by
Matti
Maybe it's just a question of an inch or two
Yes: I see you nod.
An inch less -- there, maybe, where your finger barely grazed my side. Grazed me as if by accident, as I lie here in bed, as I lie where I have let you lead me, where I once tried to lead a girl but now am led. An inch less where your finger barely stroked my side and there would be a curve, a curve dipping closer to my center, as if a potter's wheel had spun a little faster, as if a hand had lingered on the clay a second longer.
Or an inch more. There, say, down just a little from your touch. An inch more there and, like the slope of a gently rising hill, you'd find a curve rising to my tilted hip, like the bent wood of some ancient harp.
Or there, where perhaps it is best if you don't touch. Not yet. But there, above my heart, where your tongue on my small nipple would burn so. An inch or two more, rising as if an inner blooming could no longer be contained, as if a swell of feeling rose from deep within me. Soft as a cloud might be to touch, as two clouds.
But do not touch now. Stay instead, leaning there against the headboard, your broad shoulders resting there as if the hard V of your torso had been carved from that wood, as if it were the bite of the chisel and blows of the mallet that made you appear tonight. As if maybe that's why your arm (the color of oak after the steel's bright edge has cut) lies there beside me, waiting. Stay leaning there, so that I will not know if the pale brown bulge of your bicep is just as smooth and just as warm as I suspect, or if my touch would feel the rough burrs and cool shavings that a chisel left. Stay there, so that the shadow falls across your face, so I can't see your features, so I can't know you. Let's keep a borderland of cool white sheet between us, for a moment, for this moment.
"An inch or two," you say.
And leaning closer to me, now you show me: Index fingers held an inch apart.
"This much?" you ask.
And, already knowing the answer, you reach still farther, stretching your two fingertips towards the crown of my head. I feel you leaning, looming over me. Feel you though our bodies still don't touch.
Tensing, I try to press my back firm to the sheet beneath, backing away, backing away. I close my eyes.
"This distance, the space between my two fingers," you say.
Two fingers, an inch apart. Such a small distance that all I feel is a single gentle pressure. One spot -- right there, just where an infant's still-forming bones eventually knit together, where now that we've grown, we adults have become all-too-solid, closed. Where perhaps it may be time, past time, to let myself be open, to be re-opened, in order to be made new, to be renewed. I feel you touching me, yes. Pressing me.
"Ah," you say. "Ah, good."
Is it just one finger that you touch to me, like the finger tracing curves along my side?
"No," you whisper. "No, two. But close, so close you feel just one. A question of an inch, not even two. Trivial things, these inches-or-two, you see. Illusory things, these touches."
No, not illusion, for I feel.
"Not illusion, no," you say. "But not quite everything. The net of nerves aren't woven tight enough just here, where I touch, for you to feel the two. You need a finer-woven web of feeling, of sensation, to understand the shape of some things. But wait."
It is not until you begin to comb your fingers through my hair, that I can feel: Yes, oh yes there are two. We two. Your two fingers. Fingers, moving the way a hand hung over a rowboat's side might barely part the water, moving beyond the power of my eyes to see, like the way that a spring wind riffles through a field of wheat. Is that a ripple your one finger is stirring, a wake rejoining behind; is that a bending of the ripened heads of grain stirred by your other finger, before swaying back to their well-ordered rows?
Or is it just two fingers, toying idly in my hair? Combing down, then resting for a moment, here, where a pulse beats beneath thin skin. Feeling: A beat, slowing? Calmer? Or not.
You won't say what you feel, touching me there, won't tell me what you diagnose.
Nor will I tell myself.
Now your fingers slowly trace more lines, more lines: The outline of my face, a ridge of bone. Cheekbones. Brows. Stroking one time, twice. As if considering, contemplating.
"Here," you say, "Here, it is not even a question of an inch. Here, fractions of an inches are an issue, fractions: an eighth, a sixteenth, thirty-second. So small a difference."
So small, I think.
Fingers so lightly touching. I feel them, but barely, Feel them move the way a mesmerist's hands might move, soothing, curing.
And as you stroke I also (or perhaps instead) now feel the breeze from the window, the dancing edge of muslin curtain floating. Lying on my back, is it the touch of fingers, or the cloth, or maybe the breeze that now I feel?
Or maybe muscles tensing, rigid. A bowl bowed outward, the small of my back pressed tight against the sheet. This trembling counterpoint: The lightness of the moving air, your stroking fingers like a treble line of melody against the deep bass groan of the dipping bedsprings as you shift your weight. Your implacable presence looming beyond where I can look, dare look.
Perhaps the shift of weight will tip a balance. Perhaps the play of breeze across my skin, the brushing of a finger, brushing so lightly, a touch so delicate it might almost sink beneath a surface. Such a small distance. Not even an inch.
Fingertips: Two, now, a symmetric dance. My right brow traced, my left. Cheekbones, jaws. Fingertips: Four now stroking my cheek. Six. Now all your fingers, Trailing now over my skin -- or maybe touching, just a little deeper. Maybe a touch beneath the surface, contact with something more essential.
"Do you feel?" you ask.
A nod so small no one else can see.
"We are layers," you say. "Do I touch the outermost, or is it the next one down? Is it the farthest humming electron of my skin that's touching yours? Or do I merge a bit, the smallest bit, with you? Maybe I touch you deeper down, my finger's touch not the first layer of you, not the second. My finger's touch, here ..."
Along my cheekbone, yes. Along my jaw.
"A fraction of inch less there, that's all you'd need. "So little, we could barely measure," your voice a murmur. "So little that it would need only the slightest pressing of a finger, like the extra second that the potter's hand rests on the spinning clay."
That's all. So small.
Small as the shiver traveling up my spine, pressed flat and hard to the mattress though I still am. An undulation, a half-formed "S", a tiny wave from root to crown. Shivering, as if you touched my shoulder at the bar. As you did touch, in fact, and not so long before. And as I shivered.
I'd walked past the place once, twice. And finally, the third time, heart pounding, I pushed through the door, sure that just as I turned I saw the knowing smirk of a passing girl, a look that nearly, nearly made me flee, as I had fled before. It is a place that's known, after all. That's how I knew. A kind of place I hadn't dared to go before. Dared now only because this was a strange part of town, and I was feeling strange.
I had barely two hours before tried to peer into the steam clouding my mirror, trying to see my face, my real face, now that she'd swept herself out of my life, swept out like the swoop of her arm gathering her nylons from the shower rod behind me. Tried to see if an empty hollowness I felt within was visible without, tried to see if hot, hot water washes the bitterness of certain words away. A cold night, maybe. Or maybe I felt only the chill from all the hours of drizzle seeping from the fog today, the fog rolling in from the sea beyond, the fog that hid my steps until I'd walked past once, and twice before I turned. In the fog: Violet, ruby lights flashing, caught in the corner of an eye, the glow from dark windows only glimpsed before the blowing drops make me tear up, before the chill wind demands I bow before it. Violet and ruby sparkling in the dark wet of the foggy street.
The warmth of the entranceway momentary relief. I paused in that cramped airlock between the chill of the streets and -- and what?A step.
Dark in here, and warm; a wet warmth that makes glasses and mirrors steam. I see a smear of violet neon in the window, low lights glowing along a bar, running half the length of a wall: dimness beyond. Slowly, focus comes, slowly my heart thuds just a little less.There are two men, chatting, two feet away. One glances, smiles. I hear the sing-song of his voice, though not his words. I see him glance and look away and glance again, see the liquid dark brown of his eyes. The bartender approaches, pausing a moment with the others, laughing an instant before continuing to me.
Half-swallowed words, an order croaked out. Waiting, I just stare ahead, as if interested in the rows of bottles gleaming, the mirrored gaps, as if wearing blinders. Waiting, I shake. No tab, no thanks, I tell the bartender when he at last returns. I tell him to keep the change, waving fingers to leave a too-large tip, get a flashing grin, a speculative glance, before he spins away. Gulping a first sip, I almost decide to run. Almost.
But don't. I see from out the corner of my eye the man who had tried to catch my eye before; see him glancing again, smiling, as if to invite me over, as if the two of them and me could become three, just chatting, shooting the breeze, the easy-going way that any three at loose ends on a foggy night might do. I sipped.
A quiet night. Hardly a soul inside. Safe. As always I have wanted it to be safe for me.
And so, the feel of your hand on my shoulder is a shock.
You'd come from where? The dimness, in the back? The cold outside? Was it a shadow that I felt first, before your hand, or was it a chill? I cannot say. Perhaps both. Perhaps just a sense that, even more than I was in that instant before I pushed through that door, I am now poised for something big. A step across the threshold. You knew I shook, you must have known. So: from where did you come? Shadows? The chill?
"I'll never tell," you whisper now.
Your fingers still trace their lines, their lines on me, their hypnotic never-ending lines on me.
Were I able to turn my head now, lying here, I'd read what in your face, I wonder. If I had turned my head, there in the bar, I'd have read what?
"You didn't turn," you say.
"I was afraid to turn. I am afraid."
"I know." A long pause. "But not only afraid."
No, not only afraid.
Now, you lift your fingers, now you rest your hand there, on my right shoulder. There, just as you had done before.
"I feel you," you say. "I feel the way you shrink from the touch of my hand here, how you shrank when I came up behind you there at the bar, laid my hand here. I feel, just as I'd felt, the shivering, the S shaped wave of need, as well. I feel, I felt, how that wave rose up from deep within, how it rolled up and up and up along your spine. That's how I knew. How you know."
"How I know?"
"Shh," you say. "Not now."
For now, again, your fingers dance.
"A question of an inch or two," you say. No more. "The tiniest affair, so small a change. And yet, it seems so difficult."
A pause
"But it only seems hard."
Fingertips, two fingertips, stroking down arms, stroking back up a slightly different path along my skin, stroke down again, the valleys where my arms, press tightly, almost fearfully, against my sides.
"An inch or two here," you say. "Inch or two there."
Fingertips stroking: Approach each other, do not meet, then curve away. Fingertips tracing an hourglass on me.
"When I first touched your shoulder," you say, "You shrank, and then you grew, you rose to meet my hand. At my touch, a shivering you couldn't stop, a wave of what: Desire, need. Knowledge perhaps." Knowledge?
Again, fingertips trace those lines.
"You know," you say.
