You were listing a little to one side, or maybe you were just leaning in to be heard over the music. When you leaned in, I could feel the softness of your cheek, its smoothness, the childlike curve of it. I told you, “don’t lean in so close”. But you kept leaning in. Each time you did, I wanted only to kiss you. I told you that I liked you and you said that you liked me, although the actual saying of it and the intentions behind it were much more complicated and what I really meant was I wanted your mouth on me, and hoped only that you wanted the same.
Later, though I’m remembering it as a memory, not as it actually was, we absconded from the dance floor, where your lips had been pulling me back into a body memory from a decade before that. Into the alcove of the men’s bathroom, you had your hands on me and your leg between mine. Each time some sparkle eyed gay boy came into the bathroom, it lit up the room, from black to white then, as the door swung shut again, back to black.
The others wondered where we had got to but in the end, no one of matter or mind saw us kissing the way I see us kissing now after all this time.
Eventually we got a cab that took us to that place where we had been hoping to go. And you asked me, and you seemed shy but not shy about asking me, and we directed the cab driver to pass my street with my bed where I should have been sleeping. And instead we went to your bed and did the things we had been remembering in advance that we wanted to do.
You were softer and less lean in person than you looked in your clothes, in fact, you were womanly and curved beyond expectations. I had your nipples in my mouth and wanted them between my teeth but could sense you didn’t want that. Not this time, this first and last. You smelled lightly of bread and the bar and though you seemed stronger than me initially, and were always protesting as such, I wanted to pin you into the bed. I placed my thigh on your thigh, and held down the calf with mine. You only wanted your hand inside me and never to return the pleasure. Although my body was hardly behaving as I’d have liked it to, you were wet and felt like the ocean, the return and then the escape.
After a while you made the noises I wanted you to make, like you were evaporating, dissolving and resolving again. You held me and I held you and eventually we went to sleep, bodies naked and sheets confused as hearts. In the morning, I woke first and you were feeling “a little bit cuddly”, offering to drive me home though you were probably still drunk and I was probably still drunk and as if you should be driving me home. I stayed for a while but what I wanted was to sleep forever and to never get up and be me ever again.
In the morning after, all I have is a hangover and fluff from the cat on my skirt the vague recollection of having once been at this club before.
eleanor j jackson 