i swear i had never heard a man so in raptures before. his voice like an incantation — all at once, i was falling through the floorboards, transported to the last time (birthday party, beach) where he and i had first created / shared / indulged in our (this) tremendous illicitness. it was bad then, so it must be doubly bad now — a year later to the date — this time indoors (his place, poker night) instead of all sunshine and sandy.
he was bad for me. bad for me like really really very bad for me. he was wrong for me and yet i was wondering where next he might grab me ;; take me hold me grip my thighs (his hand compressing pliant flesh my eyes ignoring his ring finger with that awful damning tan line) — i wasn’t sure if he knew just how much i knew that what we were doing was at best immoral. at worst …
“we’d better not again; there’s no way,” i said, “we couldn’t though, do you think?”
“i think i need to,” he said, and the way his voice was light and breathy and airy like he was on the precipice of the most divine pleasure and too gone to hold it back made me shiver with delight. and after needing twice before … !
it was dark all around me and the harder i squeezed my eyes shut the closer i got to him. the party went on in the dining room without us, laughing / cheering / an oblivious unruly energy. my energy was swirled deliciously into his ;; i’d forgotten how much my world was his kaleidoscope, how complicated he jumbled me up with his hands like wow. what was i doing? i knew that i really shouldn’t be feeling what i was touching but he was using that voice, his voice and i let it fill me with every thing that was good and hot in the world, and precious.
“you’re gorgeous,” i said, and the room suddenly started to sweat with me ;; i thought i could feel the walls breathing, expanding and contracting violently as if suffocation was imminent. was it loud loud loud? or just me? my subtlety was floating away. “i was gorgeous once…”
“how many times can we be gorgeous together, do you think?” it was a lace and red velvet question, stitching itself into my skin; an inference / invitation / a promise that exalted me. wonderfully indulgent, “let’s count.”
how many? we were halfway through clawing and destroying each other, so maybe i was at number two or three. i thought he might stop at one i was secretly hoping he wouldn’t but by the end of the night he’d be on three and i’d be on six. i mean five. it felt like six, seven, eight, infinite, but no — it was five. i remember talking to the rear-view mirror about it the next day and the number fffive slithered out from me automatically (slow and soft like a wicked confession), bottom lip catching under my teeth ;; word morphing into a sigh.
as he cracked open my ribcage, “glass heart,” i explained sheepishly, and he pulled the thing out with a morbid curiosity. “please hold without shattering.”
the glow from it was illuminating him ;; an angel of a man. “no promises,” he laughed, but his eyes weren’t smiling. he paused, and with his finger, traced the seam down the middle where the two chunks of crystal had been welded back together some time ago. “it’s been crushed before.”
“tell me about it,” i said, and my iridescent heart began to warm in his hands ;; his finger still exploring that tactile groove with a practiced expertise. “it’s ugly. like a car accident … you just can’t look away.”
so … five, and him three (i didn’t even know it was possible, for him or for me). where did he learn it, i was wondering to myself, or i am wondering it now, and praising / wanting to kiss the neurons in his brain for the cerebral fireworks he set off around me, the new skill he has unlocked in me. i am so gone ! kind of gone in that way, where the badness catches up to the goodness too late, since the deed is already done. the poison, as delicious as is, still poison is, and though it spreads so beautifully — something has metastasized, i know it ;; and i’m not sure if he’s so sure about how much he has bewildered me, knocked me out of sense.
“that stuff,” i coughed, moving away from the glass he put to my lips, “is like paint stripper.” it was pure liquid amber, smelled like sweetness and smoke; my throated burned and burned and went totally raw in protest.
“i know. it’s good for this type of thing,” he sounded almost reticent.
“true.” i anxiously coolly finished off the rest. “more,” i said.
“are you sure?”
