In the Hallways

His lips stuck to my skin like glaze, moist with their freshness and marked of their betrayal.  It was as if I could taste desire on his tongue translating infidelity into something more beautiful, something more tangible.

He whispered into the cheek of my mouth that he had left something for me there that I could go back to if I were ever hungry.  His saliva poured itself into my mouth like buttermilk into the flatness of hungry tongues and it was then, that my soul’s hunger was satiated.

He was nothing but a messenger, only seen in the dark hallways of my father’s estate.  I would catch glimpses of him like runaway slaves by the shaking leaves of quiet trees.  Even then, something about him intrigued me.  The stride of his long legs often had me peering from behind my bedroom door, inhaling the very wind he left behind.  I thought myself too proper of a girl to desire a man that felt he worked for me.  Yet, I was not his employer, just a witness to his duties as my father’s apprentice.  He was to be next in line as a master of scholars, sharing his intelligence as if it were DNA to the starving wombs of women yearning to be mothers.  Though looking at him, you could never tell if he was smart.  His face was too calm to ever show that he was in deep thought like Einstein or W.E.B. Dubois.  His eyebrows were never wrinkled with the idea of formulas and he never looked like he was wondering if gravity had anything to do with me falling in love with him.  His intelligence must have been so mighty that it was sacred and so I decided the most genuine of things hide in plain sight as to never be hunted.

The day we made love, there was snow on the ground, painting the streets with the brush of Michelangelo, riddled with purity.  I didn’t want to step foot outside whilst the only miracle I wanted to witness stood in the house with me.

“Evan, may I speak with you for a moment,” I whispered between the lines of oak wood in the foyer.

“Sure, I’ll be right there.”

A few minutes later, the creaking door rest under his hand as he walked into my room.  I stood there, in my pure nakedness eyes wide open as I watched his book fall from his free hand.  He closed the door behind him and tilted his head to the left as to make sure that what he was seeing was right.

“You must be cold for sure.”

“Not at all, with the sun walking through my door.”

“You’re not supposed to get too close to the sun though.”

“Before today, the sun never had arms like yours,  arms that look like they can reach out to the earth and press its continents against its own warmth.”

“It is true, I have always desired to hold the world in my two hands.”

“It is also true that word becomes flesh,” were the last words I spoke before I was engulfed into his broad frame.  He turned me around to face the window as his right hand swept across the nape of my neck, down to the curve of my breasts, to the smile of my waist and the tidal waves between my legs.  The nerve endings in my soul began to perk up like dandelions to the wind and I left pieces of myself stained to his flesh.

As he submerged his body into mine, it became known to me, that I was deep in his love like coral reef lining the ocean floor.  No matter how the waves turned and how angry the currents could be, I would never be lost within the very force that owned me.  I was his for a lifetime and dealt to him in the proportion of that moment.