Rhythms

Sex didn’t come in poetic nuances or strings of adjectives like she read in books, in realistic fiction, that, well, must be based off reality. She was still new to it. Her fingers tremored as she watched her own hands ascend down the planes of skin on the backs of men she spent brief evening with.

She wanted sex to be like the second time she had it, where she stumbled into him through the doorway on soiled red pumps, streaks of mud on her jeans where she tripped and fell on one knee, bringing up soft grass with her heel like a garden hoe. She tore through a bleary night, teetering with left over whiskey and vodka tonic still burning in her esophagus, threatening to leave her body violently and without warning. And she ended up at his door with veins of mascara down her cheeks and half glossed lips, a damp face like a bleeding watercolor.

He wasn’t surprised to see her, all snot nosed and blubbering. He calmed her, shushed her through pursed lips, rubbing her shoulders and the back of her neck, abating her taut muscles. He brought her a glass of water and undressed her like a frightened, lost child.

“Arms up.” And she lifted them over her head, heavy with exhaustion and intoxication. He slid the sheer material up and over her torso, a backless top she had worn to the bar. She remembers how temperate and pacified he was as if he was handling her vulnerability like the expensive silk shirt that he laid over the back of a chair, then helping her peel off her skinny jeans, wiping another smudge of mud off her bare back. He disappeared for a moment, and she looked out the open window, goose bumps transposed on her skin, he nipples slightly firm. And he returns to her with a white undershirt and boxers, says “arms up” again, pulling the clothes over her shivering body, her breasts apparent through the white cotton material. And he lifted the sheets guiding her depleted body into the comfort of a down blanket and lay next to her leaving space enough so only her heel skims the top of his foot.

She tries to catch her breath and her back shudders, exposing the curves of her ribs and knobs of her backbone like a pea pod. His two fingers trail a line down her back and a crossed her neck. Her breathing slows and her muscles relax, he can tell, because her shoulders fall, avowing his touch. She shifts towards him and he moves his knees into the crook her legs make, the way she is curled in on herself, closing the space, heat building from their pulsing bodies. His bottom lip finds the L her shoulder blades make and she barely sighs. He can’t tell if she’s fallen asleep in her exhaustion or if that breath of sound was from him. But then she shifts so she is facing him her eyes listless and averting his own which are wide, taking her in, and she doesn’t move but he does, waiting for her to kiss him, but she doesn’t, instead allows her toes to linger up the length of his leg. And he brings his fingers to her mouth, and she takes them one by one, tasting him, the warmth of her tongue sends rivulets of shudders down his back and thighs. Then she kisses him. She kissed him leaving behind the intent to ignore him as she promised herself earlier at the bar as he shot pool with rolled up sleeves and those boat shoes.

“Don’t ignore me,” he had said to her catching her bare elbow in his palm, turning her towards him and away from her drink at the bar, and she gave him a what-are-you-talking about-look, before she hardly nodded and started to turn back to her drink but he wouldn’t have it.

“Listen, I’m going to play a round of pool but don’t go anywhere. We need to talk. It’s good to see you.” And she wondered what she was supposed to take from this. She tasted her answer in the whiskey near the back of her throat. A drink that soothed rejection from another boy who beckoned her from text messages the week before, and the rejection now stung, and her friends were nowhere to be found. Only her glass and this male, one she hadn’t spoken to since their last mouthfuls of each other. So she sips her drink and remembers. They never did get that coffee.

*

You never got coffee but you did have wine, red wine, and expensive bourbon. He told you some of his secrets, you made him smile and you liked that. You flopped down next to him on the mattress, the TV glowing but silent in front of you and the space between your bodies was non-existent until your hand touched his under the blanket you asked for because you claimed you were cold. And you were coy about the way you lay down, toying with the string on his hoodie your head on his lap, peering up at him, and he tickled you after asking if you were ticklish. Your noses touched, then your mouths and it was sweet and innocent, and then it wasn’t. And it went on; he took you for drinks, always paid, even though you argued against it, and you talked and laughed at night, and went your separate ways during the day. And then the morning before he left for vacation you left your jewelry in his room and went to grab it and he barely spoke to you. And it hurt, unexpectedly, like a snap of a rubber band. And you remember joking with your friends about how vacations made or broke a fling, turned it into ash or fed the flame and everything became brighter and warmer and alive.

*

And now she kisses him like the second time she ever did, when the anticipation and nerves were lessened and each point of contact was the possibility of more skin, and inching hands and fingertips along new curves and dips, and the harder she kissed him the more he couldn’t keep his mouth from exploring other places.

Now in the wake of night he tasted like Cuban tobacco and scotch. She opens her eyes while his tongue trails her teeth and sees those boat shoes, tangerine, next to her muddied red pumps and nearly laughs. His hands find the small of her back, the waistband of her underwear. And she helps him shed his own t-shirt. He is a long, his body, slight and toned and she, for a moment feels messily chubby, but as he takes her face in his hands she forgets and now she becomes this voluptuous being, lustrous around her curves and angles, her hair mussed from her tears and make up and the wind whipping it around her face, and now his fingers there on the back of her neck searching for that crop of hair as his mouth on hers becomes something like consumption.

She let her mouth leave his and pressed herself into the crevices of his bare chest. His hands slid from her waist to just below her breasts then back down the line her stomach muscles made through the center of her torso, his fingers finding the warm, and now moist space between her legs. She lets her eyes close and her head fall back a bit, mouth open, tasting the air around them, tart and spicy like a poached pear. Her eyes tear when his fingers slide further into the center of her and her muscles ripple and contract, something she swears she can see when she clothes her eyes, all of those fibers and tendons writing with and against each other, just as her back arches and she lets out a sound that housed itself in the depths of her throat. He removes his fingers and they stop briefly, where the whirr of the refrigerator and their breathing became rhythmic. She watches his chest swell with oxygen, but he doesn’t exhale until her lips flit across his waistline. And as she slithers back up the length of his body, she lets him slide her black underwear over her thighs, where the cloth gets caught around her knees and she takes him, guiding him into her and she moves her hips as if she was dancing alone somewhere to a steady drum.