(Level: Warm Tide)
He said to me, let’s live and let’s count, you say and your mouth comes close as if between your fingers you carried a rosary of fireflies, a sum that never closes because desire always adds one more digit; I answer you with a yes that is barely air and I begin to keep the count in silence, not for greed but for the secret game of inventing a world where numbers turn to breeze and the breeze touches and learns, a kiss one that lights the lamp of the room, a kiss two that erases the noise of the day, a kiss three that sets the clocks so they mark the hour of our small beginning, as if trying to circumscribe our sin.
Then the windows tremble a little and outside the sky tests its own arithmetic of stars, but inside we go on, a kiss four that remembers the old taste of summer, a kiss five that strikes laughter like a match, a kiss six that no longer knows how to pronounce itself and stays quivering on the lips, and so we climb a stair without a handrail where every step is an accord and an offering, where the mouth invents its language and translates it into touch, where the count comes undone and starts again so it will never be finished, because what we seek is not the total but the vertigo of adding and forgetting the sum while the room understands the night has learned to count with us.
He entered me as night enters through an open window, without asking leave, stripping the room bare of shadows. I felt him close, felt his wanting, felt his erect member at the threshold of my aching sex. His breath was a hot blow, dense as wine spilled over an ancient altar. I was the offering. He, the god and the headsman. I longed to be taken by him.
His tongue, a hungry animal, grazed my skin with the care one uses to feel an open wound, seeking the center, the tremor, the place where the flesh no longer defends itself. He parted my thighs with the devotion with which one opens a ripe fruit, and he drank of me as if beneath my pubis burned the spring of his eternal thirst. Thus I offered myself to him, opening my legs and giving him the warmest of welcomes.
There were no preliminaries, only a centuries-long urgency stored in his pelvis, a sway of bone against bone, a language spoken only by bodies when speech can go no further. His hands were roots upon my hips, tying me to the bed as if he feared ecstasy might tear me from the world. Each thrust was a brief poem, cruel, perfect. Verses written inside my belly, one by one, with the burning edge of his desire.
I did not moan, I sang. I did not beg, I invoked. And in the sweat that stitched us, modesty, shame, and name dissolved. I was skin, I was cry, I was spasm. I was a flower ravished by the noonday sun, opening until I bled sweetness. He liked to hear me scream; he liked to hear his name on my lips. I knew I would be only a flower of one night, I knew he belonged to another, but I did not care; even so I knelt before him to ready him, to embalm him with my saliva so he would be prepared to pass through my body, to profane my dignity.
When he finished, there was no ending. Only a silence that still throbs between my legs, like a hot memory, like a fire that does not know how to die. Thus the sum reached its shore and broke in silence, a light fainted behind the eyelids and the room drew a deep breath as if it were learning to say goodbye; the count turned to music without numbers and the mouth found its zenith without naming it, just a flare, it trembles and goes out like the last firefly in the jar; afterward the clocks remain, starting up again, and the cool at the window signs the end of night, gathers its keys, and I gather the thread of our arithmetic to keep it on my tongue; it will be kiss one hundred and kiss none, because as I close the door I still hear his laughter count itself and softly repeat my name, while the hallway carries him away and I begin the count again in his absence so that the next encounter may find its infinity ready.
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