I remember the way you walked up to me.

You walked like you owned the world, because for all I know you did, the hips you swear that you don't have swinging like a pendulum held in the hand of a hypnotist. I was lost that quickly. Your slim body didn't seem small, even though it was, because of the aura you had that made everyone turn and look when you walked into a room. I still don't know if I'm the only one who didn't have a look of fear when you did.

I can't help but think, too, about the way you fix me with your beautiful frigid eyes, eyes like green agate but not bright or light-reflecting, rather, dull and inward- facing. I always wonder about what it is you think of so deeply that even the glow of your skin is muted by your musings. I believe that it can't be anything light in tone, but rather as heavy as sin, sins you saw committed but have always refused to tell me about. I want to be as muted as you, as quiet, as deep and barring, and I wanted to know what it was that truly made you. Beyond your flesh and bones, I always want to know you.

But you won't allow me that grace, not on any night I have been here, and I wonder if it will come on any night that I will be here, and that hope is what keeps me coming. I will come, I have come, I am coming. At this very moment, I am here with you, but I still cannot see any deeper into your shallow eyes than on any other night.

I chant your name like a prayer.

I know your body, every inch of your vanilla skin, I know how it feels and tastes and smells and heats and cools, I know how it is the only thing truly keeping me from you. I wish I could take your skin away, strip it off like bark off of a tree, to see the dripping sap and the still-green center of your being. I want to know you, and I want to see you totally and know how it feels to thread my fingers, not through your obsidian hair, but through your very self. That is what I want.

But it isn't what you want me here for, not that I have ever been able to see. Either that or it is, and your shut-away emotions truly desire for someone to know you. But your emotions are still shut-away in either case, and even with me shuddering against you and leaning into you and embracing what I can touch you haven't yet unlocked even one of your many padlocks, and never have you ever shuddered or leaned or embraced. Sometimes I can't help but wonder at your total composure, that composure that I want so dearly.

I nuzzle deep into your neck, as if I could burrow myself there and nest like a starling in your pulse. I stay there, and stay there, as the white of your skin is blotted out by the white of my ecstasy and I fell my own desire to make this last long, long, longer. I whisper your name, and I whispered that I love you, and I whisper that I'll come back again into the iron-hard skin of your shoulder. You let me linger, stretch out the moment as if I were pulling taffy, and for a moment I can pretend that I am here by the choice of your heart instead of a choice of your mind.

Then you push me away, and I am forced to leave again. I never know why you refuse me the afterglow with you, why you refuse such from yourself, but you do and I do not argue. I will never argue. I give you what you want, because it is for that reason that you call me here, and that you did call me here that time ago.

I remember the way you walked up to me.