ADAM- Am I Just the Night, or Am I Her Morning

And just like that, our secret reduces to just my own, alone. I sit down for the fifth week, and the bartender looks at me with fringes of pity around his eyes while he pours the red wine into my glass. I ask myself again, how I got here, knowing in actuality so little about her, and yet consumed by this relentless expansion of void because she stopped showing up. When did she become of such consequence for me? As if I really didn’t know. That night she called. When she let me in and I followed her into that closet. That pristine alpha male closet with the puddle of towels on the floor. As soon as I stepped into that closet, I had crossed over to a place where I never thought I’d be. Became someone I would have never imagined: a victim to her heartbeat.

She started to reach down to grab the towels but her body exploded, a thud and slammed against mine and we dropped down onto her puddle. I pulled her close onto my chest. My fingers in that thick mane of hair and other palm on her back. I cocooned her little body, all goose bumpy and clammy cold. “I’m in shock,” she managed to tell me through chattering teeth. I held her jack hammering softness until the heat of her body slowly risen to match mine, her heart slowed, beating in time with mine. Something in her, something singular and precious inside her, insinuated its way through two layers of another man’s cotton, into me. And this feeling, like I have known it since a prior life, a life that was simple and wild, and the nights were long and deep and open to the stars, waiting for the heat of the morning. This feeling, intimate angst, reached into me and expanded beyond and whirled around our bodies.

We were again in the dark universe. This time, not mesmerized, but together, we drifted into private unconsciousness, into our very own darkness and body heat. Unguarded and defenseless with each other through the blackness, until the seeping foggy glimmer of first light. Was I just the not-so-stranger body, or did she gift me her vulnerability. Was I just the convenient Saturday night or did I become her Sunday morning.