This Is How I Really Want You

I don’t want you to think I don’t want you. Because I do. I see your body, keeping warm in your cotton, staying cool in nothing else, all hard, so soft, pale and strong. I want to touch you, discover you, whisper stories on your skin, tell you the dirty things I want to do to you. Because I want to. I want to touch you over your jeans, make you hard with my hands, pull your zipper down with my face right there, kiss your marks and trace your lines with my tongue.

I want to be aggressive in the way I am, in the way I devour you, and even in the way my hand touches your hand, like it’s something arbitrary and doesn’t make me feel like it could mean a million other things. I don’t want to fold into myself and let my mind drench my craving, making me feel relentless, making me feel too vulnerable because I’m too proud to need anything. I want to not think twice to interrupt your space, to smell you, to let you smell me, to make your heart jump.

I want you to know what I feel, to pour myself into you, to fill you with assurance and love, measuring happiness by moments that make our breaths become one breath.

In my mind it’s all so simple. Movement, trusting, feelings, confidence. And when I’m there in my mind, seeing the world carry on as best it should, I will be a whole person. I will ask you to dance in places nobody dances. I will take your hands and put them where I want to feel them. I will tell you that you’re beautiful and that you’ve changed me, and I’ll say it when you haven’t asked.

And it will be natural to say it, too, like sunlight and tangled sheets, a lyric that’s meant to be sung over and over and over again, like laughter that’s contagious. But it will never be that way, because as long as this idea exists in my head, it’s also a colossal ruin, like a stop sign, like a mute button, like a coma. It’s a tormenting hell that twists my world into a burning silence, into a morbid stiffness. I am vanilla proper. I will not speak until spoken to, will not move until my button has been pressed first.

You will wonder what I’m thinking. You will wonder how I feel.

And you’ll imagine yourself with someone different, someone who is open and not scared, someone who will risk their pride to tell you what you deserve to hear, and at any given time—when having coffee, when waiting for a train, when hidden in a book. I try to make sense of the way I am. I try to gather my guts.

Say it. Say anything, you fool.

But it’s like speaking with a mouthful of rocks. I’ll see your perfect hands, and I’ll want to grab them and squeeze them, put your fingers in my mouth, put them down my pants. I’ll want to say, “Hey. I like you. I like everything about you.” And I’ll want to say it and say it again. But I won’t. I’m a dirty girl on the inside who’ll never say how I really want it, or even that I like the color of your eyes.

Shh, baby, baby, baby.