I sing the body electric, baby
-Lana Del Rey
They are learning to learn each other.
The first time, they read with strained eyes and awkward fingertips; she was too jerky, starting every time his fingers touched her spine, he was too careful, stifling his sounds and censoring every move. They were distant planets to each other, and even when he couldn't help himself and he kissed her brutally on the mouth and they were bodies electric in the dark, it was clumsy, scrambling, aching-noises need and it was strange.
The next morning, she didn't look at him. The next morning, he blushed up to his ears whenever he caught a glimpse of her.
They had both heard the breathless babble of a foreign language, and neither could make any sense of it.
So they started to learn.
She started to go slower, to let her fingertips drift so, so carelessly along his arm. To savor the tension there, the way the hairs prickle and his breathing jolts and his eyes get darker—darker—darker. Breakfast coffee colored, almost.
She started to decipher his mouth and the things his hands told her when they were over—over—all over. She started to pick up on the ways he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when he wanted her. She started to know, to conjugate like Latin, the roughness hidden in him—the impatient movement of his broom-rough fingers on her skin when he couldn't stand to be gentle any more. She started to see when he wanted to kiss patterns on her shoulders and when he wanted to rip her apart.
He, for his part, started to piece together her little, unconscious signals—the hitches in her breath when she had wild thoughts, the way she sat with her legs defensively crossed. He started to understand, like the Scotch phrases of his mother, her shudders when he went slow—her noises when he went fast. He started to find, just with his grazing fingertips, which parts of her were tuned tight-tight-tight. He began to categorize the contradiction in her: the playfulness, all coy eyes and roaming hands and laughter caught in his mouth, and the pleading, all heavy flush and rushing, rushing blood. He learned his way around her lips and how to take his name out from under her tongue.
Over and over and over and over.
"OliverOliverOliverOliverOliver…"
So now, they're reading each other in the dark; she is no longer afraid of blue night and browned hands and he is no longer ashamed of roaring need and an impatient mouth.
They are reading each other like braille and she has never until recently known the aching, uncertain gorgeousness of being blind.
They are reading each other like German starting to make sense and he has never until recently heard the headiness behind those rough syllables.
They are orbiting planets, and she cannot hold in her breath—her sighs—as he kisses her closed eyes. Nebulas bloom behind her roaring, fluttering eyelids.
He runs his fingers lightly down the tenderness of her arm, stretching it above her head. He likes the long white line of it in the dark—like a crescent moon. Like all the horizons and hidden facets of this language he's learning—learning with his mouth skimming her quivering collarbone like participles.
"You're spectacular," he says, his voice lost in her. "God—God, you're so spectacular."
She doesn't say anything. Her hands reach for him, for any of him, and they brush up on each others' grammar.
And they lie there, bodies electric in the wild violet dark, learning.