by November Tuesday

I am so, so fucked.

I’ve never kissed anyone like this before, leisurely, not necessarily leading up to anything, just reveling in it. She pulls back a bit and breathes, then nuzzles close, dragging her lips against mine. That texture of bottom lips across one another, that crude sweetness, gets me every time. I buck up and suck her bottom lip between mine. She moans and grabs a lock of my hair.

I hate to admit it but I’ve waited weeks for this, her body on mine, kissing me so slowly. We move lips and tongues in a leisurely rhythm, opening, flickering. “I could kiss you forever,” she murmurs.

Liar, I think, hurt blooming in my brain. I’m such a fucking literalist. But she’s never lied to me, she’s always been honest, that she can’t be what I need. I hate that, just as I like it, because I have no reason to hate her for this naked splayed feeling.

Poison. Still my lips are open below her, receiving her, taking her in.

I hate to admit it. I’m not that woman, that fool. I set the terms of my life. So why am I still kissing her back?

The world narrows and widens, there is nothing but her warm sweet weight and lips, and the throbbing between my legs. Her hand is gentle on my face. She pulls back and looks at me with these eyes that give nothing, seeing me below her. A million things are zipping by behind those eyes, but I’ll never know what they are. And I’m fine with that, as she moves down to kiss me with impossible tenderness. What I’m not fine with is the ledge I’m on. I could fall. With the scale that hangs down heavily in her favor.

I’m so fucking powerless. I bite her lip, and she squirms and makes a feminine whimper. How I love to make her squirm. It’s all I can control.

She takes my wrist. Presses it above my head. I fall limp, as I always do. She teases me about it, the automatic way this makes me go slack like an animal playing dead. Says I’m easy. It’s too close to home. I tell her to fuck off but it’s true.

That rough bid for control, that manifestation of her desire makes me go limp with pleasure. That she could want me enough to just take me like that. Even if she only wants me every other week.

She’s not brave enough to properly top me. In our current state, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

This is danger, this is wrong, in a time in my life where I’m fragile as glass. She pulls my hair hard enough to hurt, to make pleasure rise dizzily through me, and I just open wider. Knowing full well that I’m taking in.

It’s liberating, embracing that break of my heart. Her hand cradles my face so sweetly and tears rise to my eyes. Oh no, can’t do this. Can’t show my feelings. Can’t ruin it for her.

Fuck her, I think. Let it slip. The tears rise up and up in me, quiet. Her eyes are closed, her whole being focused on kissing me. How can that be? When I won’t see her for weeks and during that time she won’t touch a thing that is going on with me. How can this sweetness exist once every other week or less, in a vacuum, an airless bubble, a circle drawn by her and her alone?

We get rougher, fingernails across skin. I need to taste her. I’m so fucked. It stings in my eyes, my sinuses. I feel the tears flow down my cheek, first one side then the other. How can I cry while I’m kissing her?

The two are one and the same. Let it slip, I think. I let go and it snaps into focus. I feel the tenor of my heart like one continuous chord, and it feels good to hear it, real and in the air, not tangled up inside me.

She shivers as I suck her tongue between my lips. The pain and the pleasure. I open. My lips tangle with hers, and my tears fall. If she sees-

She doesn’t see. Her eyes are closed.

If she sees-

If she sees, I’ll tell her to shut the fuck up and keep kissing me.

I’ve never kissed this way before, with tears falling, and lips moving, and all of it a manifestation of the same emotion. It feels so whole, so right, to let that hurt merge into itself, to just let it be.

The doorbell rings, a loud suburban chime meant to be heard in the back yard or basement, too loud for the living room we’re in. We look at each other, startled.

She gets up to get the door, and I wipe my eyes. If she sees, she doesn’t say anything.

I feel fucked, though I’m still clothed, lips bruised red, hair messed, tears all on my face. I duck to the back of the house, to the kitchen.

I’m thirsty. All the moisture in me has rushed out in tears or between my legs. When I walk I feel that sodden glide of it in my panties. I gasp deeply and touch my lips. So fucking hot.

This kitchen has a million cupboards. I try them all until I find the glasses. I hear her in the other room, talking to someone, thanking them, shutting the door.

“Where’d you go,” she calls, laughing. How can she laugh?

She comes into the kitchen. I look at the ice dispenser. Cube, Crush. I press crush, then fill my glass with ice. Then water.

“I’m thirsty.” I don’t look up, feel my hair falling foward.

My glass is still half empty when she is behind me, lifting my hair, molesting my neck. She bites, hard. My gasp is audible in the kitchen silence. Her mouth, her breath are wet-hot as she eagerly kisses a line from ear to ear, pushing my hair out of the way, so rough. I make a little cry and stumble a bit on my feet, then she is pressing me close. My forehead is pressing clumsily against the door, rearranging plastic magnets.

The edge of her teeth, below my jaw. Bliss, in the reeling of my head and the slackness of my open lips, and the harsh catch of my breath.

Wouldn’t it be funny to show up at work with the imprint of a refrigerator magnet on my forehead?

I see this scene like a movie, as if I’m outside my body, a hot sex scene where I loll forward and she moves in close, and the pained expression on my face is hot, white hot, making the viewer throb the way I’m throbbing. I feel her biting me, teeth grazing, making me hurt, making me sing.

This is my next true confession, I think. Hell yeah. My readers will appreciate this. But what if she sees?

It will never happen. I gave her the URL for this site months ago, a show of faith not given to many people who I know in real life. I told her how heart and my soul are up here, and they are here - typed in blue pixels in a black void, and she hasn’t bothered to look even once.

If she were cruel, if she were playing me like a game, it would be easier. I’d tell her to fuck off and that would be that. But she’s in a prison within a prison, too lost in her own darkness to see me. It’s not her fault. She just doesn’t have the capacity to see me in the ways I need to be seen. She would love to, but I know she doesn’t know how. She’s like one of those babies, who never learns to bond. And it may be too late for her to learn.

So why do I stay, why do I keep driving up here, every other week, if I’m lucky. Because I see her struggle and her beauty. Because I’m on the cusp of loving her, and all it would take is a little more on her part, for her to finally open her eyes and see me.

I decided give it til mid-winter, for her craziness and my craziness to die down, and see if things don’t equalize a bit. See if she can’t warm to me and see how I’ve been here, all along.

She grinds my ear between her sharp teeth and I writhe. I’m moving side to side, in a way I haven’t moved in ages.

Then she presses against me, and I can’t move, the large fridge in front of me, her behind me. I like that lack of possibility, the way it removes any decision I could make, like even more the rough way her hand moves up the curve of my waist, around to grope my breast.

It’s more than hope though, more than a careful hedging of my bets, the decision to give it a chance.

The pleasure of her teeth on my neck, her rough hand, my moan, it’s stronger than heroin banging through my veins. I’m feeling things I never do in my day to day life, feel real and physical and connected to the world, my heart beating with the universal rhythm of life, of the heart and birth and death and fucking.

I'll give her til Christmas, because here I feel all the things I am isolated from in my ordinary life, in my cold hours, in the space between times like this.