A bedspring creaks, a sagging beneath me. Tightening muscle resists the way a shifting surface suddenly demands that I must slide. Palms pressed hard to the sheet, I hold myself from sliding. You move, I feel you moving towards me though I will not look, I won't, not now. Another creak, another dip, the other side of me. And now, I feel you above me, large and inevitable, one knee grazing my hip, your knee just touching as you straddle me, kneeling above me, tall enough so that your shadow falls across me, so that the muslin curtain floating in breeze momentarily enwraps you, momentarily unveils.
Yes. Now I look.
And think: The shadows, then. It was from the shadows you emerged when you walked over to me, when you came from behind, from out of the blue, when you came and laid your hand on me.
I shiver as a tiny shift of weight means now I feel both of your knees, just barely touching me. I feel (or perhaps I merely sense) your calves alongside me. Shivering, I think: Maybe it was the cold then, not the shadow. Maybe it is from the chill that you have come.
And now, finally, I look into your eyes. Eyes like a starry sky, a summer night. I see the velvet dark of night, the distant stars, so far their color is palest blue, near-white. Ah, and the longer that I look the clearer does it seem that all I need to do is lift a hand to touch them. All I need to do.
It's not an act of will, and yet, my hand is rising, rising. Rising to meet yours, to feel your thumb brush the inside of my wrist, to feel your fingers gently close to encircle me, to trap my too-thin arm and hold me there, where I have nearly touched your face.
"A question of an inch or two," you say. "The smallest distance. Will you?"
Did I nod?
My hand, held loose, enwrapped, lost in your grasp now gentle squeezing. Squeezing with maybe just force enough to press pliable clay a final, invisible measure, press it towards a shape seen in a mind's eye. Same pressure now, moving down my forearm, as your hands stroke downwards, wrist to elbow. Elbow to shoulder.
My other hand. My other arm.
Now, one hand there, just where my arm and shoulder meet, your other hand reaches to the other side of me. You press. Firmer, a little firmer than the pressing of your hands along my arms.
Heels of hands press lightly, sink easily to my sides. And pressing again, each hand cupped, each hand containing the whole curve of ribs, back to chest, I feel you stroking downwards, downwards towards my waist. The gentle pressure of your hands increasing just the slightest bit as they travel down. Then pressing easing as you reach my hips, following the curve, forming it.
A shift of weight as you twist, so that your two hands now hold one leg, my left leg. Two hands holding, pressing, stroking downwards along a leg somehow I'd lifted just so you could reach. And as you let me go, and as I feel the briefest dip of bedsprings as you twist to my right, you take my other leg now in your hands and again I am feeling the pressing of your hands, the movement of your hands
I don't look as you touch; your touch is overwhelming, as overwhelming as you yourself are, looming over me. Your touch making me shake. But now, my right leg sinking back to the bed, feeling your half turn, feeling you lean towards me -- now, you become too much, too much a presence and now I need to look.
And now I see, now I feel the first brush of what I'd feared.
You rise and arc: A scimitar. Nested in a dark forest between your legs, curving, yearning outward. Towards me. In the dim of the moonlight, glowing: violet, ruby. As you approach, I feel the heat of you, how firm you are, how you burn, will burn, how you demand. How you need.
How I do, as well.
Now I reach. Now I hold you, feel the velvet of your skin, the hardness beneath; now my fingertip traces a line, that curving arc of the bottom of your shaft; now my fingers hold you, pressing you gently as they stroke. Now I feel you shiver. Feel you.
I feel your palms now on my chest, feeling how as you've risen, grown towards me, so now I grow, so now I rise, swelling to meet your touch. But not down where your thighs entrap me, not down where I had in my time risen to meet a different kind of lover's touch.
Rising here, here above my heart, where I feel the touch, the gentle touch of your hands on my chest, on my breasts. Feeling a warmth of my own, rising from within, from deep within -- call it my heart, yes. Call it my heart. I feel my heart expanding in the warmth as your hands cup my breasts.
Still you move, now the weight of you begins to hold me, I am bearing you on my hips, holding you now, as you approach, your fingertips on my face, most delicate work yet.
The smallest distance, yes.
Gentle pressing along the curve of jaw, a cheekbone's ridge. Touch here, there. A arc, like this, traced with a finger. Another.
Finger tip down my nose, finger tip tracing the edge of my upper lip, right side, left side. Finger laid lightly, oh so lightly on the swelling softness of a lower lip.
And then, waiting. Waiting. You fingers combing through my hair, fanning outwards, holding me.
I feel your breath now on my face, feel you coming closer, closer, closer still.
That moment, wondering if you will lean in that final inch, knowing and not knowing that lips were meant to touch. That moment, beating heart, shuddering breath. Waiting.
The first touch, light as butterfly might touch, alighting. For just an instant, I feel how your lips are slightly rough, pressing against the smooth wet of mine, but you keep pressing still. Your head tilts just a bit, or mine, so we may fit all the closer, closer still.
Your hand slides down my side. My lips part and I feel the probing of your tongue, feel you in me, feel you in inviolable me, feel my hips arching towards you as your hand slides past waist, along the curve, pulling me closer.
As your belly presses mine, I feel you, hard and warm, feel you pressing a shallow valley in my now-softer skin, your burning, purpling head below my navel. My hands now on your lean hips, feeling the ropes of your muscles tensing, shifting over steel-hard bone, each muscle sliding smoothly over others as if washed in the finest, fragrant oil. I feel you lifting hips, feel your chest sliding against my breasts, feel the bed dip, hear the creaking of springs.
My hands trace urgent circles on your waist, your hips, your thighs, feeling your muscles swell with power, poised.
And now you come to me. Like a wave rolling in from the center of the ocean, unstoppable. I feel your body's weight, heavier now. I feel a pressing between my legs, inevitable, the wave rolling, pushing, pushing. But not crashing on this shore.
For as I feel you enter where surely you couldn't, where I am sure I feel you enter, where reason, where a lifetime says you couldn't enter, I know (deeper than any feeling) that you are slicing in towards my core. Knowing this, from the feel of you, like the thrilling shock of silk or satin parting, like the way a razor's lightest touch makes you shiver in the first instant before the welling of red tells you you've been hurt. But now, no welling of the red, only you moving, moving into me. Like a wave rolling, a giant wave, an ocean's width of heaving energy in a single rolling wave.
A glowing ball, iridescent, expanding as you move in me, until, almost unbearable, it vanishes like a bubble, flash of rainbow; then comes the next, the next. I feel a thick sweet flow, like golden honey, moving like the bow-wave of a ship before your head, flowing through secret channels I had never felt before, a warming, thick sweetness.
To breath now, I must gasp, it seems. Must shudder.
Beneath the weight of you, I cannot move. And yet I need to move, must move. Beneath the surging of you into me, wave on wave, I can only be carried.
I feel you, with my arms enwrapped, my legs enwrapped, around you, hard and urgent, muscles shivering as gather and stretch, driving you onward, inward. I feel how you burn, how you throb in me.
Feeling waves iridescent, now golden, arise within, expand, I feel them grow to fill me, to the farthest ends, so that fingertips clutching you are aflame so that the ends of my hair fanned in their halo flicker orange and red.
I feel you moving, moving, feel a strange electricity that neither shocks or burns, yet still can make us shiver. Can make us tremble.
I feel your muscles bulge and stretch, feel you moving beyond any power of mine to stop you, moving against the inside of my thighs.
I feel your hands grasping me tightly.
Feel you moving, moving, waves of the ocean surging into me, easing back, surging again. Feel you more urgent, more urgent still.This cannot be, this cannot be, I think. My hands fall to the bed. Oblivious, you shake, I feel you shaking.
Feel you exploding.
I feel you pumping, pumping, pumping onto me. Into me.
The fountain that my own fingers recall, nothing like this: Drawn from a pond, a puddle. But, oh, how I felt an ocean of you crashing in. Ocean: warm saltiness of life, thick with potential, humming with energy barely contained, condensed of beating hearts and fluttering gills and lashing tails of a million, of a billion tiny creatures saying: Live, live. A warm seawater jell to nourish, to fulfil. As you pumped, pumped, pumped into me and I accepted, I felt a warm flood flowing throughme , flowering outward, along perhaps my arteries, my veins; along, perhaps, inner pathways I've never know. As I had felt the touch of your hands seem to reshape, to sculpt an outer shell, now I felt within I was reshaped, reformed.
Even now, later, hours later, past the midnight that makes another day, I am expanding from within, as if the touch of your hand, like the potter's on the spinning clay removed a heavy earthen excess. Shrinking from without, spun beneath your hands, as the same I am burgeoning from within, a bud opening, opening.
Shall I now disappear, now that I have surrendered?
No.
No. I rested just a minute there. Rested on your shoulder. Drifted ...
Drifted.
Until: Opening my eyes, I see the arch of sky outside my window now is just barely washed with blue, the shadows that the new-risen sun cast are still lavender. Pale light in my room, where the muslin still billows in the fresh air of a new day.
Hair fans across my pillow, strands of hair touch my cheek, catch on my lips as my hair never had before. The distance that my hand now crosses, reaching for my glasses, seems an unfamiliar extra inch; the brushing of my fingers on my face seems lighter, My glasses don't seem to settle quite right.
Somehow I know what my touch will now find -- perhaps because I know that I surrendered, know that, whether in dreaming or in fact, I crossed a border I never dared before. Somehow I know my hand will cup a breast above my heart, a small breast, yes, but still a breast. Surely still a breast. I know that (sleepy as I am) I will feel breasts nestled in the hollows of my hands, that nipples will swell and stiffen into the center of my palms. That I will feel a shiver of delight, a gentle glow arise.
Somehow I know the curve my lightest touch will trace from waist to hip. Somehow, knowing that where my fingers will follow a smooth, soft swell along my inner thighs, I'll find only a simple flattened curve where my legs meet. An inward turn. Somehow, my heart does not thud as I lay a finger between those lips, feel how they will part, how they could open for another's desire. I wonder if I'll dare: for now, there's just the small weight of my finger, laid between my lips, barely easing them apart. My shiver in response is just enough.
I wonder if this is what I have really wanted.
I rise now from my bed, that extra inch or two I have to reachaking for a momentary awkwardness. I take the extra step I must now take to reach the closet, for now I need to look into the mirror on the inside of the door. A mirror I rarely bothered with before.
