I Need to Belong

It was what she needed, she said, later. It was not something I could really understand. I had always been something of a loner. I had never belonged to anything. I never joined any club, never became a fan of any team or band, never wanted to be one of the lads or in with the in-crowd. I had always preferred to be the one that stood apart, alone.

I was standing apart, alone, when we met. I had left the noise of the party behind me and strolled out onto a balcony to breathe some fresh air and get away from inane opinions.

She came up behind me and stood at the balcony rail next to me, turning her body towards me. I turned my head just enough to acknowledge her presence. I had played this game before. I knew what she wanted, needed, probably more than she did, then.

We spoke, made those tentative introductions, traded necessary information in the way that people do in such situations. At first, I was barely polite, a little angry at having my precious solitude invaded. However, as we talked she seemed less annoying than most of those I’d come out on the balcony to avoid.

She was witty, intelligent, articulate – the sort of person you rarely meet at parties. She was married, of course. Her husband, she nodded back towards the party, ‘…with his mates, probably talking about sport.’

I nodded, thought about making some comment about the pointlessness of sport, but she beat me to it.

‘I don’t know, sometimes I think there is something homoerotic about men and sport.’ She sipped her wine. ‘My husband and his friends always seem to need to be measuring their dicks against something, against each other… metaphorically, of course.’

She was silent for a while. ‘I’d leave him, but I have nowhere to go.’ She was looking out over at the night sky, but then she turned back to me. ‘I need to belong,’ she said, toying with the chain around her neck as she looked into my eyes.

I looked back, expressionless. ‘You could belong to me,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she replied and stared down at the wine in her glass, a smile appearing on her lips. ‘I could.’