The smell of an unfamiliar bed. The sound of people and cars on the street below. A warm presence to my left.
He shifted, groaned quietly in the stillness of his room. The only thing out of place was me.
A smooth arm curled around me. His face pressed into my hair, his nose in my ear. I could feel his heavy breath - deep, sound - somewhere between wake and sleep, ebbing and flowing like the tide of a tired ocean against my waking mind.
My eyes, blurry from a night of deep sleep, rejected the morning light softened slightly by the mint walls that enclosed me in this room, which rested in the heart of the Gourmet Ghetto.
Secrets lay stuffed inside his dresser drawers, in the darkest corner of his closet, imprinted into pages of the books that lined the shelves, collecting dust under his bed, inside his basket of “things he will figure out later”.
I wondered if a silent thought of me was somewhere at the bottom of that basket - muted by his detachment, unimportant now that I was in his bed. Maybe it - along with all the others - had evaporated into the sky with the fog of the bay, forgotten.
The harsh glare of selfishness blurred the lines I dared not to cross as I reminded myself that he was not mine and I was not his. And that all my thoughts of him, however farfetched, had no other place to go other than my own basket of things I told myself I’d come back to later, although I knew I never would. No reason to break the deal I’d made with the devil.
Maybe my musings of this olive skinned creature lying next to me could drift up to the sky, into the space we had spoken of; the space where our thoughts of each other settled into the orbit of our planet, in the emptiness of the vast, black vacuum. The only thing we shared besides the need to tame the fires burning in the pit of our stomachs.
His dark eyelashes were so long, his lips barely parted, his skin so smooth.
Unpredictable like the boiling sea, all life hidden under miles of cold salt water.
I knew I could never dive that deep. The brine would fill my lungs before I could even glimpse the first rainbow reef. The impenetrable, blue expanse would be like a blindfold over my dull brown eyes.
Feeling him pressed against me, unconsciously pulling me into him was like the calm before a storm. The air heavy with anticipation, the skyline looming with dark, rimed clouds.
The thought of him is like a wine stain on a dress I can’t wear anymore.
Maybe I had known it would be this way.
I felt the ocean sigh in my ear.
My heart skipped a beat - a single, lonely, unnoticed hiccup in the infinite thrum of rhythmic beats.
I took a deep breath and dove. And the last thing I saw before the water clouded my vision was a blur of mint green paint.