It's true, could it be true?
My breasts, as I touch, so small they might almost not be there. My hips curve, as I had never seen before, to frame that small triangle of hair and -- and surely not nothing else. Nothing else that I can see. My hair, tousled as ever, thicker somehow. My face, in the misty light of dawn, seems more delicate now, as if a curve of jaw and chin is sharper, as if faint shadows now frame a rounder forehead. But still it is my gray eyes that gaze back.
I wonder if, having flowered from within, contracted from without, I'll feel a frailer wall between me and the world, a thinner skin. Wondering, calm as if I were watching a dream unfold, calm as if knowing I will awaken.
What I see, what I think I see: Impossible. As if I've shed a layer or two -- or even a smaller change, a change like one I might imagine if, emerging from a long soak in the bath, I peer through the steam to see, faintly in the mirror, a reflection of a possibility.
What I see: Still me. Thin skin, pale through whatever now clouds vision; An edge of rib, a shadow of hipbone. Hair a halo framing face, as if each strand had drunk so deeply of the steam, as deeply as I drunk of you, that it had thickened, been infused with the electricity that jolts a finger on a doorknob, needing to fly from each neighbors' touch, so tender still from drinking.
Still me. And yet, beneath my arms, crossing my chest, below the smooth curve below my navel, where I will not look now -- and yet, I know I've changed.
Change. What we want-- what we say we want -- whether or not it is this particular change I see, I think I see, now in my mirror. But it is change that makes us tremble when it comes. Makes us shake and fear because change inists that we manage, that we cope, even if we're sure we have no idea how to. To fit the change into the interlocking tiny pieces of our daily lives. To discover how to continue when, looking within, there are no memories to help, no guidebooks to be found. When looking within I see: I am still me. If I am changed, I still am me. How now will I learn to sit just so, to walk this way, not that; to put this on, and that. Know this will be alright but that will never do at all. I do not know. The list of what I need to know if I am change races through my mind as quickly as spilled water flashes across the floor, and all I can do is gape.
If I have changed, nothing else has: The book I read last night still on the floor beside me, the trees, the wall, the corner of street that I can see through my window just the same. Inside my closet, there are still only the jeans, the khaki trousers, long-sleeve shirts, the dark suits I have always worn. In my dresser, only the boxers, socks and sweaters that were there before.
I need -- well do I need? What do I need? I pull a shirt down from a hanger, slip on the trousers I had let drop to the floor last night -- but now it feels as if I cannot clinch the belt tight enough, cannot kick free the cuffs so I can walk. The shirt falls to my hips. I'm swimming in these clothes. I cannot go outside like this. Cannot be out and seem to be, be seen to be who I have been. I can no longer hide. As I had hidden?
I let the trousers fall, step free.
Padding into my living room, feeling as unexpected swing of hips, a sense of being rooted to the ground a little differently, more heavily. The weight of breasts, small as they are. Real feelings, real as -- more real than -- a reflection in the mirror. Real as the extra inch I think stretched to reach my glasses, to swing myself from the bed. Or did I; perhaps I still am dreaming. Perhaps this change -- let's say that I have changed -- cannot last: how can it, after all? The blue of the sky deepens, shadows move, their color darkens. I pace.
I pace.
Hours pass, blankly. I cannot think. I dare not.
The feeling that my center's shifted downward, to newly-heavy thighs and rounder rear, that shift of weight that makes hips sway, begins to fade as I pace on and on around my place. So, too, the tug of breasts, less noticed now, as the midday sun beams in, less noticed as the shadows of the afternoon lengthen, crossing the window's sill.
Perhaps whatever'd changed is now collapsing back. Perhaps I will return to normal. Perhaps in just an hour or two. Perhaps tonight .I cannot stay within my walls forever.
The door swings open to an empty street, always empty this time of day, on a weekend like this.
The shadows of the trees stretch all the way across the payment, green lawns glow in late afternoon light.
Step.
No one to see.
Down the walkway, step by step.
Pause at the sidewalk. Should I need to, it would take just a second or two to dash back to safety.
The park is two blocks to the left; by now, the children's soccer games are done, families encumbered by their folding chairs and picnic baskets have all straggled back to their vans. In the lake, the ducks will still be on their patrol for crumbs, full as they are. The couples will finish their last strolling rounds; perhaps one or two will eye the little stands of oak and maple, the swaying loblolly pines, that dot the sweep of grass, hoping for one more private moment before parting until tomorrow.
Familiar walk, familiar time. The easy amble comforting, reassuring. The bench down by the farthest curve of the lake, as ever, empty for me to sit and watch. The sun reddens as it sinks, as I saw yesterday, the day before, the day before; the clouds overhead blush pink and purple as the blue light of the arch of sky turns steely and violet and then a deeper, deeper blue.
Beneath the darkening sky, there's you again.
You, in the corner of my eye. Your shadow, maybe seen, maybe just the slight shiver as you block the last rays of the sun. Perhaps it is the sheer weight of you, I feel; effect of gravity, demanding, unrelenting.
We watch the sinking sun together.
I hear the low rumble of your voice in the dusk before I hear your words.
"Comfortable?" you ask
Comfortable enough. I think. Comfortable enough for now. It's good to feel the familiar warmth of sun, the ease of the end of day. To feel the world regroup. Return.
"Ah," you say. "Return. You felt, perhaps, as the hours passed today, your return. What you wanted this afternoon was not so far a reach; the steps easier to take, the weight you sensed where you'd not felt weight before began eventually to lighten."
"Yes. You know?"
"I know. I know what you think is happening, what you think now is ebbing away. I know the yearning for the familiar that brought you here, to this spot that you like so well, this time of day."
"I feel that I am coming back."
Beyond the trees, the first star sparkles. Lights of the city flicker on.
"You do?" I hear the smugness in your tone. "Tell me."
Easier now as the light fades, as I know I fade into shadows, as I sense you staring ahead, not at me Easier to say, something impossible seemed to have happened, a change I thought I made, so sure, I felt it in my very bones, so sure, I saw in a mirror, I glimpsed it, glancing down, at my hands, my legs, my ...
"Yes?" you murmur, "Yes?"
But now the strangeness fades, slowly, more slowly than the pins and needles of a long-cramped leg; slowly as when you realize you're breathing easily again after than flu, that that ache in your neck from where you'd slept so oddly still so long is now a bit less sore than yesterday, as yesterday was from the day before. I am getting back to normal, I can tell.
"Or perhaps -- perhaps you are merely becoming more accustomed?" you say.
Accustomed, I wonder, wanting to ask: accustomed to what?
"To yourself," you say.
The evening breeze catches my hair, I feel a strand dancing along my cheek now; feel ends of my hair begin to float. Unsettled, I try to shift myself an inch or two away, along the bench; I feel the tee-shirt brush a breast.
I want to argue back, want to demand; now, after all this time, to scream the scream I should have when I first looked into the mirror: No, no. You're wrong. I can't. What have you done?
"Shh," you cut me off. "Someone is coming."
And, as if on cue, your cue, I see him, rounding the bend of path that leads beyond the trees, white shirt gleaming in the dusk. I wonder how you knew he comes, when he has only now come into view; I wonder why we wait as he strolls along, a minute, 30 seconds, 10, from crossing right in front of where we sit.
He ambles on, so casually. As if the world is his, as if, for a man like him, the world would have no choice to be, as if, just as the white shirt hugs broad shoulders, the curve of bicep, so too the very air, the light, the glances of the passers-by must so caress. His hair, bleached by the sun, his mouth not quite a smirk -- a smile, perhaps, or perhaps just a warning.
And now, he passes before me. Nods.
I see his eyes glow. As if, when glances meet and bounce apart, a spark is struck. Or maybe, as if a hunger inside, flares, the way the flames of a fire do when you blow. Glances meet and break; my eyes sink, his linger, I can feel, the way his hands might, trailing down along breasts, and down, and down, as that fire within burns as his one question remains unasked, hangs between us, if I were only to glance up again.
He paces on, a step, another; glancing back at me, again his eyes gleam for an instant before he turns his head and steps into the twilight.
"You see?" you ask.
I shake my head.
"No?" you continue. "No? You've never seen that look? Never looked that way at the girl across the way, the woman in the line down at the store, or her, walking oblivious to your glance, along a downtown street? What do you think he saw as he walked past you here? What do you think that almost-smile almost asked?"
Now, you lean towards me, your fingers capture a strand of hair still dancing in the breeze, you comb it gently back, tuck it away behind my ear. Now your hand drops to my shoulder, lightly strokes down an arm.
If I had felt myself growing, solidifying once again to what I remembered from the time before your touch, the brushing of your hand now tells me I was wrong. The mirror I'd avoided through the afternoon perhaps might say the same, just as the mirror of your eyes tells me right now. Just as I'd see, were you to cup your hands around a small mirror, mirror one might find in a purse, hinged to a small round case of pressed and fragrant powder, mirror that you hold before me as I turn to you and try to make your features out in this deepening dusk.In this mirror, fogged by my breath, I see my eyes. My grey eyes, inward windows into my mystery, as ever impossible to read. I see my brown hair floating -- is it longer than I remember? -- caught in the moving air of evening. I see my face, familiar but changed: a curve of jaw, an arch of brows, a delicacy of features always there beneath the surface now exposed.
You do not need to say that I am changed. You don't need to now, I need you to tell me something else, many things else. I need you to help me with the tide that's crashing in, racing in, as if to smash me on the rocks I sense but cannot see approaching me. I don't know what is to become of me; like a frenzied printer spilling paper onto the floor, questions racing: what about this, how will I that, what will he say, and she, how can I do....
It's dark now, so dark. Even were I to turn, I couldn't see you.
****
How true to type. You come, you want, you take. A presence I cannot, that we cannot, ignore; like a Sun insisting that we revolve round you, that we turn our faces towards you, drink you in, expand perhaps in your warm light before, indifferent in your power, you move on.
And for me: the gauzy curtain dances, dances still. Billowing in a warm evening breeze, beckoning waves, inviting, inviting.
What is it about a thread of pale white, loosely bordering emptiness, that makes a fabric meant for girls: Start here.
