Soft Animal, Hard World (I Might Like You Better if we Fucked)

A Noctural Confession by Maren Vale

A Disclaimer for Snowflakes:

Dear Haters, Thanks for your many insights, but if you’d have taken the time to actually follow the links to the TATANKA project articles, you’d have seen that my creative process, including collaboration with AI, is stated openly and without apology. If that offends you, that’s your existential problem. I conceive, outline, direct, compose, interpret, refine, edit and integrate all content. The AI does any remaining heavy lifting. I use AI the same way every “real writer” uses a computer to share their supposedly “human” content (often questionable, but not ironically). The difference is that I leverage evolution when I see it. Instead of judging others for evolving, perhaps try evolving yourself. Or remain left behind.

I Might Like You Better if we Fucked (Full Album - 1:06:11)

Lyrics

… If time itself was his demeanor
There’d be no sunlight or a glimmer of sunlight
Landing on the street
Sunsuit girls must be discreet

… Sunsuit girls must be discreet
Nursing their fathers, locked inside
They masqueraded as his bride

… I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
But there’s something in your eyes that says maybe
That’s never, never say never

… Slumped by the courthouse with windburn skin
That man could give a fuck about the grin on your face
As you walk by, randy as a goat
He’s sleeping on papers, but he’d be warm in your coat

… I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
But there’s something in your eyes that says maybe
That’s never, never say never

… There’s no easy way to lose your sight
On the street, on the stairs, who’s on your flight?
Old couple walks by as ugly as sin
But he’s got her, she’s got him

… I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
But there’s something in your eyes that says maybe
That’s never, never say never

… Sunsuit girls must be discreet
Nursing their fathers, locked inside
They masqueraded as his bride
Never say never, never say never
Never say never, never, never

… Sun seems to move across the sky so slow
It’s us who’s turning with nowhere to go
Sun seems to move across the sky so slow
Us who’s turning with nowhere to go

… Never say never, never say never
Never say never, say never, say never
Never, never, never say never

… I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
But there’s something in your eyes that says maybe
That’s never, never say never

---

Small Animal, Hard World

I should probably start with the moment his hand slipped under my thigh, because that’s where the split happens. It’s always the same gesture, the same pressure, the same quick inhalation from him as if my body is a container he’s opening. But the moment he touched me there, it was like a flash of two films projected at once.

Film One:
I feel the heat of his hand, the undeniable rightness of being wanted, the gratifying pull of significance, my heartbeat rising because someone has decided my body is valuable enough to pursue.

Film Two:
My mind detaches half an inch above my skin, watching the scene like a bystander pressed to the glass. The word wrong hums faintly behind my ribs, a trapped insect beating its wings against bone.

And then the two films collide, creating a sensation that feels like drowning and breathing at the same time.

That is what sex has been for me:
a contradiction clothed in skin.

---

The sheets were cool when he first pressed me down. I remember that because the temperature shift shocked me into full awareness, the imprint of my spine meeting fabric that hadn’t yet warmed to my shape. Then his weight followed, familiar in its heaviness, almost comforting in the way pain can be comforting if you’ve known it long enough.

He kissed me too hard on the mouth. Men always do when they want something. It’s not passion; it’s pressure. A silent translation of the sentence:
I want, therefore you should give.

I parted my lips automatically.

Reflex.
Conditioning.
The choreography of survival.

His tongue pushed into my mouth with the same entitlement as his hands, which were already gripping my hips like handlebars. I felt a flicker of wanting, it wasn’t for him, but for the temporary release from being unobserved. There are days when the worst part of loneliness is the quiet, not the absence.

He whispered, “God, you’re perfect,” as he kissed down my neck. His breath was warm and sour with beer. He didn’t notice that I stiffened. Men rarely notice the women who freeze underneath them. They only notice the women who move.

So I made myself move.

A small arch of my back.
A faint sound in the back of my throat.
My hand sliding into his hair to guide, even though guiding him felt like steering a flood.

My body knows these gestures better than it knows safety.

---

When he pushed my legs open, a familiar nausea rose, not from disgust of the act but from the speed of the script. Men always rush this part, as if the opening of a woman’s body is a race they trained for.

His fingers pressed inside me with the competence of someone who’s done this too many times to care about nuance. Too fast. Too direct. The kind of touch that aims only for outcome, not connection.

