The Night You Came
It unfolds like this.
It is only my skin, lit in the darkness by the light of my laptop. I breathe into my writing, breathe as though it is life. I don’t know if it is any different anymore.
In these small hours — the really small ones — I can no longer tell which side of the screen I’m on.
Tonight I’m everywhere. I lie in cool sheets that absorb me. And I write. And write. I try to write it all away, but it never leaves. It just comes.
I try to write away the proverbial demons, but they wag their fingers to remind me that proverbs are dead and they — these monsters — are the only real things. They tell me what not to feel, but my bare skin argues against it all. And this damn heat.
The power is back on and the fan oscillates, blowing a weak breeze onto my damp chest and neck each time it passes by. I pretend it is your whisper along my spine as it moves near. And it pains me each time you and the fan leave.
I think of the last time your arms encircled my ribcage and my face nestled into your chest. The smell of you filled me, overwhelmed me as it does still. Sometimes, I can will my memory to recall you that way, the smell of you. And I do it now.
You are a faint smell of sweat and clean shirt. You are a combination of shoulds and shouldn’ts, of always and not quite yets. You are more and less and almost enough and far too far away at any given time. You fill my nose with these dreams and my mouth with a sweet ache of an appetite never satiated.
It works and I feel you here now next to me, as though we shared the same air and the same skin. We are sticky in this thick summer and neither of us cares. The light of my laptop casts itself across my chest and creates shadows for you to trace and I want you to find them all.
You are here now, aren’t you? Even now as my own hands wander these forbidden lands? I can tell you are driving these deft movements over me, each soft and purposeful touch, each plea for more of you on my neck and my tongue and my belly.
It is ever more real by each second that passes and my nose trails over you, taking you in. My lips have found each ripe patch of flesh to taste like summer’s own golden offerings and I devour like so much warm and sweet fruit. Your tongue of honey mango against the apricot of my own mouth and it is sugar as we kiss. I hold your lip between my teeth for all the sweetness in this rush.
And the laptop light and the fan that passes by only once every few seconds. Only once an eon. Only once an eternity even as we sweat and beg for the cool air.
I thirstily gulp from the ice water next to me and it tickles my throat. I pour some of the frigid liquid along your chest and drink directly from you, from this bounty before me of you. You are the water and water is life and now you are life and everything here and now. And as my tongue retrieves each drop I am undone.
I am climbing over you and my hands are on you and over you and pulling at your hair. It is still fruit and summer pie but it is dark cherry red now and I want all of it. My thirst has grown to hunger for every bit of you. I pour more now over you and lick you up.
My hands on your hips pull you into me, into my mouth. You awaken along my soft tongue and it fills my belly with only more wanting. Your hands in my hair clutch for purchase as your hips move closer still against my cheekbones and I have all of you now. I want nothing more except your fingers in my hair and on my neck pulling for more.
This sweet sticky night moves in pulses and now you are shifting down and pulling my legs around your neck. My thighs are wet with summer heat and the magic of what you’ve done to my mind and body. I’ve melted.
Your mouth moves on me like butterscotch and pear. I grasp at sheets. The fan drowns my whimpers in a soft buzzing that has become the soundtrack to this moment. My eyes open and it isn’t you, even though it is, and I find only me. But the moment carries itself on as though life has been breathed into the very passing of time, each second its own undoing.
I cannot stop the fire from spreading. I am aflame. My eyes close as you move from tongue to fingers to all of you. Belly to belly, mouth to mouth, and legs around your back, I am yours. You rock into me, plump blackberries and fig, the dark and earthy flavors of you deep, deep in my mind. It is my own hands now and maybe they are yours too, but I can’t tell.
No matter now as I am gone. And the light of the laptop and the fan that moves. Moves more and more. More. More. More, I cry, as my fingers plunge deep within me now to find you. I grasp at myself everywhere for you, searching until you are here.
This deep, sweet ache. This ritual of your presence inside me whether you are here at all or not. The sweat and the ice water and the soaking wet thighs are lost into a sea. I drift away on that sea — coming, undone.