Start with a memory of breezes though a bedroom window years ago, breezes carrying the sound of laughing voices in a summer night, beyond the dancing gauze of a curtain by an open window -- for memories from long ago are where it always starts.
Silver in the velvet dark, an echo of my cousins' sparkling, shimmering delight just a few hours before. I had been hiding from my father, impatient that this summer at in-laws' place by the lake I would at last learn how to swim, shed my fear of the icy water, that tamer version of the oceans where he made his living. Sneaking back to the house, I'd paused to peer into the sitting room, surprised by delight as my mother swept an ivory band of lace from deep inside a cedar chest, so that it swirled through the sunlight air and then floated down like a mist onto her lap. Caught by the fluttering of white, I'd stepped in from the hallway, unconscious that I had, just watching, just needing to watch. I saw my smiling aunt trace the patterns of arabesques and flowers for my cousins; heard my mother tell of how their mother and their mother's mother patiently knotted and tugged and wove the airy fantasies of thread. Saw a smile I'd never seen for, heard a tone of voice never murmured to me. How wonderful it will look, my aunt had said, a trim for that dress, veil for that. And my cousins laughed like tiny silver bells.
Laughed again, with a hint of some other feeling, when my aunt turned to the faint sound of my unthinking step. Were they embarrassed at their joy? Or were they merely mocking me?
Laughed when my aunt turned, and asked what I was doing there; what I thought of the dress, if it might fit?
Their laughter drove me off.
But later, the silver bells of their voices in the night, echoes from a world I did not know, invited me, invited. And invited, I lay there listening to their laughter as the muslin curtain in that room floated in that breeze, like a last remnant of evening fog on the ocean's edge.
When do we understand there is a difference? That for some, a plain edge, a clear boundary, is what is proper. That for some, what suits is thread-trapped spaces patterning a band of lace, a mist of cloth obscuring borders, like drifting fog. When do we understand that some must brave the icy water's grip and not complain, that some need never know the breath-seizing panic of a lap between the buoys that you are too tired to make; that it is fine if she reads on a summer afternoon but there's a ballgame in the park and they need a ninth so badly that even you will suffice.
Or, from another time: When do we understand the meaning of the playground chanting of a mispronounced girl's name and why that makes you redden. The odd smile when the girl in French class shakes her head and says she'd already seen the movie that you've asked her to come see with you. The way she took my hand, straightened a wrist that I had, unthinkingly, held limply bent. Murmuring that sometimes I seemed a bit -- well, anyway.
Perhaps we all are true to type -- or perhaps not.
My type perhaps you know, without of course quite knowing me. Or would it matter, to know this: I am a Navy brat, as rootless as a myth, disconnected as cool dispassion that I have lied to you about, that neutrality with which I dance around the issue at the center here. I tell you I am sure that I did, in fact, change in a way we cannot, not really. But am I sure? Did I change? Or not really? I was, no question here, hammered under the unrelenting fact of you, as if you were an oblivious, gleaming giant machine battering my metal into a new form, as if I were half-melted metal to be reshaped, as if I were that malleable -- or even more so.
So I will tell you: I am, in my own way, a child of salt water, fog and rolling waves -- you can check my certificate of birth from the Naval Hospital, the photos of my blue-suited father in the album in my mother's house. My father, so much older than she, Navy man set quite firmly in his ways: our Old Man of the Sea, if you will. My mother, slight and shy, following patiently as he bounced from this coast to that, this ship to that. Patient as he stewed, anxious to be away, when shorebound in between cruises. Oceanus and his Niaid had a child, their Proteus, mutable, flexible. Changeable.
Shall I be true to type; or perhaps shall I be no type at all? Or maybe simply play with types. Maybe I'll say its just a game, to try this playing true to types -- as you might play with a type, with your grunt, perhaps, as you set that just-emptied bottle of beer down by your side, so like the grunt of yours as one last thrust of hip impels your seed into your lover. As she plays with types too, not with brute grunts of course but let's say with those lowered eyes, that palm-out backwards comb of fingers through her hair.
Ah yes: I see now how that would work, why my hand rises so to the way a stray strand tickles at a cheek, and dances so beyond my reach, impossible to glimpse. See why a hand would turn that move, move thus, and why the little flourish tucking hair securely -- not so securely, really -- must happen. Not so securely, for in a moment, in a hour, I will comb my hand backwards to catch a dancing strand again.
I see why, as you watch me, my eyes should seem to look away and down; should need to, all the better to see you with. And see how, when I lift my head again, I'd find that you -- ah yes, so true to type -- have slipped off into the dark.
Here, at this end of the park, when it is as still as it is now in the dark of evening, you can hear -- you could hear, were you here -- the wavelets of the inlet lapping the shore, smell the wet salt air, the rich fishy scent of the edge where worlds of water and of land meet. On the smooth silt, packed firm and cool by the waves, I see bubbled dots from where the clams sucked in the sea, see nervous, pale crabs scurry away. Were it light, the swooping birds, black cormorants, diving pelicans and the ever-screeching gulls would claim this place. Here, by the ocean's edge, is where, of course, I have washed up. And washed up, now move up.
At the far end of the park, a low bridge carries the street across the inlet's mouth, the street leads on into the center of the town, quiet and empty now of all but the most strange. A good time now to see, to try at least to begin to see, the way the land lies.
Quiet, except for, every few minutes, the sound, like cloth tearing, of the passing cars. Dark, except when a pool of harsh fluorescent light spills from an empty store. Walking.
Mainly dark at first. Then more light. And in the rising, ebbing shushing whisper of the tires of the passing cars, a momentary pause. A glance, perhaps, out of a window to the night. A muttering. snatched away as the car moves on. A whistle in the dark.
At the stoplight, a car waits, trembling at the red, ready to race on: Where? Two young men; the passenger glances out, sees me.
And I see him. Young man, a kid. His close-clipped hair, like the bright Hawaiian shirt he wears, the sunglasses dangling from the cord around his neck, the rumbling of a muffler deliberately modified all spell: Swabbie, weekend leave, pent-up need, a frenzy waiting for release and soon to find it.
Our eyes meet for a moment. Lock for moment.
Then, the light clicking green, he's gone.
In his eyes, in that moment, I see. The hunger, switched on in an instant, the way your knuckle flicks a light-switch and the room's illuminated in a flash. Hunger: a glowing in his eye, the flush reddening his skin, engorging his ...
It must be almost automatic; for in an instant I flush too, for an instant I feel a glow of warmth, a shivering of brief, perhaps, desire. Shiver, perhaps, of fear. That it could be so easy, so beyond control. And then, flush of resentment that it is so automatic, that he, with just a glance, sees -- well, maybe the swell of breast pressing my shirt, a strand of hair blowing free, a curve as I step forward. Resentment that that tiniest of sights might be enough to make him slaver, that I might be reduced to that.
To think a glance might make me shiver.
There is a thrill in having hungry eyes read you, of course. There is a thrill in being so desired, even if in the merest, hungry glance, the most casual, licking-of-lips lusting of callow sailor boys roaring along the boulevard from base to town. Resent being reduced this way as you might want to do, but understand this: That to be reduced to the prey in his hunt tonight touches a need in you, as well.
Another car tears down the fabric of the night, another dopplering rise and falling swoosh of tires on wet pavement. Hungry eyes glance my way; glance and return, glance and linger. Another car, another.What must I look like? -- swimming in too-large shirt and pants, caught here halfway between all that I know, all that I've learned and all that I am still to learn. What I must know? -- knowledge demanded by a new form, only sometimes visible to them when a small gust of breeze or twist of arm presses cloth tightly to my skin.
Perhaps they see only a halfway person. See only what I have always feared they'd think. Perhaps as their cars race down the road so fast away from me, there is a echo of my cousin's laughter, the words the girl from French class wouldn't say.
Ahead, at the next light, there is a pool of light spilling from stores, a glow from the traffic on the avenue that's to be crossed or turned onto to, six lanes to the Beach and to the Interstate. A long light, there is a line of cars here waiting. The cars that passed, whose drivers and whose passengers had glanced and -- well had glanced and turned again indifferently, had glanced and glowed with momentary hunger, had glanced and raced off laughing into the night. I step into the pool of light.
A step, two steps. I sense, not seeing, glances darting my way again, and turn.
Behind me now: a click, the light now green, the cars move on.
A voice. A voice so soft I barely jump. So soft, he must be just a step or two away, for me to have heard, if I heard. So close, I have to turn. Even to flee now means at least the briefest engagement here, a meeting of eyes, a mumbled something.
Turning, ready to run if need be, turning because when we might need to run we know the first thing to be sensed is where and how large and how the other is postured. But when I turn, who I see is just the smiling man from the bar the night before, the one whose liquid eyes seemed to invite me to join him and the man whom he was chatting to, to take a step. And with that step perhaps begin a waltz of words that likely turns to courting. Or maybe let the waltz and he and the other danced become instead a less demanding gathering of three men in a bar, three men who are only chatting. Only.
Before, of course, that hand upon my shoulder.
Turning, the first thing that I sense is he is just a inch or two taller than I, standing easy on the sidewalk, hands in pockets, shoulders unbunched. I see the smile, inviting as it invited before. In his eyes, not the glow, only, well let us say, the possibility.
"We met ... " And then the soft singsong of his voice halts.
"I thought we met," he says, staring now. "I thought, though the light was so dim; I thought we met the other night."
Caught halfway here; me -- but changed, feeling so changed, in the way that we all know is impossible, that maybe he sees now as his eyes dart up and down my body. Not just a lifetime of my memories and thoughts and hopes and fears in a body that's not right for them. Caught halfway, for it is me, and my face is mine, even if changed; enough of me in my eyes, line of my nose, set of my lips. Though it must be a woman's face he looks into, surely it is, he knows beyond a doubt the face he sees now is the face that he saw in the bar last night. He knows I am the one that he invited to his rescue with that glance.
Perhaps he thought he knew why I looked different, perhaps he thought: Pointless to ask how come, what happened? Perhaps he's silent because he doesn't see something has happened, had to have happened, I know must have had happened even if he will not see. The point, instead, is we are here. In this place, at this moment, in a pool of light spilling from the window of the store, backs turned to the cars of eager sailor boys lining up at the stoplight. We are here, feeling the soft breeze of this moment, the scent of saltwater in the night air insisting it is this place. Beyond us is the darkness of the night, the dark into which we could disappear if I turn, if he does, if those are the steps we are to take.
