Modern Love by Lilly Sokolowski

As part of EWF X Hate Mail (2026)

He slept with his mouth open and his drool dribbled down onto the scrunched-up hoodie he was using as a pillow. He only owned one, which he’d lent Sarah for the night. She watched the rise and fall of his chest and resisted the urge to place her head on it. The doona was kicked off his torso, poetically covering his groan, like a modern-day Aphrodite. In the early-morning light, he seemed to be someone else. His face now 3-dimential, bumpy, even ugly. No longer softened by the carefully selected photos on his Hinge profile or by the orange glow of the bar they’d met at on Lygon Street. And Sarah saw her own ugliness reflected in him too; the acne that punctuated her cheeks, the crust in the corner of her eyes, the bad breath. 

Her head ached, her mouth was dry and her stomach swirled with the multiple glasses of red wine she’d consumed the night prior. She hadn’t slept but instead lay awake all night with the painful feeling in her abdomen of needing to piss, fearful of getting up and not being able to navigate her way to the bathroom or of bumping into one of his housemates. She decided that an STI was better than a walk of shame in the dark. 

She looked around his room as the daylight revealed all of the distinguishable qualities of a 20-something boy living in an inner-north share house. Dark blue sheets, paperbacks in a pile on his bedside table, a metal clothing rack that bent with the weight of his clothes. But it was considered and neat and there was something earnest about it, which only made her like him more. 

She stared at his side profile, listening to the soft sounds of his blocked sinus before he choked himself awake, eyes blinking open like a baby’s. He turned to kiss her, sleepily, on the forehead, then on the mouth. His breath was stale, slightly unpleasant, but not off-putting. Sarah was suddenly very aware of being naked in a stranger’s bed. Her head on his yellowing pillow, his hand placed on her lower back. And he looked as shy as she felt, his cheeks a little flushed, his eyes unsure. He kissed her again, but this time with an awkwardness that hadn’t been there in his half-asleep state. 

He looked at the clock on his bedside table, which revealed it was 9.02am. ‘Fuck,’ he said, dragging his hand over his eyes and yawning. 

‘Morning,’ she said, playing make-believe. Like they’d woken up together every morning for the past 50 years. 
She told him that she needed to pee and sat up awkwardly, very aware of her bare chest as she scrambled to find her bra and underwear that had gotten caught up in his bedsheets, and her top that had been thrown to the ground. It was right next to the used condom, which she pretended not to see. 

She went to put on her skirt before he said ‘wait,’ and untangled himself from the sheets, getting up from the bed to offer her a pair of jeans from his cupboard. She pulled them on, embarrassed at how perfectly they fit.
‘I have a small waist,’ he said. 

As he bent down to awkwardly manoeuvre his underwear back on, he quickly grabbed the condom from the ground. Sarah could tell he was trying to do it fast enough so that she wouldn’t notice, hastily throwing it in the bin beside his desk, which only made it more noticeable. They stood in the middle of his room in silence, him half-dressed and her in his perfectly fitting jeans, regarding each other as the strangers they were. 

In the bathroom mirror, she looked at herself like a child who’d done something they weren’t supposed to. She felt out of her body, foreign, coy even. But she also felt smug looking at her pale skin and eyes outlined by the black smudge of last night’s mascara. It was the feeling of doing something you weren’t supposed to and getting away with it. 

The bathroom was littered with used toilet rolls and small black hairs. When she sat down on the toilet, it really hurt to pee. 

On the way back from the bathroom, she walked passed the kitchen to find him in front of the coffee machine. He had put on clothes—a pair of jeans and a button up shirt which felt too formal for the occasion. The kitchen, which was also the living, was that of a stereotypical share house, cobbled together with second-hand furniture and empty bottles of alcohol, like trophies of bygone house parties. 

‘Coffee?’ 

‘Please,’ she said, sitting down at the kitchen island. Sarah watched as he made the coffee tenderly and was embarrassed to witness him do such a simple domestic task. Somehow it seemed more intimate than sex, an insight into a life she knew so little about, even if their closeness last night and all the things they’d revealed to one another had made her feel like they knew each other so well. But as he steamed the milk, she realised that she didn’t know him at all. In the aftermath of playing pretend was a familiar kind of loneliness that crept over her. A feeling she’d had time and time again after sex. A feeling she often didn’t know how to place, but that left her with a sense of aimlessness, a hopelessness, like she was floundering mid-air. 

He took her to sit on the couch in his backyard, perfectly incongruous amongst the overgrown grass and sprawling fruit trees, which he explained by telling her that the house had belonged to an old Italian couple before it had become a share house. He picked her a fig from one of the trees and broke it apart, giving her half. An act she regarded as one of care, a sign that he might just like her. That this might be the beginning of something. 

She asked him basic questions she realised she didn’t know about him—his last name, where he’d gone to high school––but he didn’t reciprocate her curiosity. He seemed tired, distracted, smiling in the vacant sort of way a sales assistant would. He sipped his coffee and let the silence fill the distance between her questions. She shrugged this off as him being hungover and sleep deprived. 

The clouds sat heavy in the sky and Sarah realised that they hadn’t touched each other since leaving the bed. 
She said that she should leave soon, that she was seeing her friend in a play in a few hours. But she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to reach out and touch him again, or she wanted him to reach out and touch her. She was waiting for a sign that this could really be something.

She was never good at just casual sex.

The clouds grew darker as he drove her home, and when he turned down Sarah’s street, rain begun to spatter on the windshield. 

As she unbuckled her seatbelt, she told him that they should do this again. ‘So, I can at least give you back your jeans,’ she said, scared of seeming too eager. 

He smiled and reached across the handbrake to give her a hug. It was the kind of half-hearted hug you’d give a friend of a friend. 

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ll text you.’ And then added, ‘no rush about the jeans, I hardly wear them.’ 
When she got to her front door, she turned to see his car go up the street and disappear around the corner. She felt as if she might laugh, or cry, or vomit, or all three. 

His jeans sat in her cupboard for months before she finally decided to donate them to the op-shop.