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.

dreamy you.

this morning:
with a stinging on the outer curve of my right shoulder, i awoke to the burn of your teeth planted firmly in my soft, languid, waking skin. a dull, lingering ache lay atop the left one, too - the place where your teeth had sunk into my flesh moments prior.

before:
with your teeth gnashed against my bones and their freckled sheathing of epidermis, your body moved against mine, for the first time, fast enough and hard enough to make your knees buckle to the point where holding yourself upright required you to hinge the solid, smooth enamel of your incisors into the give of my skin. this is the yielding of me to you.

now:
alone in my bed, pillows damp with their cases wrinkled and askew, i open my eyes remembering what it felt like in that dreamland to have your fingers three deep inside of me while your teeth fought deliberately at breaking skin, at breaking me.

the visceral early morning memories of you: the sweat gathered around my hairline and the slickness of wanting between my thighs, serve as daily guilt-stricken reminders of how she got to you first.

leaving you.

friday night i'm with you and you're fucking me in ways that make my stomach first and my heart second, feel like they are being pulled down from their place high up in my body cavity, out between my thighs. every time there is the slightest retreat in your touch or in your thrust my body tenses with the fear that you will stop and break this chain you've created that links all of my important organs - brain, heart, gut, cunt - with all of yours - brain, heart, gut, cunt, fist.

we've been fighting for weeks now over stupid shit because you can't recognize what love and care looks like. or maybe you've just got an unquenchable thirst for it; for playing games, for mindfucking. you're losing me now and you know it. this is irreparable. you've waited too long without giving me much. you've waited too long to fuck me heart-to-heart like this.

and, for a second, i think i have it figured out. i think that i've wound up on top in all of this because i'm realizing these things even while my whole body is beating around the hand you still have inside of me. but i can't see that you're also thinking beyond the fucking and the grunting right now too. you're not processing shit the way my sweaty, little head is doing while mashed against my pillows and headboard. no, you're still trying to figure out your next move in this long drawn out game of "who do you love?"

then you do what i fear most, but what i least expect - you pull your hand from me quick and cruel, causing me to gasp at the contrast of going from full to empty in less than a second. i hear conceit, a tonal snicker to your words, as you throw yourself down next to me and say low, a threat for my ears only, "i wanted you to feel me leave you."