In the bar’s dull roar
your laugh lands like a fist inside my chest
and everything I have spent thirty years pretending I did not feel
rips open at once.
The sound of you tears the scar tissue loose.
I feel it tear (wet, audible only to me)
and underneath is the raw, red child
who learned early that wanting a girl
was the same as asking to be broken.
Then you move,
and the air turns solid with your scent,
but it is the touch of that scent that murders me:
cold rain on wool dragging across my forearm
like a blade wrapped in mercy,
each droplet a needle of ice
searing straight into the vein.
Your knee finds mine beneath the table
and the contact is so small, so accidental,
yet it detonates every carefully buried landmine.
Heat floods me so fast I taste blood (
I have bitten the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out).
My leg trembles against yours
and I feel you feel it.
You do not move away.
A single strand of your wet hair
sticks to the side of my throat
and stays there,
a living thing,
cool then warming,
branding me with the exact temperature of your scalp.
I cannot breathe without moving it,
cannot move it without admitting
I am already yours.
My pulse is no longer blood;
it is confession.
It slams against my skin so hard
I expect bruises to bloom by morning
in the shape of your name.
I am shaking apart at the seams.
Every nerve is screaming
the thing I swore I would never say again:
See me.
Want me anyway.
Love me even though they told us both
this would ruin us.
I am terrified.
I have never been more alive.
The space between us is only inches
but it feels like the width of every closet I ever hid in,
every prayer I choked on,
every night I curled into myself
and pretended my own arms were enough.
Your eyes lift.
They find mine.
And in that single, merciless second
all the armor I wore like skin
falls away with a sound I will hear
for the rest of my life.
I am naked.
I am shaking.
I am seen.
And I have never wanted anything
the way I want you
to close the distance
and finish destroying me
with your mouth.