I felt my body clench around him, but not from pleasure.
A spasm masquerading as desire.

He mistook the tension for excitement.

They always do.

“You like that,” he murmured, not asking but declaring, as if my body were speaking a language he’d already decided he was fluent in.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I made another sound, something between agreement and exhale, and tried to convince my muscles to soften. I’ve learned that relaxing hurts less. Resistance is interpreted as challenge; surrender is interpreted as eagerness.

Neither interpretation is true, but when has truth ever mattered in a woman’s body?

---

Then he was inside me.
No pause.
No check.
No searching for my face to ask how I felt.

Just a push.
A claiming.

My body lifted slightly from the bed with the force. A sharp sting spread outward, a flash of too-much-too-quick that made my eyes sting. He groaned into my neck, delighted with himself, unaware that the sound escaping my throat wasn’t pleasure, it was the whisper of air leaving a collapsing structure.

It didn’t matter.

He kept going.

His rhythm was mechanical, the same tempo all men seem to share when they’re more focused on the finish than the journey. His breath hit my ear in hot bursts. His weight pinned me so thoroughly I could feel my heartbeat in the small space where our bodies weren’t touching.

I let myself float again.
I always do.

I leave the room without moving. My body keeps performing. My mind goes somewhere quieter. Somewhere dim.

I exist in the outline of myself, not the center.

But the contradiction stayed. A sick, small ache of wanting, wanting the affirmation, not the act; wanting the illusion of being chosen, not by him, but by a world that taught me that chosen women suffer but unchosen women disappear.

Wrong and right, layered like wet paint that never dries.

---

“Jesus, you feel amazing,” he gasped.

He said it like a man congratulating himself.

I almost laughed.
Instead, I tilted my hips the way I knew would push him faster toward what he wanted. My pelvis strained; a familiar soreness bloomed across my lower belly. He grabbed my face with his hand, thumb forcing my jaw open as he kissed me again, harder than before.

That part always shocks me, not the pressure, but how quickly I adjust to it. How quickly my body obeys.

How much of myself I can silence in order to keep the peace.

He finished with a low groan, collapsing onto me for a moment before rolling away. The absence of his weight left a brief, ghostly relief, air rushing back into the places he’d occupied.

I stared at the ceiling.
The cracks looked like veins.
Like something beneath the surface waiting to break through.

He didn’t ask if I finished.
He didn’t ask if I was okay.
He didn’t ask anything.

He just wiped himself with the corner of the sheet, my sheet, and muttered something about an early morning.

I said, “It’s fine,” because that’s the line.
I always say it’s fine.

It’s my most fluent language.

---

The door clicked shut.
The apartment exhaled.
And something in me, small, bright, rebellious, exhaled too.

Not relief.
Not disgust.
Not desire.

Something closer to recognition.

I am not the thing they keep sculpting me into.
Not anymore.

Tonight felt different, not because of him, but because of me. Because for the first time, I didn’t feel hollowed out. I felt alert. Awake. As if my body were returning to me molecule by molecule.

I wrapped one arm around my stomach, the place that always knots during sex, and pressed gently, not to soothe, but to remind myself I was still here.

My body is not a vessel.
Not a soft container.
Not a doorway for men to walk through.

I am not designed for their hunger.

If I must be a soft animal in a hard world, then so be it, but I am learning, slowly, painfully, how to choose softness for myself, not as sacrifice but as sanctuary.

And maybe, just maybe, the next time someone touches me, I’ll feel something that isn’t a collision of wrong and right.

Maybe I’ll feel whole.

For the first time.

The Next Morning

I woke to the faint metallic tapping of rain against the fire escape, small drops at first, then faster, like a hand drumming the side of a tin cup. The kind of rain that feels like a warning more than a storm. Gray light seeped through the blinds and painted bars across the room, turning everything into a gray-scale still-life of my life: the chair draped with yesterday’s dress, the abandoned mug of tea, the bed-sheet twisted like a half-forgotten accident.

The other side of the bed was cold.
Of course it was.

When men leave my body, they leave my bed like a room they were never in.

I lay on my back for a long time, staring at the water stains in the ceiling. They always blur into familiar shapes if I stare long enough. Today they looked like islands, small and distant, none of them connected. Like me.

