
I wake up in a stranger’s shirt.
Guilt—serrated and slow. Power distorts, dragging empathy in slow motion. By afternoon, I’m kneeling at the altar of seppuku.
I think about the ego trip I rode raw, no protection. How good it felt until I found myself weeping into my elbow, worried I’d stolen someone’s favorite shirt.
Stay tuned for Part 2:
We go deeper into power dynamics, ego trips, and what happens when confidence blurs into narcissism—plus the full, chaotic interaction over the shirt.