His hand barely grazing the small of my back, a tiny pressing.
"Come," he says.
Behind us, a sailor shouts.
And with a touch to the small of my back, like a waltzer gingerly turning a newly-met partner around the ballroom floor, he guides me around the corner
For just an instant, I think I feel the fleeting touch of a hem upon my thighs, the brush of the air on my bare upper arms as I spin -- like nothing ever felt before, remind me with each turn I take of a vulnerable exposure to world that now could be my lot, part of my lot. And yet, that imagined touch of cloth also a sensuous invitation to immerse myself, engage myself in this world. To swim in this rich sea, in these warm waters humming with this life. The touch of cloth, the thrill of air -- and later, the feel of his hand centered on the small of my back as we walk into the night, not caught halfway now, not either of us. Call us disguised, as we walk side by side, the shush of passing cars tires, the shadows that the moonlight casts from the rows of trees briefly obscuring us as we progress, the silver light briefly illuminating as we take another step. And another.
Maybe what keeps us on our course is fearing how the shock of change will shake the people whom we know.
Let your hair grow long, too long, then cut it short, and watch the flicker of reaction in others' eyes, whether or not they say anything -- though we all know most will say something. It's not really the way a friend might react, nor parents, brothers, sisters -- the ones who know us best, who may even love us -- they aren't really those we fear to shock. Other fears there, with them. The flicker in the eyes that puts us most on guard are those we see in the near-strangers who we may know from the next cubicle, that push-cart or the drive-in where we always buy our lunch, the couple in the apartment across the hall.
A face lost in a crowd, as anyone of us is, demands easy recognition to enjoy the safety of casual dismissal, the anonymity that protects from the way that passion rends you to your core. I have been happy enough -- before you came -- to be one of the tens of thousands of almost-familiar faces staring grimly through a windshield, inching along an Interstate bound for work. Happy enough to be the bland and mild face you may have thought you saw right in the middle of the phalanx waiting at curbside for the light, the light that in a moment will let us march lockstep across the avenue. To be the person, third aisle down, fourth doorway on the right who gets accounting's weekly printout in my inbox. A world that barely sees us needs us to be constant.
But I am changed. I am. Aren't I?
I sip my morning coffee and tell myself so, anyway.
We are a conversation with the world -- sometimes, a one-way conversation, sometimes not. When we were just kids, we'd bounce a basketball in a driveway to our own running radio-announcer-styled commentary of our invisible triumphs; what were the inner guiding voices that the little girls down the street would hear? Sometimes, as now, a different monologue, one of all our unanswered questions: Why me? What am I now to do? Or, again: This is what I did once, but can't do now. There are a hundred little things, a thousand, that we will always do just so, and signal to ourselves and to whoever watches that we are who we have been all along. This man. This woman.
The touch of a hem above a knee, the way legs cross, the fact of clothing that hides this, shows that: a new vocabulary for my internal commentary, for that web of words defining me, tying me to the world.`Shall I sit now? I shall, I think. Step here, close enough? Closer? Not quite. Ankles together? Now knees? Swing rear? Like this? Try again. And once I rise -- oops, was that a lurch? Do I galoomp too much, walking across the room to fetch my cup of ... better tea than coffee, I think.
Each tiny task, like the smaller steps I deliberately try to take, demands such concentration, tugs like a new scab might on stretching skin as you reach for something that you need. There is a hint in any twinge like that, a hint that just as you reach, you risk. Minor discomfort, reopened wound, which will it be -- and not knowing for sure, do you stop reaching? Do you find some other way, take another step so you don't have to reach quite so far? Decide that what you reached for isn't worth it just for now?
Such tiny gestures: my hand holding the steaming cup of tea like this, not that way, the little grimace of my lips that I try now when I decide the first sip is just a shade too hot still. I am preoccupied with stereotype, with the expected, the conventions of behavior I do not really know.
Let's say I have a cubicle somewhere, within the maze of a floor of a one-block-square building like a hundred that you've seen before. When I lift my head and peer across the rows and rows and rows of grey-cloth-covered fences pretending to be walls, I see the bent heads of people whose names I almost know: He who I rode up with in the elevator, she who nearly bumped into me by the copier. The windows in the distance, far across this sea of cubicles open out only to a view of rows and rows of office towers, maybe. Maybe just a black and rainwashed plain of parking lots, the roaring superhighway just beyond.
Or maybe there is glinting of magic, like a violet shadow on a concrete wall, in the grey days of our too familiar world. Maybe now I can lift my head, shake free from that inward curve of chest I had, unthinking, slumped into. Yes: those are breasts there, I don't care whether you see or not. A toss of hair out of my eyes: yes, that's right, that's the way we do. So there.
Hair grows an inch a month. I start with hair that likely was an inch or two too long for who I was; before too many more weeks pass, my hair will hide the back of my neck, ears will be covered. In two months, three, when I bend my neck to the side, ends of my hair will tickle my shoulders. A loose white shirt or a baggy cardigan will (particularly if I remember to slump) hide any new curves of breasts, of waist. And if in weeks to come, I sometimes need to arch my back and fabric presses curve, and if the new shirt that I wear a week or two from now is not as loose, or if perhaps it buttons down a different side, would anyone remark? If baggy sweaters go from brown to beige to primrose as the weeks go by, would anyone remark that their colleague in the third cubicle over looks a little more sprightly these days. Perhaps it is that spring is coming soon?
What if, the next day or the day after when someone in another cubicle asks: Where is what's'name? the answer is: Oh, she is ill? If chatting by the copier, the vending machine, my friend should let my name float out with an extra "a" or "ie" at the end sometimes, who would really care that much?Would it take a month, two, before a certain unformed memory of me would fade?
Imagine that it could be just a game of clothes and pronouns that sets the rules with which we engage the world, and it does us.
Mondays for change, then. Each incremental step, I unveil on a Monday. The torso's twist that for an instant reveals, a sweater in a pastel shade, a flourish for finishing a gesture, a pursing of lips: a moue.
Mondays are for the whispers that the girls breath into each other's ears as they nibble on the sweet rolls that they brought to work. Mondays are when they unwrap themselves for another week, jackets falling open, coats slipped off and feelings that had been held deep, deep within delicately unveiled and lifted up to the light, the blue fluorescent light of the coffee break room, in order to be shared. And I am there sometimes. On Mondays, for the tales of the Fridays past, the stories from the hours after we step into the lavender shadow of approaching night. Listening, for what have I to tell but how it feels to cling here on the edge, the way that when I was oh so much younger I might have felt as fingers slipped along the wet planks of the pier, hanging there in the chill dark water, unwilling to let go and be immersed, not wanting -- not at all -- to try to paddle to the other end where all the other brand-new swimmers wait. Not sure that a frantic lunge and splashing panic can bring me safely to where the white sand of the lake bottom gleams dimly through the water.
I take my tiny steps into a new-woven web of gesture and glances exchanged that increasingly connects me -- seems to connect me -- in a different way to a different world. Tiny steps, like a minuet, a gavotte. Violins flicking precise crystalline notes, to match the precise turns and stops and steps of this most elaborate of dances. In this quadrille, we approach, step apart and twirl away. The ebbs and flows over the weeks; come close, retreat; smile and flee. Except my flight is not a flight, just a swirling around to the far end of the ballroom where I will spin again and the long gown will float behind so he will catch his glimpse of tiny ankle, curve of a calf. And with a tiny gasp, inhale.
"Ah," I hear you say from somewhere behind me as I sit, back at the bar again. "Ah yes, the dance."
You're back?
"You are doing quite well."
I am only hiding in a careful confusion of clothing and gesture, pronoun and presence slowly revealed, floating quite unremarked past others eyes until, some Friday down the road, some will see, or hear, or know somehow to ask.
"Unremarked?"
Unremarked, yes. That's the plan. To gradually change, unnoticed, right before their eyes, until maybe someday they might could see what you have made me -- or much more likely only somehow sense the halfway being that I am, that presence in the corner of an eye that must be blinked away.
"Are you quite sure that you are, as you say, unremarked?"
That's what I need. That's what I need. Need to be unremarked, because of you. Because of what you have made me ...
"What I have made?"
What you have made me ...
"Ah," And if I could turn to see, I know that you would nod; but do you smile or frown, is that sympathy that makes your eyes glow or a call to revelation making you crease your brow.
"Ah," you say. "How can I have made you? How can anyone do that?"
You did, you did. You came, like a ghost in the night, an incubus and with your touch, with your insistent touch, you did. With your words, words like battering rams, you broke through me, shattered my doorway, entered and made me. Made me.
"That sounds quite mad."
From deep within, a red wave rises. From behind my tight-shut eyes, for now I do not want to see what I am sure is your mocking grin. Impotent anger: Oh, I want to clench fists and drum them on your chest. Oh yes, I am quite mad, that you -- yes you -- have done this to me, that you, because you wanted to, because you can, because you have the power, because you can do what you will, what you desire. That you, because you are so large, because you are so certain, because you come and go so freely, as freely as I would like to come and go myself, can do this. Oh yes, I'm mad. Oh yes, as I flit through my days, just beyond the focus of the eyes around me, oh yes, as I bend my head in my study of the tiny things that my change now demands that I must master, oh yes, I am quite mad, quite mad at you.
"I meant," (and now I am quite sure that you grin) "I meant mad in quite the other sense."
The other sense?
"I meant: How can it be that some unnamed, unknown visitor in the night can do what has been done to you? An incubus? My touch, my strange and potent seed in you: That can remake you? In a single night, my touch on your shoulder, my fingers on your skin, my erect cock inside your mouth, that can remake you?"
Yes. Yes, that can. Yes, you have.
"How can it be that we have made a myth," you say. "The two of us, here in this gray little place, where that billboard for the Chevvy dealer looms, under this overcast sky, by that litter-strewn beach where the cold gray sea batters so mindlessly at the shore. A myth, we two?"
And yet I am remade. I am. I feel it, when on a weekend evening, pacing in my dark apartment, the hem of the skirt I dare not yet wear at work touches my knee; feel it when his eyes dart my way across the parking lot at the end of day and linger, just a second longer than they might have once. I feel it in the way the heaviness between my hipbones roots me to the ground in a way I've never felt before, the way the slight new weight upon my chest shifts as I turn. I feel in the way my hand now wants to float, the way more delicate fingers need to flutter sometimes.
