I was sitting on your couch. Your cats were lounging against my leg with their feline weight; gentle and light against my denim. The magazine was pointless but distracting. I heard you getting yourself ready upstairs but I sat quietly. The night rained on outside and the house was cold.
But you were close.
I still remember the dim light from the kitchen warming the room I sat alone in with it’s intimate glow. And I wonder how you look and how you smell from upstairs where you are.
xxx
The car ride was spontaneous. I sweat and I call you from the cab of a large Jeep but only the answering machine responds. I’m glad you have a roommate. With a little bit of pride and a lot of gusto, I find myself driving towards you on Christmas day alone. Cigarettes and a foreign cell phone are my only company. Except thoughts of you and your strange room.
I hurry.
xxx
When I hear the sink turn off and the light go out and the door close, from upstairs, all I can do is wait. My heart beats, my breath moves but the world is frozen in apprehension. Your shadow dances on the wall where the staircase bends and I catch myself not breathing.
Not moving.
Then I see you.
Words fail. The earth moves. You glow with the light of a thousand pagodas. I fall but I love every minute of the trip. You descend and all I can do is stare. Every step and every stair bring you a little closer to me but not close enough.
Your eyes reflect all available light in a perfect, prismatic stare and I stare back. There you are with nothing between us but air and tension. I’m ashamed.
I’m ashamed of my sweat. Of my scruff. Of my gaze, settled on you and every shadow you create by being opaque. And suddenly you’re closer than I can bear with your lips and your hips and your upward gazing eyes. I wonder if I can handle it but you seem so real and right.
My arm caresses and traces the outline of your body, creating another body for you in the shadows. Then we smile to ourselves and outwardly they touch. Lips placed against lips in an electric dance that I get lost in but don’t mind the confusion. You’re here and I’m with you and the cold air outside doesn’t mean a thing with your warmth around me like an ozone of familiar safety.
Why does it have to be so easy?
Nothing in the world could make as much sense as you do pressed against me in a soft pressure that cripples me. It’s really not fair. But you won’t hear a peep from me except for a few moans of pleasure from beneath the sheets of your bed on the floor. Even your cats like me.
xxx
Once again, even in the middle of it all, my thoughts go to the vision of you coming down the stairs. By yourself but not alone. I stared and you didn’t mind and I couldn’t help myself. You made every word for “beauty” seem insignificant. I see you in a version of slow motion only three-dimensional and staring back. Skin like lava but sweeter and hair like the fragrant breath of September in the mountains; I breath it in.
Your body is a shadow that rests against mine in graceful weight that only I can feel. You flex and relax in a perfect cadence of tempting undulation that only I can understand. Every breath you take is filled with desire that I exhaled and the room is polluted with us. I take a breath so close to your skin that you invade my lungs with a pleasant headiness that overtakes us both. I can’t help but sink; falling farther than ever and hard enough to break something that only you can fix.
And that’s how I know – I’m home.