Mouth Like Blood

If I gave him two tequila shots and went down on him he would start to tell me things. Slowly at first, but I knew how to tug on the sweater threads of his past. Extracting the storylines gently. The finest strands of silk pressed between my thumb and forefinger and pull gently, evenly.

I would sort of straighten up the skeletons from his past and knock the dust off. Count their fingers and toes. Run my finger tips over the chips in the cool smooth surface of their bones.

Like this I began to know him. The other women. The stories weren’t typically thrilling. Often they were just the regular stories of an upper middle class guy who’d grown up in a wealthy Chicago suburban town. He’d taken his parents car out for a joy ride when he was a teenager and gotten caught, he’d traveled Europe after his graduation from a university known for it’s party culture. He’d moved to San Francisco and bounced around the city wondering around, waiting for an interesting life to happen to him.

This wasn’t a relationship that I wanted to work at. Something to work on. But I was intrigued by his understanding of the world and his innate understanding of how to look at it.

We had only been out a few times. I wasn’t planning on sleeping with him. He was handsome and intelligent, intense. But I didn’t think of him like that. He had a mouth like blood and that meant that I could only kiss him for a minute at a time.

Originally published at PigeonLab.