The Piercing by Rachel Schmidt

My ex-boyfriend sits at the edge of my marital king-size bed. Finn looks exactly the same as the last time I saw him, except, he’s only wearing a loincloth. His nakedness makes me aware of my own and I try to cover myself with the comforter, but it’s trapped beneath Finn’s weight.

Beside me, my husband snores, shifting slightly in his sleep. Past him, the numbers on his digital bedside clock slide into a puddle on top of his latest self-help book. I make do by pulling up my old, ratty, charity 5K run tee-shirt and scoot to sitting against the headboard. Already, the shirt’s neckline, cut to a deep V, is slipping, nearly uncovering the boobs that past Finn—maybe real Finn—used to fondle. That was long before the children who turned my breasts into something I don’t recognize when I scrub beneath the soft skin where my third nipple hides.

            I want to ask Finn why he’s here. Yet opening my mouth only makes this somehow more ordinary and it’s anything but. Which is why I’m pulling the age-old bogey-man defense and grabbing the blankets like the boy I used to love, who I used to have sex with in my college house’s kitchen pantry, thighs pressed into the shelves and back crushing the boxed mac-n-cheese, who is now a monster who crawled out from under the bed. This isn’t real.

            He speaks first.

            “Hello.” No attempt to keep his voice low. No emotion. Flat.

            The simplicity, no, the audacity of the basic greeting, snaps me from the pretense that this is simply a fantasy where Finn, dressed as Tarzan, is finally ready to admit what a douchebag he was all those years ago.

 “Why are you here?” I whisper-hiss the words and glance to my husband, expecting him to have woken. I brace for his outrage at the scantily clad stranger seated on our bed. Instead, his mouth only parts, lower lip trembling as if he’s speaking in whatever dream is more important than my safety and wellbeing.

            “You have something of mine,” Finn says, fingering the saggy opening where a gauged earring used to be. It makes his ear look like the same animal that got the rest of his clothing took a piece of him with it. “I want it back.”

            Something of his from twenty years ago? I do a brief scan of the room if only for the benefit of this ghost-of-orgasms-past version of Finn. It’s been too many years and enough Goodwill trips that anything of his is long gone. There’s no way that seventeen years later, he’s coming after me for his scarf like we’re stuck in a Taylor Swift song.

            Finn’s still trying to fit his pinky into that old hole in his ear. He grabs the probing hand with the other, settles them onto his lap. Shrugs. “Feels like it should still be there, seeing you, being here with you.”

            I cross my arms, ignoring his wistfulness over the piercing. “Is this about the chipped tooth?” Like a knee to my own skull (apparently the patella is hard enough to break a tooth), another possibility of what’s happening here occurs to me. Maybe Finn’s alone—staring forty in the face with no family—nothing and no one—to help hold his hand into middle age. Eyes narrowing, I say, “This better not be some piece-of-your-heart sob story. You broke up with me.”

            His look of revulsion is enough to both calm me down and reignite the self-consciousness he’d made me feel throughout our relationship. To my right, my husband mumbles something in his sleep that could be the word pancake. The concerns about my bared breasts have brought the deliciously-shaped breakfast food to his mind via our shared consciousness, perhaps. Finn and I both watch him for a few seconds before refocusing on each other.

            “This may sound crazy, but could I—” Finn leans, hand outreached. “Please?” he asks before initiating contact.

            A thrill catches my spine and I bend forward before I can spare another thought for my marriage. I haven’t been touched by a man besides my husband in almost fifteen years. Finn wastes no time. He tugs something from my scalp near the bottom of my hairline. Something hard and sharp. I didn’t even know I had anything there, but now that it’s out, the pain is fresh. Stinging and insistent. I cup my neck.

            “What was it?” I’m not a daily showerer, but jesus.

            He holds it to close to his eye and squints. “Fingernail.”

            “Lodged in my head for nearly two decades?”

            He shrugs.

            I spread my fingers, massaging the area where it had been and am shocked anew at how much it hurts. At the wetness and divot that makes the pain go from dull to sharp with touch. And because I haven’t had the morning’s first cup of coffee yet, the one that my sleeping husband will bring when the alarm goes off at five-fifteen, I voice the idiotic nagging of the wound. “Can you put it back?”

            Finn cradles the nail to his chest. “It’s mine.”

            “It’s been part of me all this time, though.”

            “You’ll heal.”

            Then he stands, looks at me as he threads the small sliver of nail through his ear and vanishes from the room, leaving me feeling as untethered to reality as he must truly be. My head throbs, both grounding and infuriating me at the new insult. I know it’s simply a matter of time, reknitting the skin at the base of my skull. That my hair will hide the hole during the transition from decorated to scabbed to scarred. But I’d rather not give another second to the man who for so long made me associate love with pain. I scoop my phone from the nightstand and begin searching for replacement jewelry. Earrings that look like miniature fishhooks. Studs shaped like talons. Something, anything, that will mirror what was once completion.