barely with words.

with your lips to my ear and your fingers on my skin, you deftly trace across my body the lines and boundaries you have drawn for your own. "like this..." you say and with your mouth crushed against my cheek, your palm cups the side of my neck, slowly but decisively making its way past the top of my chest to the space between my breasts. your hand rests here, avoiding the flesh that surrounds it, flesh that you usually cannot resist to feel with hands and mouth. but tonight is not about this. tonight, with touches applied to my skin so that i might begin to understand your own, you teach me what "stone" means to you.

channeling the steady hands of a master cartographer, your fingertips pull channels down my abdomen, flowing free and unchecked against the soft roll and lower expanse of my belly. with palms wide and flat across my sides, you work harder, rougher, to push aside my ripples of curve so that the depth, the marrow of my bones, will remember the contrast in touches the sharp angles of your own hips demand, will retain the memory of distinction between my body and yours. when your hands reach my thighs and then skid along the tops of their inner slopes, you fall still. and with a deep breath settled in your lungs, you draft for me with the mere tip of one index finger the minefield of this place.

tomorrow, with you asleep next to me, i let my eyes follow the shape of a body recreated under the tightly wound ropes of sheet rolled over and passed over one hundred times in the night before we both stopped long enough to catch our breaths.