Terms Of Service

As she takes me in,

she looks me in the eye,

asks if it feels good,

tells me she loves me.

I look instead

at the pillow gathered beneath her nape.

I know she doesn't mean

to know any of it.

So I say nothing

and keep going.

She lets out measured, practised moans,

twitches her body by design,

and I arrive in silence;

evidence lodged in her depths.

She holds me tight for a minute.

Long enough to make the lie believable.

She needs to convince me of her fiction.

That's the thing about selling fiction:

the price of it lies in the conviction.

She gets up,

washes herself,

makes sure every last shred of evidence

is flushed down the commode.

Then she returns to bed

and tells me how good she feels

when I leave parts of myself inside her.

I pretend to believe her.

Because she needs me to.

She needs the tale to be true,

even if only for a moment,

before she collects her dividends in cash.

We go at it again.

And as the soft, rehearsed moans

begin their second performance,

I wonder,

does she know

it doesn't matter to me?

Any of it.

The moans. The love. The fiction.

Does she understand

that when you pay to eat at a restaurant,

you don't burden yourself

with unnecessary questions, like

whether the chef enjoyed making your meal,

whether they savoured every ingredient,

whether the pleasure on their face was genuine,

or whether they were simply bartering what they had

for enough money to take home some lunch?

You paid. They served.

And sometimes,

that's all there is,

no matter what needs to be believed.