The Journey - Part One

We sat next to each other, facing the back of the 18:42 to Paddington. He closed his laptop, I stroked a fingertip quickly and lightly across his knuckle. We said "how are you?". He buried his face in my neck and pulled me closer to him, tightly. His hands brushed my back, firm and warm on the bare skin of my arms. Pressing my nose against his neck, unable to get closer, I breathed him in and ran my hand over his jaw, his cheek, and let my lips find their place against the smooth, fine skin in the hollow of his collar bone. For the first and last time. We pulled away, I don't know how it happened, my lips found the tight, pursed pull of his. i started to soften, to let go of the questions, softening into slow, intense waves of purple, pulling in, spreading out again. And just as I stopped pushing and looking for what he wanted and let myself relax and open and be there, just as my breath became sharp and insistent, I inhaled his burning no. Just as my heart started to open and I couldn't breath quickly or deeply enough to hold on, I knew it was over.

Fragments

I remember one night in London in the middle of summer. The heat had been building over a week or two to the point of bursting. London heat is a little tense and gritty. A stillness was filling the evening. The colours in the garden vivid and crisp, the smell of dirty lilac persistent as we ate greasy roast chicken from the rotisserie outside the blue mosque. I remember lying naked on my bed that night, sash window wide open, very little between me and the outside. I didn't sleep until the heat began to drop only to be woken a couple of hours later by what sounded like hot, golden oil sizzling fast. Between sleeping and waking, the air cooled and started stirring, stroking my skin and as the heat broke the sound of hot oil turned into to raindrops falling on leaves I turned from a leaf soaking up raindrops back into myself.