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The first time you slept beside me, I felt stiff as a board. I saw your arm slithering towards me and coiling itself around my torso, a snake saying you’re mine. The silence hissed it. I own you.

Minutes earlier I’d been as close to you as possible,
whispering in your ear and then trailing my pink, poking tongue around your lobes, soft soft and ticklish. Trying to tease it back out and let it fall back in to my mouth where it came from, like throwing candy in the air.
I found the dot to dot scatter of freckles below your hipbone, drawn out like a bouquet of birds taking flight. I traced my fingers to everywhere they might be going and found where they might have come from.
You said, on the cusp of an ‘oh’ - ‘I’ll definitely be back in here’.
I burrowed in to your collarbone with a smile and hoped that the little cove that caved in between your bone on your shoulder would catch my sweat. A pool of me. 

With your white skin against the white sheets and a mouth that I could not stop sticking myself to, I could not say no to you spending the night even when my heart beat so fast that I thought it would throw out a key and open the gates of my rib cage to come bursting clean through the skin of my bare chest and break all over you.

Bed space is mine. Night time is for me, for my dreams do cartwheels out of my brain, escaping through my ears and turning and turning through my nostrils til they’re flipping around the room and kicking me in the face, jolting me up and throwing me to the window to look up at the sky, trying to find the face of God to tell him to stop.

When the lights go out control is converted from a force to a measly nine point Scrabble word. It is made from a material so slippy that even if every finger tip held a thousand miniscule fishing nets, it could never be caught.
 
That night I stared at the ceiling going through the alphabet and silently naming an animal for every letter until my head became a safari park and I had to grab the sheets to stop my voice box from letting out a roar. I wanted to wake you up to help me with X, but then I’d have to explain why at 5 in the morning I was gripping on to everything solid around me like my knuckles had only just learned their power to go white. 

In the morning when I felt the small of your back stir against my tensed belly I squeezed my eyes shut so that I saw fireworks in my eyelids and pretended to wake after you. I watched you leave and then rubbed my fingertips against every inch of sheet that you had sprawled and stretched and arched on, and your perfume hung everywhere like glue. I liked it better there than on your own skin. I closed my eyes as was only kicked in the teeth once.

Ten months later and I feel stiff as a board. Now, I’d give anything for that snake arm, I’d let it shed it’s skin over and over so that I had a blanket to always keep me warm. Since then I learned that an animal beginning with an X is a Xantus, but no thoughts of that bird, even with its feathers that look like someone has shaken the yolk from the sun, can make sleeping without you any easier. 
I’m yours.

Now. 2012.