My hips ached faintly, a dull reminder of being held without tenderness. I placed my hand on my lower stomach. The skin was warm, but the hollow underneath it felt refrigerated, as if the parts of me that mattered most retreated to somewhere unreachable.

I should have gotten up, started the day, made coffee.
Instead, I lay there listening to the rain announce itself against the glass, pretending it was speaking to me in a language I once knew.

---

I wasn’t lonely.
Lonely implies wanting someone beside me.

I was alone,
in the factual, bone-deep, topographical sense.

There’s a difference.

Loneliness is needing.
Aloneness is knowing.

The bed creaked when I finally sat up. My muscles protested, stiff from hours of being pinned under a body that didn’t know how to hold me without taking something. The sheets smelled faintly of him. I hated that my body recognized the scent before my mind did. My body always remembers what I want to forget.

I pulled the covers to my chest, not out of modesty, there was no one here to hide from, but because the chill in the room made my skin hyperaware. Over the years I’ve learned that solitude is loudest in the morning. It sits at the edge of the bed, uninvited and honest, waiting for me to look it in the eye.

The truth is:
I have never been more alone than when I am recovering from being touched.

---

My feet hit the hardwood floor. Cold. Sharp. Real.

I walked to the bathroom, passing the faint reflection of myself in the hallway mirror. I stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe because my reflection looked like a stranger in borrowed skin. Maybe because I needed proof that I still existed outside the silhouette of someone else’s desire.

My hair was a mess, my mascara smudged, my mouth slightly swollen from being kissed too hard.

I looked like a woman who had been used.
But I also looked like a woman still standing.

I pressed a fingertip to my bottom lip. It throbbed. A bruise would probably bloom there by afternoon. Part of me liked that. Not the pain itself, but the evidence. A mark that this happened, that it wasn’t a dream or a flashback or a story I whispered to myself in the dark.

I leaned closer to the mirror.

“Is this what you want?”
I mouthed, almost silently.

Not to myself.
Not to the man.
To the girl I used to be, the one who thought love meant giving until nothing was left.

The girl who confused attention with affection.
Desire with devotion.
Hurt with having a purpose.

She didn’t answer. She never does.

---

In the bathroom, I turned on the shower but didn’t step in. I just watched the steam rise and fog the mirror until my reflection vanished completely.

There was a relief in disappearing.

The hot water roared in the tiny space, a deafening reminder of how quiet the rest of my life was. The noise filled my ears, my chest, the small cracks in my ribs where memories still hide.

I stepped under the stream.

The water hit the tender places first. Where he’d gripped. Where he’d pressed too hard. Where my skin had gone numb from overcompensating.

My breath caught when the heat touched inside me.
A sharp sting.
Immediate.
Unmistakable.

I closed my eyes.
Let the water run down my face.
Let it pull last night off my skin in rivulets.

But cleansing is not erasing.

No matter how hot the water gets, it can’t wash out the old scripts.

The ones written into me like scars.
The ones that say:
Be wanted, no matter the cost.
Be available, or be invisible.

I leaned my forehead against the tile. It was cold.
The contrast made my skin prickle.

For a moment, a single, fragile moment, I wished someone would come up behind me and wrap their arms around my waist. Not a man, not any specific person, but someone who touched me without expectation. Someone who held me because I deserved holding, not because my body was convenient.

But that fantasy dissolved as soon as I formed it.

No one was coming.
No one ever comes.
Not for me.

Not in the way that matters.

---

After the shower, I wrapped myself in a towel and stood at the sink. My body was warm from the water, but the air chilled me instantly, raising goosebumps along my arms.

I traced the outline of my collarbone.
Ran my thumb over a faint red mark on my hip.
Touched the tender inside of my thigh where his fingers had been.

Not with shame.
Not with desire.

With recognition.

These parts of me are mine.
Even when they don’t feel like it.
Even when history tries to say otherwise.

I walked back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets were still tangled, a physical map of a night I didn’t want to relive but couldn’t ignore.

Silence settled again.
Heavy. Intentional.
Firm as a hand on my shoulder.

I let it.

Because in the quiet, I can almost hear the truth starting to form:

I am always alone.
But maybe I don’t have to be lost.