"You feel you are. Perhaps, though, what the world sees is something else."
You mean? I don't know what you mean. I won't know. Won't, because I do know, but I do not want to say.
"Perhaps all that the world sees is someone playing at something that's quite impossible."
I do not want this, no. I did not. You did this, not me.
"It is impossible, after all," you say. "Isn't it?"
It can't be. I need it not to be.
"Perhaps what the world sees now is just a shadow who is breaking down. Who sheds his self control, who sheds himself, as he breaks down. Who thinks, who really thinks, a creature in the night has wrought a kind of magic. Who thinks, who honestly believes, he's been transformed. Who thinks, who dares to think, he can fool us. Perhaps as you sashay down the aisles between the cubicles, they look and snicker at the crazy little ... well, you know the word."
Now, at last, I feel your touch again. And now, I dare to turn, for I have no other choice; I steel myself for your cruel smile but see only the wet gleam of your eyes.
I stand, a pathway through the crowd seems to appear. I walk, slow and stately as a pallbearer, towards the street.There is a tiny anteroom before the final step, a small dark mirror on the wall that mists when the damp fog outside and warmth within collide.
Through the steam on the mirror, I cannot focus. In the fog from the sea, I dissolve.
I try to shape my days now by my work. Numbers in charts, words battered out of a keyboard, spit out from a whirring printer: Let's say it is work like that I do, work meant for grey-walled cubicles under flickering fluorescent lights.
Waiting by the printer for my work, the result of my work, to come, gazing out at the deepening steely Grey of evening, I realize that one again, I have reached Friday. Yet another Friday.
Am I impatient? -- tapping the inch-thick stack of paper from the printer on the table, all the edges of this week, this month, this whatevers-worth of work needing to be neatened, lined up, ready to turn in (and just in time) to the fellow waiting for it, waiting for me, down by the corner.
He smiles -- as much as any of us ever smile here at work -- as he glances up from his desk. A tired S of dark hair slips down his forehead, brushing his brow, wanting someone's two fingers to pat it back to place, combing from his part a time or two just to be sure. A half day's growth of beard shadows his jaw, the hours we have spent here makes his face seem just a little wan, makes me lean against the frame of his office door, the two of us sharing our week's-ending weariness, waiting in case one of us needs to, wants to, tell the other something. Anything. I lean, as if the weight of hours had made me tired, as if the strain of preparing what I have prepared for him, what waits before his eyes for him, has somehow unwound something that had restrained me, something that stiffened me inside. Perhaps, not really leaning, I drape myself on the doorframe's metal edge. Waiting.A word or two, perhaps more. Work words, they can be paragraphs but really boil down to a word or two. Problems? No? Yes? All good? Yes? No? Need something?
Not that he's brusque. He's smiling, just a little. It is the end of the week, a Friday evening, we are allowed, we can allow ourselves to unwind a little from this pretend-great task of work that we've embarked, it is a time when we may stretch out the kink in our lower backs from hours lost in concentration on our work.
We can look into a colleague's eyes and see.
"Friday," he smiles
"Yes, Friday," I reply.
And wait. Wondering if he is the one who will ask. Wondering what he sees, what he is thinking as his eyes dart, as his glance flits. On me, the clock. The spot on his desk where there are no photos of wife and children carefully arrayed next to the in-tray.
A few seconds, a minute. Waiting. Will he?
An unvoiced sigh, push of my elbow against the doorframe. Upright: will that be the signal that he needs to see to say, no, stay a bit.
"Stick around for a bit?" he halfway asks.
Stick around? Yes, oh yes. Oh yes I'll stick around.
"I'd like to take a fast look," he smiles again. "I'm sure it's just exactly what I want."
And so, of course, I stick around. Outside, the steel sky deepens into velvet blue, a star, a planet, sparkles like a tiny jewel. The clock above the water cooler ticks, voices mutter their see-ya's, have-a-good-weekends.
Tell me, tell me, I want to ask. Tell me, what should I do?
What if he walks on back here? Stops there, right by my cubicle -- do I smile? This way, like that. What is too much? If he leans there, against the half-wall, do we lock eyes? Do I glance and then look away? If he asks, do I try a yes, or simply nod, afraid the word would catch and shatter in my throat? And if he sits? Or if he leans and brushes a hand? a knee? What do I do? What do I want?
Waiting, wondering. Thinking: We might very well have a drink, we would be sitting where, at the bar? There'd be a buzz of conversation all around, perhaps not quite drowning the line of melody of an hit song from when we both were kids, the pounding of a bass guitar. I'd perch, I'd have to, on the edge of the wooden stool, legs crossed primly, stiffbacked with nerves. He would have draped his jacket over the back when he gave up his own stool to the girl who'd just arrived, I think. He'd speak his half-heard words to me; I'll nod and speak words he would likely never hear. Nervous, I'd drink too fast.
And he'd order another.
Standing, because he'd have given up his stool, he'd be much closer. Perhaps the warmth from all the people filling the bar, more and more as Friday freed them from their week, might make him yank his tie a little loose, might lead him to unbutton his collar; perhaps that, or just the fact he'd be standing closer might make me think I felt his heat. Perhaps it'd be when he leaned towards me to slide my drink over.
I'd see his eyes glance down my front, see how he shifts his weight from foot to foot. I'd see him look, unable to not look, as the buzz of others' words, the music from so long ago, the clink of glass the shock of laughter cutting through, the sounds all rising, swelling until we two were isolated in a tiny space of unheard words and unsaid thoughts.
A wall of sound around the still and silent eddy that enfolds us. His eyes rising slowly from the valley of my front, caressing that smooth V of skin, that curve of throat, the red plush of my lips, my dark framed glowing eyes. Eyes gazing into eyes, green eyes into my Grey, imagining that through the dark opening of iris we could see a soul, that a gaze might so softly touch the intangible other, make him uncurl so you can gape at the wonder of his size, the colors he is to share with you.
My eyes, pretending not to see him gazing down my front, fixed on his hands resting, so large they cover mine, the heavy skin stretched over the knobs of knuckles barely containing the strength that pulses through the thick veins that feed his half-clenched fingers. I see: His forearms, tendons and muscle exposed by a turn or two of his cuff; see biceps I'm not sure my hand could encompass pressing the thin cloth of his shirt: see blunt chin, straight nose and eyes, green eyes, gazing into mine.
Around us, would the buzz of other people, beat of the music retreat, would unheard thoughts converge, unsaid words invite our movement onward? Rising from the table, my hand in his, would he lead me through a crowd that parted for us, lead me through the swirling glitter of colored light and laughing couples, following a step or two behind. His arm reaching behind, my stretching before me, following.
Somehow, we'd have to know how many steps from the doorway of the bar into the evening dark, how far from the red glow of neon, before that tiny tug spins me close enough for his arm to sweep me up, curve round the small of back and then fold me into his chest. One step or two or three.
Somehow, lips an inch or two apart, we'd know that in a heartbeat, two heartbeats, uncountable heartbeats, he will gaze into me my eyes and bend to me. Somehow, I'll know when it's not just desire, not just the hope of his approach, but the sheer fact of him that means it is with shaking breath that I must close my eyes, that is with the next breath that I will feel his lips brush mine.
Will it be just one kiss, there in the shadows, or maybe two? Will he let my lips fall an inch or two from his so we can catch our breaths and then kiss me again, or shall I stroke my hand up from his neck and pull him down to me? Will I lift myself to the tips of my toes, bend one knee, raise my foot so that, tiptoed I must lean into him so he pulls me closer, closer, still?
Waiting for him now in my cubicle, looking out at the evening sky, its violet washed with the glow of city lights diffusing in the mist, wondering if it is warm enough that he will break our kiss and once again, hand in hand, he'll lead me on into the dark, perhaps the lawn beyond a small grove of carefully-planted pine, a mound of juniper to block the view of passers-by. Or maybe that is where he left his car, and would he, after opening the door for me, lean down and take another kiss, or simply smile and step round to the other side to drive us off. What do I think in those seconds after I slide into the seat and wait? Shall I turn to him, smiling, as he fumbles with his key until the engine roars alive?
What might he say, craning his neck to see behind, as he pulls out?
Silent, demure, I'd wait, I suppose. Or perhaps I am supposed to say something to him. Perhaps I need to whisper No when his hand brushes my knee, perhaps I need to giggle softly. Which is it? Will he talk much as we drive on, I wonder, as I sit here in my cubicle and wait. And when we arrive, wherever it is we are bound, I'll wait, I guess, for him to open the door, gather my arm as I swing my legs clear, ankles pressed tight, so he can lift me free. Perhaps he'll tug and swing me again into his chest, or tug a different way so that I follow him, a step or two behind, as he leads me on.
We'll walk along a winding gravel path, I think, past beds of flowers, colors dimmed by moonlight into muted purple, blue and black; petals turned inwards, folded together for the night, as we are meant fold ourselves together in the night. We'll walk through deeper shadows of that the trees cast and emerge back into the silver light washing the lawn. Walking, walking.
Or maybe the path will stretch just a few yards from his car to a wood-framed doorway, where he will fumble with his keys again, before he lets us in. There in the darkness of his living room, he'll cup my face with his hands as he kisses me again. He'll step another step towards me, let his hands brush though my hair, fall to my shoulders, trace the outline of my arms as he bends lower, where his glance had fallen, touching with his lips the spot just where the valley between my breasts narrows. I'd barely feel the first button slipping free, as his chin, as his kissing lips, his cheeks are cradled there; I'd barely feel his awkward grope as he tries, once, twice and at last to unsnap the hook and eye on my bra, I'd barely feel it slip down as his lips encircle a nipple: first, my right, I think, and then, once I had swollen, maybe moaned a time or two, and risen to the touch of his tongue, his lips would take my left nipple and inhale.
My hand would have to touch him, have to stroke, have to pull him closer; and pulling closer, he'd lift his lips again to fit, fold me into his arms kiss me deeply, tongue pushing into me, an urgent need to taste, to probe.
I'd feel him, hard and throbbing against my belly, feel a wall of muscle under my palm, tugging his shirt free, stroking circles, circles, circles on his stomach as he kissed. One arm across my back would press me to him, hold me as my knees melted for a moment, hold me as I tumbled backwards, carrying him with me to the sofa.
