Ian 52

Ian,

 

I might believe that being soul mates implies a certain responsibility for the other's virginity.  Maybe you created mine.  Maybe I created yours.  Maybe, in the quiet depth below all things, we made little assignations of ourselves, to one another, like kisses, pressed to one another like medals of war.

 

You're innocent of any crime, because it was your innocence which drove you to commit them.  Maybe I'll never be bothered by anything you've ever done, because I have this piece of you, which is inconsequential to those things.  Inconsequential, because it exists below your actions or motivations, and it's comprised of a pure expression of you.  Crime happens within the parameters dragons make for one another, and this is what evades those edges every time, and makes you a fox.

 

There's a place beneath the hedges where our creeping fingers met and I would have thought us both a weed or a vine, knowledge thick between us that twining is an act of desperation, slow and single-minded, reaching for that which with intent will be met and strengthened.  Your fingers crept into mine, your fingers, they crept into mine, and we knotted together into a hedge, a dark place to recede to, a wall, an act of family, a creation of a secret, an acknowledgment of something safe.

 

I wanted down there.  I wanted down there my whole life, I wanted to be down there, my eyes burning hot and bright in endless sun.  I wanted down there, and I was not brave enough or could not have gone alone.  I wanted down there, Matthew, I wanted down there into silence and strange ritual of raking dirt through my fingers and finding the importance of all I'd lost or misplaced.  It was my first love, that place I wanted, the secret of it, the lost world, the place I always knew to go, my expression wide and starved. 

 

There's something innocent about you and me.  I'll stay right here, until you understand.  The world is made of doors to other worlds.  Some of them are dark and simple.  The hedges of neat suburban homes, trimmed in the sapling spring, junipers soft and fur-like, their thorns supple, littering yellow and hard the ground beneath, breaking fast as bird bones.  The dirt black, the air cold, the light dim and blue.  There are doors to other worlds, where under hedges, there are windows, into basements, which push inward like your intruding hands.

 

The glass of each window is hazed with dirt and the water of past rain.  They are webbed delicate with the work of spiders.  They are rusted shut.  They are levered open, they are cracked in a gentle arc. 

 

The basements are unfinished.  The floors are leaked onto from the sagging floor above.  The tiles are stacked into corners, the dust is from something demolished, your jacket is torn, the door is locked.  Your breath is loud and mine is quiet, but my lungs burn with the effort to control my heart and slow it down because I won't admit I'm out of breath in front of almost anyone.  Your eyes are low.  Mine are sly. 

 

You reach blindly into unpainted sheetrock, dented and crumbling, and remove a small glass marijuana pipe, speckled blue, and laugh before tossing it against the cinder brick, where it smashes into bigger pieces than I would have liked. 

 

We wouldn't have to say anything here.  The butterfly wings of my spreading thighs will be the same color as the paper used to hold the drywall into place, an unpainted pale tinting flesh-toned in the damp.  If we did speak, it would sound something like...

 

"Have you always been afraid of spiders?"

 

"No."

 

I wanted down there, I wanted down there for years after... and did I lose you?  Fiercely, hopelessly, sexually, I wanted down there.  I wanted you.  I want you.

 

Thinking about this makes me feel how the angels must, about dancing.  That I could never tell anyone, not out loud, what it does to me inside, to think about going out, much less going out with you.  How it makes me want to touch myself, aimlessly, slowly, drawing out the sense of anticipation as long as possible, the way it feels to circle a seemingly empty room with you. 

 

It will happen when it happens, when you reach so assuredly into a dark place, and remove a broken pair of glasses, bent out of shape and shining gold.  I pet my swollen pussy with a soft finger, my knees up, mimicking the pace of my heart beat, going nowhere.  My lowest secrets are always yours.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 48

Ian,

Twelve haggard steps in the snow, and a fire begins in a line, dark beneath the trees where only you could make a wall against me.  We rose up to the height of each knoll of trees, the dusk running rapid, milk down a drain.  We were girls in summer denims and ill-fitting nylons, testing the limits that all girls have to test, in the darkening woods where the sounds of metal bending popped in the cold as it settled for a night we didn't understand.  Was that rain, on the roof?

No.  Maybe just the price of all things.

Giddy in teenage glee, I tracked socks the color of South American tree frogs, calves bare and white, thighs thin and unshaven and she laughed.  Her hair was blonde.  She laughed because I made her laugh.  Matthew, I've never been in love like this.

We seeped into the cabin, the wooden walls shutting out a chill and light, the darkness full and round like a held and golden note hovering near 300 hz.  How many of us intrude in places we don't belong?  Don't signs exist for a reason?

The impish man within teaches fables to young girls, makes morals of them, while I watch.  The source of soiled fabrics, stretched and torn, are the folds inside her riding coat; fur stuck with the starvation of her mare where I can tell - I CAN TELL - she crawled within, slick and winter-bellied and it's... well, the reason for the smell. 

