Bites/Being in Love by Nicole Sellew
1.
I remembered someone telling me that the worst thing that could happen was running out of desires, but I just wasn’t wired like that. I was in the back of my car, on New Year’s Eve, with a boy I’d just met. He tried to take off his pants. I laughed and unlocked the back door. Rainbow fairy lights. Chill, chill, chill. Thinking about someone else, always thinking about someone else. But when the someone else’s asked me what I wanted from them, I said nothing, nothing at all.
2.
The Grand Bazaar with Valentina. She had already spent five hundred dollars that weekend. She held up an antique silver necklace. She gave it to me to hold.
It’s very heavy, I said.
For you, said the salesman, forty dollars.
She didn’t buy it. We walked across the park and she told me that she thought I was a person who lived too much in the imaginary past. She herself was someone who lived too much in the imaginary future.
We passed a group of old men singing. We passed a couple arguing. We passed people who looked cold and alone. Valentina in her blue silk coat and very aware of her own beauty. People looking at us. She held onto my arm.
I imagined the past.
I kept expecting the next person I saw to be me, but it never was.
I feel faint, I said. Can we sit down?
We went to a bench.
Valentina said she felt like a big yellow house was pressing down on her chest. Did I ever feel that way?
Yes, I said. All the time.
The truth was, I never felt like that. I just wanted her to think feeling that way was okay.
3.
Alone in Hackney Downs, and shaking. A girl wearing a tank top and sunglasses and another girl wearing a fur coat. Tell me exactly when you’re coming back, he wrote. So that I can be ready for you. Already, everything happening in the past tense.
4.
When I was in my hotel, I unpacked carefully. It was like anything could happen, and would happen. I lay down on top of the covers and put my legs up the wall. Then I watched the colour drain from my feet. And then I texted him.
5.
The L Train in early March. A woman screaming. The whole time, he was holding my hand. But I was wearing the gloves he gave me. So we weren’t really touching.
6.
It was dark enough that the boundaries between our bodies were dissolved and I couldn’t tell whether the parts of him that were inside of me had maybe always been there. When it was over, and my eyes had adjusted, I could see his shape in the dark. I felt that I was looking not at another person, but at an extension of myself. I told him I didn’t like it in the dark. Do you really think that, he asked. Do you really think I don’t want to see you?
7.
He taught me to parallel park. I told him a beautiful girl should never have to parallel park and that’s why I can’t do it. We got out of the car. It was just past Halloween and on every stoop there were dead pumpkins. The pumpkins watched me walk down the street. When we got to his apartment I looked down and there was a pumpkin seed on my shoe, trailed by a little orange line of goo. I tracked it into his apartment and now something that I brought in would be there for a long time. I was active, I had agency. He asked me if I wanted a cup of tea and I said no. He asked if I was hungry and I said no. He asked if he should eat rice or noodles and I said no. I was active, I had agency.
8.
When I left he gave me back my pink hair clip, the one in the shape of a butterfly. I held it in my hand. I was having a hard time detaching. The ribbons in my hair moved in the wind. It felt like someone was touching my back.
9.
When it comes to love, everyone gets bit by the mosquitoes. Sitting with him in the sexual assault remembrance garden and the fireflies were like something else beautiful that glitters. I told him I’d never seen anything like that, even though I really had. In another park, another time, looking at other stars. With one of the someone elses. We saw two rats, one fat, one thin. We saw white ducks. I was a girl who let someone have sex with her in the park, on the wet grass, looking at the faint traces of bright stars. I woke up with bites all over my ankles, all over my body.
10.
I told him a story: when I was on the train earlier, a man spat in my mouth and called me a bitch.
That’s a story with a clear moral, I said. We get what we deserve.
Okay, he said.
But that didn’t happen to me, I said. It happened to my friend.
But you just said it like it happened to you, he said. You said: I.
Nicole Sellew is a writer and teacher living in Connecticut. She received her MLitt from the University of St Andrews in 2022, and is currently studying for her PhD. Her novella, Lover Girl, will be out with Clash Books in February 2026.
20 June 2025
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