A little half twist so we both would fit, my back pressed to the soft back of the sofa, my hand sliding down to the bulge of trousers where he is straining toward me.
Rubbing, feeling an arc of need, his need, bulging beneath the slight roughness of cloth, sliding layers of cloth. Beneath the pressing of my palm, his wool trousers slipping over the cotton next to the tender skin, I feel him throb and know it's time to tug, to slowly tug the zipper.
He stirs a little, springing free. I hold him in my hand, feeling him stir, feeling the pulse of blood beneath the rose-red skin, feeling the engorged flesh, his head edged purple, as tender to my touch as a bruised fruit, for his whole body shudders when I brush the side of my index finger's first knuckle there. My thumb barely pressing at the spot where his head meets the bottom of his arcing, aching shaft. I feel his aching, know his aching.
Fingers enfold, wrapping him like the petals of the flowers outside enfold each other and the flowers' cores when evening falls, With a slow stroke down, he groans.
Watching my hand stroke, watching myself, thinking -- what do you think at such a moment, I ask myself, sitting there in my little grey-walled cubicle, waiting.
Watching, watching. With a slight arch of neck, I look up to his face, in time to hear him moan, looking for a sign and seeing eyes closed, dark curl of hair flopping down. Wanting to brush it back into place, except my hand is busy now, stroking, stroking.
He's trembling beneath my touch, the velvet skin of his shaft slides over the iron beneath, warmth rising as his quivers, the pale wet seeping from his head brushes onto my inner wrist, a strange perfume of must and of desire.
He groans again, and now I feel his hand on me, his hand traveling up my inner thigh, his hand cupping me for a moment, pressing hard through the cloth before, abrupt and urgent, he is yanking at my own zipper, pushing his fingers in, cupping again, through the thin and satiny final shield of cloth. Blunt fingers, urgent fingers, slip beneath the edge of fabric as I stroke him.
His fingers find the smooth curve that he'd cupped through cloth is now a flower opening for him, damp as if bedewed by a rising sun, the sun whose warmth and light relaxed the enfolded petals of the night before. His finger finds the line between my lips and traces it once, twice before he lays it there between my lips, just lying there, a presence I cannot ignore, a weight heavier than a single finger could ever be, the weight of contained power, resting, waiting, his finger lying there, barely pressing lips apart. Now I moan.
Did I moan? Could anyone in this emptied maze of cubicle have heard? Where is, when will he come?
First, though, he bends the knuckle, first knuckle of his finger lying there so that his blunt fingertip strokes, presses a little deeper, not even an inch, into me, a small wave, tiny cycle: Stroke and press. And, yes, reach again. Stroke and press. A finger, barely moving, a strong hand cupping me and I feel a warm, liquid electricity begin to swell from there, from there between my legs, to wash, diffuse as mist, along my inner thighs, slowly spreading as his touch reaches just a little deeper, moves just a little faster, so that the warmth flows like a tiny silver rivulet and the mist encircles legs. I feel a bloom of warmth across the small of my back, as if a pale and golden fragrant oil was seeping down into that bowl and spreading, spreading. His finger stroking, two fingers stroking and now the glow rises along the curve of my belly towards my navel, spreading, slowly thinking: like a haze become a mist become a cloud touched by the rising sun, infused with light, turning from violet to rose to gold until the moment when the day has finally come.
He'd shift himself again, I think, and I'll slip down a bit so that my back no longer's cradled by the soft fat back of the sofa, but instead presses flat to the seat-cushions, bobbing as he lifts himself to his knees, straddling me, trying to find his balance as he tugs my pants, my panties down, as he yanks his trousers out of his way.
And now, again I'm moving, as he strokes a hand along my rear, the back of my thigh, my knee, lifting my leg so he can thrust ...
The creaking of a spring, faint as it sounds, is louder than the moan I feel so deep inside my throat. Hauling myself upright in my swivel chair, feeling the wobble of its plastic arms, the roughness of the burlap textured back pressing through my thin shirt as I snap back.Steps coming, slowly, past the empty cubicles. Coming to me, I hear, muffled though each step is by the dark gray carpet that he's walking over, slowly, oh so slowly, coming to me.
What is he going to say, once he has turned that final corner? Will he hang a large hand along the top of my cubicle wall, cock hips as his eyes dance over my body, peer down a shirt I'd unbuttoned just one button too far. Will he stand square, legs spread wide, in the very center of the opening; inevitable presence, the way he'll want to be, the way he expects to be, the way his size almost demands he be, the way strength contained within his skin, that almost vibrates with energy eager for release, compels.
And there, he stands. Now he is standing in the aisle by my cubicle, now he is turning, facing me. He fills the opening, he is that big. The curl of dark hair flops again, as if tired by the week, by the stale air of the office we are surely about to escape. The sheaf of papers that is the week of work I want now to forget, to leave behind, is in his hand, hand fallen easily, tiredly by his hip. A half smile. A glance into my eyes.
"Very nice," he says.
"Yes?"
"Very nice, yes."
He neither leans nor stands, but steps into my space and lays the papers on my desk. He is just inches from my chair, looming over me, almost touching -- or did he brush my arm there for a second.Waiting, now. Waiting.
Waiting for the word, what he will say.
I try a half smile.
Nothing,
Tilt head, look up into his face.
Nothing.
Only my breathing, his. Each breath of mine shorter than the one before. Heart hammering, surely he hears, surely he knows.
Nothing.
A deep inward gasp and then:
"Friday," I say, as lightly as I can manage. "How about a drink?"
A sharp glance down, a step away.
Flash in his eyes as he takes yet another step, another, retreating through the opening, outside my cubicle. A moment that feels like an hour, like two as I wait, shaking, sick shivering in my belly, for what the dark scowl now twisting his face promises, has to promise, what I should have known, but didn't, too late to tell him: look again, look more closely, feel:
"You fucking faggot," he snaps. "No way."
Halfway across the river, the ferry turns. The gulls, as always, surprised by the boat's movement now wheel and dive, complaining cries as they take up their stations once again. The turn means a breeze from a fresh direction can ruffle hair, feather the hem of the skirt that after all these months I dare to wear so that it dances round my knees. I lean against the bow gate, as I always have whenever I ride on this ferry, lean into the breeze, let the iron railing keep me from falling. Now, though, I bend my knee, let my left foot float up as if I am a dancer posing.
The ripples across the water sparkle, silvery, in bright sunshine; the day is mild enough that I need no jacket, though the summer's past. There are no crowds crossing today, I am alone here at the ferry's bow, face bent sunwards, gulls calling, wind swirling round. The spot, here at the bow, where I now stand, is where I always stand: a few points to starboard (as my father used to say) so that I can watch the Surry County shore swing by, stately and slow, as the ferry turns, so that I can feel the breeze pick up, as if to carry me away into the sky. It's barely a hour's drive away. Funny that it's been so long since I did.
So long.
If I close my eyes, I think I can smell the tang of the sea, the spicy-sweet of loblolly needles thick on the ground across the water; I can feel that I am home again. And feel that although when the ferry thumps into the slip this journey will have to end, there is nevertheless always the possibility of return. Barely an hour's drive.
"A question of an inch or two, if you believe the map."
I feel your presence, almost touching, the same moment that I hear the rumbling of your voice. Feeling, hearing, I open my eyes to the dark green of trees, silver of water; I will not turn, not yet, to see that you are standing at my side, watching the shore slip by. I will not ask where you have been. Why you have not come.
"Such a small distance, really," you say.
"And yet, so far."
"You've made ... "
"Yes. No need to say, I suppose."
I know, though I look straight ahead so I will not see you, not just yet, that your eyes now travel over me. That you now see the breeze lifting my hair from where it brushes my shoulders so that it floats round, a halo for a far-from-angel. You see a dress, bright with a print of flowers, light as gauze, pretty as young woman's heart-shaped face, as my face. That you see how an inch less there has made a curve that is just the right fit should your arm need to wrap round my waist. That now your eyes trace how an inch more there has made a hip that you could hold to pull me closer to you; an inch more there is now the softness of breasts where once I asked you not to touch. But now, perhaps, you know you'll need to touch. Eventually.
"How has it been?"
"How has it been, my incubus, you ask," I say. "How has it been? How has it been since you remade me?"
Now you smile.
"As you say." And do you make a courtier's bow?
"Mmm. And shall I tell you a story, now," I try to sound as if I am musing over a tangent, over the fencing of flirtation. "Which story shall I tell? Which fiction?"
"That I remade you?"
"Ah, yes. That is a nice one."
"Have you another?"
Well, yes, actually. Yes. I am, we are, stories that we tell ourselves, conversations with the world. We are a story that we make; a story that we can, if we chose, rewrite; we are a dozen stories, hundreds, a fugue of stories -- first one for a few bars and then the next and then the next and then a harmony, maybe. A dissonance, maybe. A symphony of stories, a complex dance of stories. So:
"One evening, in a bar at which I'd never stopped before ... "
Or:
"The laughter of my cousins, silver bells of laughter, chased me off from their sunlit room ... "
Or:
"Maybe it's just a question of an inch or two ... "
Your hand reaches for mine, covers it. The trees on the shore are coming closer, the ferry nears its slip.
"Or," you say. "Once upon a time, there was a boy who, liberated by a touch, became transformed."
"He was?"
"Or maybe not," you smile.
And I smile too. Waiting for you to take the next step, whatever you decide. Waiting for the step that then I'll take, to see which of the many dances we could dance, we today will chose to dance -- or if we'll chose to dance at all. Waiting, as it turns out, for you to say:
"We're going to dock quite soon. Shall I come with you?"
"You don't have a ..."
"No," smiling again. "You'll leave me stranded if you don't."
I won't leave you stranded.
But I will drive now, not you.
The motor whines, as we crawl up the road over the bluf, through the shady dim, until we emerge between the yellow fields of soybeans laid in their neat squares between the trees. Where the ferry road meets a forgotten country highway, the little blue-gray metal soldier still stands guard on his column, one leg poised on the drum, rifle butt on ground, before the redbrick courthouse, white columns still needing paint, as they always did.