“yes!”
oh, i was a mess ! what was i left to do but bask in my current possession, wrapped up with a red pink ribbon, wait for him to untie me all over again? he inspired intense agony and pleasure in me, oscillating between them so precisely tears sprang to my eyes with a ferocity. now i am thinking i need outside intervention … since the forces only now stronger than him are heavens. but did i build him out of marble and did he remember to bring an afternoon free with him (maybe with flowers, a suit, a sermon)? i was reaching something, lips curling.
he said, “bite me when you do, sunshine.” like he could read my damn mind.
as if i already wasn’t thinking / wanting / dreaming about sinking my teeth vampirically into the smoothness of his neck, to brand him find the spot where the pulse was hardest. he was loving me, i could tell, in many ways though it was his twitching breathing that made me — and is making me — fall back into wicked daydreams.
“you’ll be the death of me,” i said, or maybe he said it, i can’t really remember, and it was the only truth that mattered. his lap was the electric chair and i was willingly administering each fatal shock ;; while i was his cooling drink of elemental water threatening to pull him greedily into siren depths, coveting his permanence.
the daydreams plagued and plague me. i was driving this morning in my ruined party dress enraptured on a five lane highway thinking if i let go of the wheel / prop my feet up on the dash / cover my eyes i might better keep reliving remembering the incident for all its horror and its glory ;; was so far into my own mind i was seeing above myself, watching through the sunroof the top of my clueless head. all i could think about was his voice, his agonising was music to me now repeating in me.
“i’m still going, because i have to keep going, because you make me,” he said. he had no other choice, that’s what he was trying to say for me, and he knew i found it embarrassingly hot flattering. and even if i didn’t know how much of the poetics was for my own hubristic pleasure it still made me gasp and try not to roll my eyes back and my voice came out strangled next.
pathetically apologetic: “i don’t amount to much.”
“no. you are making this beautiful for me,” he said, and i believed him, because it was a little bit beautiful amongst our silent quiet bedlam: it was elysian, almost astral like out of my world and i was at a juncture … my body was one part of the equation and i wished / hoped / thought i could keep his the other part if only for a lifetime or a green light or the length of a four-letter word …
“soon,” he said he cooed, and there it was, and when he finally said it i didn’t doubt it or think or was worried about being self-conscious because it was about to be actually, or actual, and it was soon for me too and that was enough for me. “do you disarm or detonate?”
detonate !!!
he would learn (or perhaps be reminded) after my first combustion that i would become no less explosive over time ;; that during ecstasy i would vibrate so forcefully in his hands i seemed to temporarily disappear, only to materialise minutes later in a rejuvenated state, sweaty and grinning stupidly. we took turns dizzying ourselves to the point of a pleasurable nausea, until the two of us were so glutted we couldn’t possibly continue, all sinew and nerves.
fixing my hair / my lipgloss / the straps of my dress, “i would love to see you again.”
“absolutely,” he said and i was soaring cruising. “how about my next birthday?”
i chuckled into the silence of the room, was absently pulling at a thread on the sleeve of my jacket, but the longer it echoed back to me the more troubled i became ;; it was just quieter and more quiet and the diminuendo / the unforgiving unease was too much to bear or exist in at all and his earnest face was my undoing. “next year?” i choked out, my mouth dry. yellow light, yellow light. foot timidly hovering over the brakes. “like another twelve months?”
“why not? make it a tradition?”
“oh.” heart meet hammer. “um…”
“i can’t wait,” he said, and i wanted to spit laugh in his face.
i didn’t. “it’s late,” i said, licking my lips, and i tried to say it twice (it got caught in my chest like an overeager airbag each failed attempt) before i actually made a sound, and it was early instead of late when i finally said it. it was early and with the red morning light filtering in through the curtains i thought driving home and sleep could remedy this insatiability ;; who cares if not because when if the feeling does come back, we can just do it all over again tomorrow next year. right?
the energy in the other room was no longer noisy and wild. it was silent, and empty — the festivities had seemingly ended hours ago. neither one of us had noticed, or cared to notice, or thought much in general. all evidence of a party had been cleaned up: the plates and bowls had been washed and stacked by the sink, the cards and poker chips packed away, chairs tucked in neatly. and in the middle of the wooden kitchen table, glimmering and solitary, a gold wedding band weighted down a sealed envelope.