Laying on the Tinders

She smelled like a breath of freshly brewed summer night; strong, dark and smokey. The heat of a bonfire trapped between the splitting ends of her hair, swallowed up in the bulk of her jean jacket. She wore her grass stains and singed t-shirt without shame, badges to match the scar that sliced uneasily through her left eyebrow. Her skin was like firewood, hot to the touch, but tempting from a distance, coarse and lovely all at once, shimmering beneath the blaze of a smirk that kindled in her eyes. The smooth curves of her silhouette seemed to sashay in the spotlight of the moon, dancing against the dry July grass, puffing on a cigar stitched to the corner of her lip. And if you stood close enough, she would bite down on that cigar with a clever grin, and you would ignore the looming fever, just long enough to forget that your momma always told you not to play with fire.

You had keen blue eyes that were soft like skin fresh from a shower’s steam. You had a smirk that consistently substituted for a smile, but it was worn and familiar like your t-shirts. You were cool like the first crunch into a hard mint, sweet like the aftertaste glued into the divots of your teeth. Your words evaporated into the mist of the morning air when you woke up beside her, not quite conscious of the way you slipped yourself so precariously between the stickiness of the bedsheets, but they reminded you of the warmth of the heat

of her skin between your fingers, but not quite how the roughness of her words excited you. Not quite how the toxicity of her smoky breath ebbed into your tongue the night before, or how the cacophony of squeaky furniture on faulty floors was the tenor to the melody of sounds she moaned. Did she moan? Or was it just the noise of you slipping into bliss, and the cool dewiness you remember is really just the familiar lip of a bottle. Your eyes bursted into galaxies as your hand rubbed a journey from your hairline to the stubble on your jaw. She was laying aside you, the blaze lost from her body, rather thumbprints marked your late night discoveries, but it was the lost frames from your timeline of the night before that made you wonder. But as you rose from your bed you reminded yourself

not to ask questions you didn’t want to know the answers to.