When he walks down the hall I stop and inhale, his scent. It is old spice and locker rooms and the clean cotton of his shirt. Today it’s blue.
He smiles at me, a wide smile with all of his teeth exposed, crinkling his brown eyes all fringed with gold. He has long, caramel eyelashes and freckles on his nose.
Guilt is a beast like a bat with mother’s eyes,
In math his hands spell out his frustrations. I watch them grip his pencil, stiffen, relax. I watch them walk around his desk, flip on their back, curl in and out of fists. His fingernails are bitten down; the fingers thick and square. Hands like a child’s, like my father’s.
It is , it is love. It isn’t love at all.
We were at the beach. The wind was silent, the sun loud. Laughing nervously, he kicked off his , peeled off his shirt. All of his white, freckled body exposed. His calves were long and sinewy. Embarrassed about his white chest, his freckles, he ran into the water until it covered him in a blanket of foamy waves.
By the end of the day he was red, his flesh hot and tender. I rubbed alovera on his back with sweaty palms, took a beach towel and gently, gently, brushed sand off his sunburned calves.
He is beautiful and I want to, I want to
They lock the doors to the gymn at eight thirty; we arrived at eight thirty five. I threw my corsage to the ground is disgust, fuck the prom. At a local dine-in, the waitress clucked in dismay at our story. She set a bombox on the table and we danced to rock ballads, hands slipping down, down. Adjusted back to the shoulders, squeezing too tight. Songs have a way of ending too soon. His house was close, he said. And empty.
“take this and eat it; this is my body.”
His skin was soft, perfumed with sweat and his body was solid, enveloping. His hands were like fire, then ice and when I kicked my dress to the floor (scratchy, hateful thing) they seemed to fall on me like waves. My skin puckered and tingled beneath him.
I was sighing, then screaming. A tempest of desire.
It felt like a present long denied. It felt like his heart pumped my blood.
He was lean, like meat in strung up in a butcher’s shop. I exhaled quivering gratification beneath him.
Suck me dry leave me numb leave me sweat soaked
He held my face in those clumsy hands and said nonsense words. Laughter was inappropriate and impossible to contain: dandelion seeds scattered in the wind. He looked like a slapped child, like a wilted flower, but the animal had made a feast of his flesh and slunk away victorious. It was over, and I shrugged him off like a winter thought in spring.