The blonde curtain of her hair is even, straight, solid, I'm envious of her hair.  I watch it move with the rustic sensibility of a sheet on the line.  He'll wash her hair, if not the whole of her.  I know that, the man and his friends will wash her hair, loving in their application, even if they use objects to stretch every hole she has to tearing.  It's the hair, you see, Matthew.  It's her lovely blonde and slowly-swinging hair. 

The face of her, doll-like in apathy, is the most frightening thing.  Is she me, and am I dead already?  No, because... because I don't open the gates for strange men.  I don't wander small and reckless the streets of the city at night.  I know to wait, for the smell of blood and steaming breath tracked by the woman in the red coat.  I might have been a queen of Egypt.  I might have been a concubine favored among all others in the harem of a sultan.  I might have been killed for my lust and my beauty, but I'm this, instead.  The rough skeleton of their beautiful refinements, this animal, crouching on the floor... Matthew... I'm the skeletons inside every girl; what makes them all secretly want to die. 

The impish man works a knife from his pocket dull and dirty and carves a piece of the girl away like a chicken on the table.  The meat of her splits at a grain, fibrous and white, steaming hot, the skin toasted to a tight and dark crispness. 

"Have some?" he asks, and I watch another take it, take it grateful as communion but half the sense of wonder.  Can you believe, he knew how she would taste?

The voice of your sister distracts me. 

"I want to come home," she says.  In the garden, I meet her with concern.  The air is cool and gray; the relentless chill of early mornings in late spring.  She holds her phone in her hand, reflecting early light on the blue of her t-shirt.  Her voice is angry and not a request, nor an apology, but steeped in her entitlement.

The lace of the trees against the new and expiring days alike are black and funereal.  There is snow, and there is no snow.  I'm chilled.  The moon is coming.  I'm a thing not human.  I'm late for my prom.  I forgot my homework.  I'm going to die.  I'm not going to die.  As ever, my resolve is to wait.

Love,

Annik

Ian 42

Ian,

 

Bonnie's voice gets soft and desperate, vanishing to the back of her throat in the dim light of the room with the tv on a blank station. 

 

"The thing is people know I'm a slut and no one would believe you're fucking me."

 

I put my hand over my forehead and stare at the ceiling. 

 

"What do you care?" I ask her, and she nuzzles into my shoulder. 

 

"I love your fucking shoulders," she admits to me, and I put my cigarette in her mouth to let her drag. 

 

"I think about how like...other guys you fuck probably think they know shit about you."

 

There's a flurry of sound from outside our haven.  She picks at the lint on my black t-shirt. 

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"I like thinking about you with them.  Sometimes I want to watch you and everything they don't really do for you."

 

"They do a lot," she says, her voice some kind of warning to me, like watch where you put your dick, Vincent, or, watch where I do. 

 

"No, I know," I say.  Sick of talking, I lean over her and get between her thighs, which grip my waist. 

 

"What are you doing?" she asks me, her face smiling. 

 

"Being sick of talking," I admit to her, and he snorts sarcastically. 

 

"Please, when are YOU ever sick of talking?"

 

"Talking about THAT, then," I say, defensive, and kiss her mouth which kisses mine back in soft licks of her tongue.  She moans and moves under me while I find places to touch her; squeeze her skin and mold her into some kind of existence. 

 

"I want to suck your cock," she whines, and I roll onto my back and take my jeans off, while she snakes down my body and looks back up at me with her wide little girl eyes.

 

"Your cock is really pretty," she tells me, and I swallow hard back every thought from pouring out while she slips her lips over the head and pets the underside with her small tongue. 

 

She goes slow almost like she's thinking about every sound I make when I make it, and I pull back her hair from her face and stroke her cheeks while her shoulders and neck move against my hips. 

 

Forget it, is what my body thinks. 

 

Forget it, forget this room, and this pile of tapes, and this milk crate, and this grit under my palms.  Forget cold cement, forget woolen blankets, forget emergency candles, forget acoustical tile.  Forget passing trucks, forget dirt in her hair, forget the fucking impermanency of every moment. 

 

Forget her, forget her hair, forget how it feels on your stomach brushing softly while I fuck her mouth, forget all the posters she ever had on her bedroom walls.  Forget every cock she ever sucked and how her parents didn't love her.

 

"I... I uh.  Fuck.  I'm pretty close," I tell her, and she moans low and happy at something like maybe her own expertise at getting me to cum this fast when almost fucking nothing else can. 

 

My hands dart around her hair in a way she can't see and won't ever.  Frantic, unsure where to put them without hurting her, I ball them into the blanket, into the length of her hair far from her scalp, into the hard edges of my teeth. 

 

Forget it.  Forget it, Vincent.  Forget the broken light bulbs, the stain of ink on my hands, the smell of burnt metal in the room.  Forget dusk and dawn and the times between, forget God, forget your name.  Forget everything, but... how it feels... to escape... down her... throat.

 

I cum hard, holding my whole body still and pressing her mouth against me gently.  I almost tell her to forget it, but I bite my tongue hard enough to bleed.

 

"Hold.  Hold still.  Like that," I remind her, and she does, unmoving, her eyes closed, like she's praying.

 

Love,

 

Annik.