Story: Misinterpereting Oliver

note: Obsessions and needs and wants and all the reasons that you stay together even though you shouldn't. Another disfigured relationship is better than nothing...
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“Don’t move.”

I couldn’t do what he wanted. I couldn’t sit still. Oliver stood in front of me, the lens of the camera leaving a trail of every move I made. I wanted to be anywhere but here.

“Couldn’t we just do this another time?” and “Do you want me to make you a cup of coffee?” and “Is that the phone ringing?” Nothing distracted him. He wouldn’t be put off.

“Just act natural” and “Think about something else” and “Pretend I’m not here.”

But he kept pushing the cold metal against my skin. Pushing me back down onto the couch with the camera, before bringing it back to his face, hiding behind it. And I was exposed to him. To his insistence.

It was always like this. He pushed. I pulled. And he always got his way. This time his way involved a camera, and a lot of black and white film.

Oliver’s obsessions were nothing new. But each obsession grew in its potency. Each time it lasted longer. First there was The Forgetting. Each night, he would buy a few bottles of cheap wine, and he made forgetfulness his passion. His brother’s death was the one thing that he did not know how to forget. No matter how hard he tried.

Oliver was three years younger than Mark — and did everything to emulate him. And then Mark got in the car with his girlfriend, and never came back. Oliver wanted to go with them, but Mark insisted otherwise. Oliver stayed home.

The next morning, a police officer knocked on their door. Oliver answered. Mark and his girlfriend had been drinking. They lost control. The car flipped four times. Mark wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. He went through the windshield.

Oliver never recovered.

His obsessions changed. His intensity deepened. And he lost himself in one thing after the other.

For five months he did nothing but play the guitar. He bought hundreds of picks. The tips of his fingers were calloused and I tried not to pull away when he touched me. Putting the guitar down at 2 am, he would come into the room, slip under the covers behind me and run his finger down my spine. He would fall asleep with his chin on my shoulder, and I would lay there, the ghost of his fingers leaving their trail on my back.

Now it was the camera. The dining room had become a graveyard of photographs. Pictures of the gravel by the side of the road. A blur of a white car driving past, the driver’s arm hanging out of the window. The branches of the tree outside our bedroom window.

And me.

Black and white replicas of bones jutting from shoulders - the result of a childhood accident. Or the crook of the neck, the curve of fingers, the three freckles forming a triangle from the side of my nose to my cheek. But he always came back to that shoulder.

At first he took them while I slept. My arm stretched out from under a pillow. My foot emerging from under deep covers, as I hid in deeper sleep. He knew I hated cameras. All of our photos together were the same. I would bring my lips to his neck, and he would laugh, raise his fingers to my cheek, and hide me from the rest of the world. When his hands were still soft to the touch.

And then Oliver became relentless. Forced me to sit in front of him for hours on end. His hands would reach into my hair, my skin, as he fashioned me into the shapes he wanted to create.

Soon he stopped taking photos of anything but me.

“Your shoulder,” he would say, “It’s just like Mark’s.”

And I would smile. Pretend that there was nothing wrong with being compared to his dead brother. That my accident had twisted this shoulder into the same disfigurement Mark had been given in birth. I pretended not to notice because it was easier on us that way.

But it had been a year since he picked up Mark’s old Zenit camera for the first time. And there had been none of the telltale signs that he was growing tired of it. There was none of the frustration that usually followed when things didn’t go his way. He spent hours in the makeshift dark room he had made, developing pictures that didn’t come out the way he imagined them. And still he bought more film. Still he spent hour after hour, trying to make something out of me. Something I could never be.

And I could do nothing but let him.

He reached out from behind the camera, his hand pulling my arm towards him.

“Don’t turn away from me. I’m trying to get a shot of your shoulder.”

I knew it was pointless to resist. But still I tried. “I’m not turning away from you. It’s the camera — why don’t you put it down for a while?” I tried to twist away from him, from that lens that watched me always. I had to make Oliver want something else. I needed Oliver to want something other than that camera.

I grabbed his hand, kept it on my shoulder, pulling him forward and he almost lost his balance. I let him run his fingers over the bone that had healed in ways it should not have. I pressed my hand down over his, encouraging him to keep his fingers on me, as he looked down at me sitting on the couch. Lowering the camera to his side, he slid his knee onto the couch next to me, hovering above me, and I leaned back. There was nowhere to go. His thigh pressed down on mine, and he ran his finger down my cheek. It had been over a year since he had picked up the guitar. And it almost felt as though I had him back - the tips of his fingers were soft, his index finger mapping my lips.

Momentarily forgotten, the camera slipped from his hand, onto the couch next to me. He reached down, pushing my knees apart, pressing himself against me. My hand reached for the back of his neck. We had been here before.

And then his lips were on the jutting bone of my shoulder as he opened his mouth, drawing his tongue across it. And I knew what his new obsession would become.

I arched my back. He knew I wanted him. His hand grasped the back of my neck, my arms stretched out, reaching for the air surrounding his body, my eyes wide open.

He whispered in my ear, “Don’t move,” as he reached for the camera.