He Looks At You The Way You Always Wanted Him To

He looks at you the way you subconsciously have always wanted him to, the way he has in one, two, three or seven dreams. She’s beautiful in a way you never were, but oh, the stars have been busy and he looks at you. He smiles and you smile right back, eyes suddenly cast down on reflex, because you don’t know what you’ll do if he looks at you that way again. He’s closer, you feel it before you even look up, and when you do he’s still looking at you.

To hell with the wrongs and the rights, everything is hazy, and everything is blurred, and it’s heady, and he’s looking at you.

He buys you a drink and you don’t know if with the way your limbs have weakened, it’s a good idea, but you take it. The thought comes out of nowhere, but in this moment you’d devour whatever he gave you.

He grabs your hand and leads you out to dance and you tell yourself to get a grip, that he’s just another guy, that it’s just another Saturday night, that maybe it’s just all the chemicals swirling around your veins. But your hand is in his, and true or not, it’s exhilarating. His hand is in yours and it’s hard to ignore the fact you’ve wondered how they’ve felt before.

You dance. He’s behind you and you melt into him the way you’re melting into the music and you can’t distinguish which is which or where the sound comes from. He makes you tremble with the simple presence of his arms around your waist. Maybe you’re affecting him, too, because he turns you over, grips your face, thumbs to jaw, you’re mouth to mouth.

You’re kissing and it’s almost like muscle memory, you remember you’ve done this before in some dream, but this is real, this is much better. You’re kissing and you’re feeling it everywhere. It’s been so long since you’ve kissed someone and liked it, since you kissed someone and felt it, since you kissed someone and meant it. You’re kissing him and in this moment your mouth is insatiable. Everything tastes of colors and in this moment you’d let him put his wherever he wanted to use it to taste you and paint you.

He’s taking you home and you almost want to pinch yourself, but you’d rather not, because if this is a dream you don’t want to wake up. His voice is doing something to your insides, and if there was a tension before, right now it feels like the constellations are tearing each other apart in the 3 AM sky.

In the passenger seat, your thighs part every so slightly, the warmth is already there, he hasn’t touched you yet and you can already feel yourself dripping between them. You wonder if it would be too much to slide your hand up your ensemble for a quick release, right then and there. You don’t because when you come tonight you want it to be by his hand (and, oh, how you do, when he finally lets his hands wander and feel how deep he’s sunk you into the river.)

You’re in his bed and you can’t recover a memory of the last time you felt this much pleasure from kissing. You’re running side by side, naked, with the night, talking and making out. You’d forgotten what it was like to have someone touch you and feel a jolt in every place you were in contact skin to skin, to be so close and hear that faint hum of electricity.

There’s a kindness in his eyes, a gentleness in the way he carries himself, tenderness in how he speaks to you. He looks at you like probing for answers. He doesn’t hold himself back from asking questions. It’s like he wants to know more, and although you don’t like to be seen, it strangely makes you feel at ease. He tells you that you don’t have to talk about it, as if you were uncomfortable, and you have to stop yourself from telling him that it’s fine, that you feel comfortable next to him. You don’t say more, because you know if he wanted to, he could pull the thread with ease until you unraveled yourself bare in front of him.

You want to tell him you can’t remember the last time, that it may be the first, someone touched you like looking for the girl, that someone made you feel like you were more than just a body, that someone looked at you like they appreciated your beauty. That you had forgotten you even held beauty. You don’t say anything because you don’t want to make it anything more than what it is. You don’t want to build this up into something it’s not and you definitely don’t want to ruin the moment.

Suddenly you’re jealous of her and of everybody before her, because you know the word incredible falls short of describing how it would be to have this for more than one night. Suddenly you’re angry at her, and at all the nameless and faceless girls from his past, because you can’t comprehend how anyone could ever let someone like him go. You’re playing with his hair, mid-conversation, neither of you ever breaking eye contact, and you wonder, how could anyone ever let him slip through their fingers? You imagine yourself with fingers cramped, hands cupped, holding anything that ever came from him.

You go to sleep with the thought, knowing it’ll all be over when you wake up, knowing he’s only holding you through the night. Still, you go to sleep with a smile on your face. Still, you wake up with a glow. When you do, you have to bite your tongue from saying, “thank you for last night.” But you want to thank him then, the next day, and today. You want to take your clothes off in front of him and thank him again and again, but you know you’ll never be able to show him your gratitude for the splendor of that night.

You leave, and for once you’re not leaving a bed and going home and feeling empty. You almost wish you were. You have to tell yourself you won’t write about it. But here you are, breaking that oath.

He slipped out of your subconscious and into your reality, even if for one night, and it was more than nice. You may never kiss him again, but he gave you something to write that wasn’t painful. You may never kiss him again, but now there’s details to fill in the blanks in the fantasies. You may may never kiss him again, but your hands can do what his did (every now and then to the thought of him.)