To head back home, I must turn here. Glancing at you, I see you nod.How odd, to have you here beside me, immobilized by the seatbelt, your bulk almost fitting in the seat, looking out at rolling fields, dark trees beyond, the neat frame farmhouses. To have you sitting beside me, as if tamed. Quiet, contained for once, as we drive on. The road curves easily round the low hills, a long and sweeping curve now as we approach the county line.
"Here," you say. "Turn here."
A narrow road, its signpost long disappeared, leads off between the fields. It is perhaps a quarter mile to the woods, where with a sharp right-angle curve, the road now becomes gravel. Another turn and we emerge from the trees to see a bowl of fields on gently sloping hillsides, a small creek carving S's, framed with bright green brush, meandering towards the James. The road curves along the high ground, ridge of an ancient beach, and just before it bends down towards the creek there is a field of cotton, bolls just exploded, white as clouds, the dark green leaves edged scarlet.
"There," you say, pointing to the right. "Just down here."
A lane of grass: I see where tires made tracks once, but now soft green covers the scars. We pass a stand of loblolly, the tall, straight rough-barked trunks swaying even in this day's light breeze; the gently moving trees thick enough here to screen the road, the lane here covered with their orange-brown needles. It is only when we pass the grove that I see how the trees hide the house from the barely traveled road, how they hide the way the fields slope down from the house towards the creek, hide the two hills beyond the creek, the hills washed golden as their oaks begin their autumn change of color, the hills nearly blocking that glimpse of the wide, blue river.
Looking all around, looking, wanting to drink all of this is, I barely feel you take my hand. I let this feeling, this place pour into me: The clear blue sky arching above us, the greens and browns of the fields, the black cows by the creek, the scarlet-edged green and the brilliant white of the cotton framed by the dark trees.
A tug almost too light to feel leads me on, up the front porch steps, behind you through the door and into the soft dimness inside.
"Come," you say.
And now, again, your hands there, at the curve of my waist, above the swell of hips. And now, breath on the back of my neck, where the tilt of my head has let my hair fall out of your way. Now lips touch my skin, your breath melting an inner ice.
I lift my hands to yours, to hold you to my waist, to feel you there, feel as if your hands could encompass me. Then, as if we dance, you now lift my hands, so that I spin to face you, so that I can see your eyes drinking me in, so that I can see that smile you don't know you're smiling, that smile smiled when a man sees how beautiful is the woman whom he desires. I feel you lift my hands, spin me, suspend me, just inches from you. You hold my arms akimbo, at my side and I am almost pinned. Just as I want to be.
Your eyes, I feel your eyes undress me, even as you hold me here, still, heart pounding. Your thumbs now press the very center of my palms, firm roundness pressing, as if to tell me: Now, feel. Thumb on the palm, now tracing circles there, now like a palmist reading fortune in the lines it follows but that you do not see because you are still gazing, so intently, into my eyes.
Thumb and fingers now, blunt fingers, strong fingers, stroke each of my fingers, feeling how delicate in contrast, letting me feel that. Thumb and fingers stroking, and as they stroke, lead my hands to your face, to cup your face, but loosely, so you can kiss first one palm, then the other, as you button me.
Last button loosened, you hands find mine again, lift them above our heads, sweep them down so my dress begins to slip down from my shoulders, so you can stroke the thin cloth off, so that it falls down to my feet.
I watch you watching me.
Feel your hands reaching around me, unsnapping. A deep shuddering breath.
Now, kneeling, your press lips to the soft swell beneath my navel. You hands again on my waist, stroking down, until that, too, falls to my feet. Feel your warm breath, and you, what do you feel?
You won't say.
But, your hands on my waist, mine on your hands, you rise again, standing before me, gazing at me: This time, not just into my eyes.
We stay like that a minute, an hour, who can say.
You step back, I step towards you, stepping clear of the pile of clothing, pile of froth now at my feet.
Now, I unbutton. Now, my palms stroking, push clothing clear. Now it is I who kneels so that the last is loosened, falls away.
Two hands, my two hands, can't reach round your thigh, though they can hold you, as I try to hold myself steady. They can brush lightly there, a thumb following the center-line of your inner thigh, hinting how I might like in a minute to feel your hands. They can move upwards; first this thigh, then the other, then to where they meet, and where I can hold you, your two warm testicles, heavy, moving in my palms.
If I tilt my head just the smallest bit, I feel your shaft, hard now and trembling just a little, hot against my cheek. If I turn just a little more, parting my lips, I can run the tip of my tongue along the curving outward arc of your desire.
Like this.
Do you shiver, do I feel you shake, now that my hands are fanned across your buttocks? Your muscles contract, almost like smooth oak -- that is your color -- small bowls behind your hips, beneath my palms, smooth as an statues' skin, worn by the touch of generations, warm as beach sand furrowed by my fingers. Fingers now cup each cheek, now slip down, drawing you closer, as now my tongue reaches that purpling edge.
I touch you, circle you with my tongue, part lips -- but now your hands ease to my armpits and your gentle pressure upwards lifts me from my knees.
You peer again, deep into my eyes, as if you seek a secret, the secret that I too seek in the velvet dark of yours, that I seek in the glint, like distant pale-blue stars, of your eyes. I lift a hand to you, cup your square chin.
And with a sudden dip of one knee, swoop of your arm, you scoop me up off the ground, carry me off from this room into the one just beyond.Just beyond.
You have not asked, need not. You will have what you want, and what you want is me. Is me. Me.
And, lying here on your bed, seeing you loom over me, a giant, backlit by the low rays of the sun, long shadows of you cross me, the bed, fill the wall behind me if I would look behind me, if I cared to, instead of watching you.
Watching you, your eyes fixed to mine, as you side-step around the bed until you reach its foot. Watching you, as you lift one knee, then the other, dipping springs so that I almost, almost slide to you. You kneel there, between my legs, low slanting sunbeams turn your chest hair golden, your body pale gold as the wood behind the chisel's pass, as a chisel might have carved the flat muscles of your stomach, the smooth grooves V-ing down from your hips, like the V of your torso, converging to ...
Converging to ...
To your erection, rose and red and arching out to me. To me.
Now, as I watch you turn to one side, I see one wall of muscle sliding over other, deeper walls of muscle. As you reach, holding a foot, rubbing the arch of my foot with your heavy thumb, thumb meant for grasping sledgehammers, for freeing rusted bolts with a single twist, for cracking pecans from their shells, rubbing and pressing the arch of my foot, lifting my foot so thumb and index finger trace the contour of my calf, so thumb can gently, o so gentle circle round the hollow behind me knee. So thumb can start to move, slowly, oh so slowly up the centerline of my inner thigh, your palm curved round the back, lifting me, stroking me.
Shivering, as your thumb approaches, barely brushes the hair.
Before you stroke downwards, towards my knee, laying my leg back on the softness of the mattress.
Then take my other foot. Pressing, lifting, stroking, this time a fraction of a inch farther.
The brushing of your thumb a little closer, little closer makes me shiver.
I'm not sure if I can bear the waiting.
And as I wonder, you bend to me, lowering your lips to my breast, until you have encircled my nipple, until you inhale me, until your tongue has danced around me. Raising yourself again, gazing deep into my eyes, I see you smile flash before you bend again and kiss the other.
I feel your weight on me. I need to feel your weight on me.
Need.
Need to feel you, your weight on my hips, your thighs straining and tight between mine.
Need.
Your hips lift slightly, your tonuge plunges still deeper, and then ...
Oh.
You are thrusting into me, deep into me.
I feel you push my lips apart, filling the space that have opened. Feel you slide, inch by slow inch, millimeter by millimeter, sliding along silk, each second for each millimeter that you move feels like a minute, each minute is an hour. Feeling your thick shaft that my inner walls grasp firmly, I want to moan. Feeling your upward arching shaft brushing that nub makes an inner web alight, turn all electric.
I feel you, slicing like a sword towards a core of me that's buried someplace I never knew. I feel you, unstoppable as a train plunging in me, impaling me.
My legs lift so you can drive still deeper, deeper. My legs wrap round your waist to hold you deep inside me.
Like the rich dark earth, I am now plowed. What was impossible, is happening, the feel of you in me, solid as the hard muscles of your thighs, your shaft that I enwrap as you probes deep and then, a feeling like tearing silk, retreat only to plunge again, and again.
My fingers, two fans across your back, feel you shudder. Inside, you stiffen, throb: I feel this when you pauses for this moment deep inside me, as our lips break apart and we gasp trembling, shaking draughts of air.
Then, again, slowly now, I feel your hips lift, you slipping out, almost out.
And like the ocean's wave coming crashing in.
Unstoppable.
Waves crashing on my shore, waves that rose from deeps far, far beyond the horizon's limit, that rolled across the width of ocean, driven by the spin of earth, the pull of moon. Insistent, inescapable.
Inevitable.
Waves crashing, spume flying, each wave bigger than before, second than first, third than second.
Undeniable.
Within me, washing through my body, warm and liquid like the Sun distilled, humming with energy, vibrating with what soon is to be set free, what soon will fling me to the sky, to the stars. Feeling us spiraling higher, higher with each thrust, feeling the swirling, sparkling galaxies exploding in the velvet dark inside, the viscous warm bubbles rising, swelling, one after another, iridescent and golden, each growing faster, sweeter than the one before, growing so fast, starting so fast they seem almost to subsume the one before and be subsumed. Just as the waves do, crashing onto the shore
They say the seventh wave's the biggest.
The seventh....
Is the one.
***
It's not until you flick on the beside light that I see.
On the dresser, beside the neat row of tiny bottles, delicate flasks: A dim photo, in an old-fashioned metal frame, of a couple. He's in his dress blues, her flowered, flouncy dress was fashionable once, a time barely remembered.
Tucked in the mirror's frame: A snapshot, young boy in bathing suit, water-flattened hair, droplets on shoulders catch the sunlight, the dark cold lake sparkling behind, the pines climbing beyond almost blocking the sky.
You see me looking and when I glance back at you, you nod.
There is a photo in your hand: I'm leaning on my car, tie loose, outside the office building by the highway. Tired eyes, half smile.
There is a framed photo on your nightstand: My long hair brushes bare shoulders, almost covering the satin straps of the dress, dark lips, a flush along my cheeks, an easy smile.
I have a thousand questions.
You have just a single answer:
"Welcome home."