Rememberance

*

His flesh enticed me from the beginning, looks like the edges of burnt paper. And it took me a few awkward, accidental brush of my knuckles against his wrist of elbow before I was convinced his skin wouldn’t burn me. The warmth that came from somewhere inside of him, reminded me of the way sand feels between my toes right after the early afternoon sun has touched it. Before I was with him, my body was riddled with a constant chill. Bad circulation inherited from my mother. But he cured it, and I wonder, even now, how he kept that constant internal heat, radiating out through his flesh.

The first time we shared a bed I noticed the warmth flowed through his entire body, not just his extremities, those body parts exposed to everyday air, and I claimed him as my personal heat source. There was snow on the ground that night and he insisted on keeping the thermostat 64 degrees. My body rippled in shivers before he climbed in next to me. There was a hesitancy in his touch, his large but delicate hands were meticulous and gentle as he removed each article of clothing from my body, like he was peeling away the shell from a hard-boiled egg. The slight tremor of his fingers tangled in the straps of my black bra so I stopped him, took his hands in mine and placed them on my bare hips while I lifted the bottom hem of his white undershirt up past his navel. I was shaking too.

But as soon as he pulled the stark cotton sheets around both of our naked bodies, the heat from him seeped into the mattress and radiated through the covers. And when the sunlight reflected off the white ground in the morning, I was awake before he was, the white light penetrating my closed eyelids. His smell was there next to me and my skin pulsed almost feverishly. Sachin has his back toward me and the sheets had crept down in folds just below his waist. The white material from the sheets nearly glowed against the contrast of his cherry chocolate skin. Outside, the snow on the ground and rooftops shone in the sunlight against the bare, dark branches of the trees that dotted front yards of his small neighborhood. I loved how the sheets of his bed felt as if they had just been pulled from the dryer. We fit into the empty spaces of each other, curled there in a fetal position. The nights I didn’t spend with him I’d coil around pillows, pretending he was there. But I’d wake up shivering.

*