"Sometimes I just don't know."

"Usually I just don't know." I shoot back at her, a bite in my tone, surveying her with the eyes of a predator and an unwarranted anger pulsing inside my throat.

We were talking about groceries. But somehow, we'd gotten to this.

"Len." She speaks, in a delicately sharp voice. My eyes rip themselves away from her body to meet her glowing marine ones. I'm staring into a mirror.

"What." It's an exhale, not even a legible unit of language.

Her eyes trace an elegant finger from my shoulder, across my chest, to my collarbone, up my neck and rest at my clenched jaw.

"What are you feeling." It's a question imitating a statement.
Are you thinking about me?

I allow her to wade in the deafening silence that is my unraveling of her unusual inquiry.

"Too much," I finally reply.
Stop it.

She smiles in a make-the-most-of-it kind of way. Neither of us is blinking.

"Remember that summer when we were eleven? When we went to the cliff."
You never said that when we were kids.

"Yeah." I'm caught off guard. I didn't think she would go that far.
It was so different then.

"I never forgot what you told me on the magic rocks."
We haven't changed at all.

"I never wanted you to."
In some ways more than others.

She looks straight into the pupil of my eye, and at that moment, I can truly see her soul, and it is beautiful and radiant.

The space between us diminishes into a fraction of a centimeter; our eyes are glazed and fog fills our heads as our breaths become heavy and uneven. There is a hesitation of unspoken boundaries in which we are unsure of the repercussions.

Our lips connect with an electric fire, and instantly, my thirst becomes insatiable. She became the wine from the forbidden fruit, inebriating me with each kiss. Our hands turn feral, clawing every part of the other's body: through hair, twisting clothes, gripping shoulders, across backs, scratching thighs. My tongue comes to graze her bottom lip, to taste her for the first time. She responds, sliding her palm up my bare abdomen with a heat, an impatience. I force her to the wall in a fierce retaliation, but she does not cease. We are animals tonight.

Somehow through the feverishness of it all, her fingers find my acromion and my thumb wanders to her hip bone: we repeat our age old oath without a word.

"You will never be truly alone"


"It was in that proximity that I found the deepest darkest secrets of your mind, and held them within my unclean hands, allowing myself to find more of you to thirst for."
- When Would the Clouds Care

Thank you for reading.