My arm feels like it's going to pull out the socket as he yanks me up the creaky wooden steps after him. I press three careful fingers to my quivering lips before a violent giggle can burst out, and he just grins at me, kicking open the back door and keeping me close the whole while. He runs his lips up and down my neck and I feel a quick insect-running-over-your-skin shiver jolt through my whole body. We both kiss and push our way to his bedroom, our hands tangling up in each other, stumbling over the four-feet-and-eight-limbs we have between us. Keeping his eyes trained on mine, he distractedly fumbles behind him and the lights snap off. And suddenly it's four minutes later, and my white v neck is on the floor next to his clunky Rolex and Levi jeans and I don't even know what to say, I'm not even sure if my brain can comprehend the English language anymore. His fingers are snaking their way up my arms and he smiles his assured smile.



-

There's this paper wall-hanging of a gnarled tree on his north-facing wall, and while he trails open mouthed kisses down my stomach, I can't help but think about it. It's really quite beautiful...grey cross-hatches painted through the trunk, and a hint of yellow through the leaves...like a sunrise-that-almost-was but didn't quite believe enough. And I think of how I'm the only one who will know this painting, how I can never talk about those careful strokes with anyone else. And it makes me sad that this simple, primal beauty will go unnoticed.



I'm so scared to let this thing slip through my shaking fingers...I'm scared of him, and I'm scared of being the bad girl, and I'm scared because I've never done this before--the speeding across unfamiliar highways, the six minutes late to class, the sweaty palms and racing heart.



-

Suddenly I'm awakened from my reverie as I feel my eyes roll back in my head, the fingers of my right hand tangling among his crushed velvet bed covers and the fingers of my left amid his color-of-river-mud hair. The callous on his left heel grazes roughly up my calf, his dominating blue eyes are smirking at me, and I know he loves this--he loves me.

It's this easy confidence he uses...he knows I will always want to see him, he knows I will always be delighted by his touch, and he knows how much I care about him inside this dusty, old place I promised myself I wouldn't open up to anyone anymore. But it's too late, he's a permanent resident, and I can tell, just from that cocksure way he grins at me, that he knows it.



-



So what about that sunlight-that-was-almost-not-sunlight peering through the leaves? Because that's the part where I'm not sad, where I'm glad that this beauty is reserved solely for me. There's this indescribable feeling where there are words, but there are no words...it's just--mine. It's all mine. And I don't ever have to share. I feel like tracking down this artist and demanding their secret--how they could take something normal and typical and turn it into such a beautiful atypical nothing. Because now I realize that there are no words...one would have to be a veritable Shakespeare to find the top and sides and bottom of this. Those leaves remind me of kisses...fluttering through windows and hovering above sidewalks, all around us, yet so young, so fast and short in existence.



-



There are leaves fluttering across my body, rubbing against my earlobes. His eyes are laughing at my ecstasy, and I guess that it's this part--the part where surely I must get annoyed with him, surely I won't be able to stand his arrogance and this difficult situation another day longer. But soon my soft pink skirt is unzipped by large, careful hands and flung onto the cross-hatch carpet, and I realize...that part may never come, that part that I always assumed was just an obligatory part of relationships. That maybe this is it.

He's so difficult sometimes that I find it hard to breathe--he yells unexpectedly and sometimes he refuses to talk, and simply grasps my hand like its a grenade and he's a dying man that wants an easy way out. But when he's content, and those brown lashes flutter-like-feather-wings down on top of his pacific blue eyes, there are these footsteps, like those of a happy child, that run haphazardly across my heart, a wild thump-thumping that I thought only happened in fiction.

--

We're sitting at his kitchen table, our feet crossed left-left-right-right underneath and I can't stop tapping my fingers on the faux wood pattern. His smile is simple for once, not like he's playing a game, and playing to win...and I can feel my heart settle into a less frantic pace. We're talking-but-talking-about-nothing, and I tell him that I really should go. His hand grasps me by the upper arm and then it slides down my forearm and into my waiting fingers as he walks me to the door. We kiss goodbye, once, twice, five times. I turn to leave, and just as I'm about to go, a last-chance-impulse shocks me with surprise, and I quickly ask him where he got it, it's so beautiful. My finger leads the way through the open door of his bedroom to where the wall hanging stays.

I see a flash of something I have never seen before in his eyes. Almost bashful, he drops his head and buries his face against my neck, and I can feel the bridge of his nose rubbing against my skin. He kisses my collarbone, and it's an almost-there-whisper--"I made it".