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I often dream of the warmth of our bodies entwined
the feeling of your lips pressed so sweetly to mine,
breathing into me the life I have so long missed;
this lust for life, revived.
i.
Leon rarely sees her outside of a bedroom and emails sent to coordinate a rendezvous. What need is there to communicate, she had said to him once, beyond what has already been decided?
Decided by who? he asks in the silence of the night, long after she has slipped into sleep. He holds her and blows wishes from her eyelashes for her to stay soft in his arms like this forever, unburdened from the unkindness of life.
He wishes he knew her. The real her, the Ada hidden beneath all the layers of enigmatic volatility. The Ada who has an encyclopedic knowledge of wine (only when it comes to reds, never white) and a secret, inexplicable love for black pudding. The Ada who seems to lie someplace that is just a hairsbreadth beyond his reach.
He kisses the top of her head and holds her the slightest bit tighter, makes another dozen futile wishes upon all the stars that stare back through the window.
ii.
Ada likes to lie in his arms. She often trails kisses along his jawline or a red mark just behind his ear, where nobody will know to look but him. When she steals a kiss, he finds that she tastes of cigarette smoke and red wine.
Leon likes to trail kisses of his own along her collarbone, over to the shoulder scar that keeps them intertwined. She shivers when his lips press against the scar tissue, and he always holds her a bit tighter.
He likes to say her name as they lay together. Ada, he says, needlessly addressing her over pillow talk, Ada, Ada, Ada. He says her name as if it's a ritual to keep her tethered here, to him.
She never says his name. He wants to hear her say it. Wants to hear her whisper Leon into his shoulder, to hear her hum it against his Adam's apple as she leaves a kiss atop it. He wants to know if it's even possible to hear his name whispered by cold lips in the soft warmth of dawn.
He doesn't think she ever will.
iii.
It's the middle of the night. They stand side by side in silence. Ada's smoking over the balcony's bannister, and Leon's halfway through a glass of gifted bourbon.
They do not look at each other, only ahead at the sea.
The ocean's breeze light upon the wind and the waves crashing softly against the shore evokes a sense of familiarity. How can the tide be so gentle as it presses lazy kisses up the berth of the beach, when it knows it will turn dangerous and wrathful at any moment?
She has leaked into every crevice of his body, the changing tides of her love wrecking and repairing his seabound heart a thousand times over. The wave breaks over him and he is made undone, but the sea-salt tears that flavour her kiss are enough to resuscitate him.
How is it? she asks. Her cigarette has burned down to her fingertips.
It's good. He takes a sip from his glass. You have good taste.
He extends the glass to her, and she downs the rest of the bourbon.
She gives him one of her half-smiles. I'd like to think so.
iv.
Ada leads him back to shore with a sense of care that he has not known in this life. It is enough, he tells himself, this curse of leaving tender words left unsaid and performances of domesticity staged within cheap motels.
It is enough, he swears, he says, he thinks, until its true meaning is lost. This is enough.
v.
In the lap of silence, you think of her. A hot-cold secret scarred into the tissue of your heart.
The art of letting go. It evades you, a mirror to her own avoidant steps.
You find that you don't mind it.
(Bit of a masochist, then?)
vi.
In the pitch-black of his bedroom, Leon has his hand between his thighs. He lays in bed with his eyes shut and his hands trembling, one wrapped around his leaking cock and the other laid trembling atop his stomach. He touches himself to the thought of dark hair and darker eyes, of pursed red lips and backless red dresses, of a siren's voice.
He shakes as he imagines her above him, a hand on his throat and her voice low and domineering in his ear, every command that drips from her sultry tongue drawing him closer to shore.
When he comes, he utters her name as if it were a hymn.
He lays in his mess of sheets and sweat until his breathing evens out. He turns to look at the clock on his bedside table. It's half-past ten.
It's half-four in Munich. He wonders if she's in the bed of a stranger, sticky and shaking in the afterglow of sex. Selfishly, he hopes she imagined him in the place of the nameless stranger.
vii.
She never speaks first when they lay together like this, an unending tangle of limbs and blankets. He sometimes wishes that she would say something, anything, to indulge him in her thoughts, even if her mind is full of nothing but mundanity or negativity.
As always, he parses the silence, and she is receptive to his idle chatter, but not necessarily warm. There is a sharp stab of want when she gazes up at him through long eyelashes, and it twists deeper when she carefully manoeuvres the conversation further away from anything profound.
They fuck again. Ada touches him as though he will shatter beneath her palm, and Leon touches her as though he wants nothing more than to see her break.
viii.
Her hands trail down the expanse of his chest, tantalizingly slow as they chart each plateau and terrace along his skin. He lies ensnared in three-hundred thread count sheets with eyes wide and lips parted, the agony of his aching manifesting in a thin sheen of sweat and laboured breaths.
Her hands dip lower and lower still, low until they're beneath his waistband. She indulges him in languid strokes as her lips sink to retrace the paths burned into his chest by her nails. Her kisses are fleeting, each brush of mouth to skin imparting upon him a promise made to be broken.
He savours it anyway.
ix.
She was back in America. For now, she said. I don't know where I'll be next, she said, but why worry about what the future holds when we can enjoy the present?
She stays in his apartment for three nights, and he spends each hour kissing her as though she is his tether to this mortal coil. He kisses her with the bleeding intensity of the sun, searing into her the weight of his desperation, of uncaged desire. She kisses him, too, hands roaming the expanse of his back, and for a moment, he lets himself believe that her warm breaths against his lips are a sign of reciprocity.
x.
You look down at the bed,
and though your bodies have left their prints in the mattress, the bed looks as though you were never there,
and you suppose you never were, really, you just pretended that you had,
and even though clarity strikes when you splash water in your face in the bathroom,
you still kiss her as you wait for the elevator, just as you have a thousand times before in the hallowed halls of the heartbreak hotel.
xi.
His hands are on her thighs, holding them firmly apart as he laps up her heat, his mouth dripping with the taste of her. He whispers nothings to her in tongues, each swipe against her clit acting as a proclamation, a vow, a dozen emotional appeals.
She wraps her legs around his head with a staccato of gasps.
It wouldn't be a bad way to go out, he thinks.
xii.
They rock together. Slowly, carefully, carnally.
Her head is tilted back in pleasure, low moans spilling from her lips and staining the air with their sound. His head is buried in the space between her neck and shoulder, mouth agape and breathing hot on her skin.
This is almost love-making, he tells himself. Almost.
Leon rolls his hips up and grinds against her, and she is rasping and whining against him. The room is slick with sweat and sex, heavy with the sound of skin on skin, of raspy moans and half-stifled whines.
Ada is shaking when she tips her head forward, down to whisper in Leon's ear, bite me.
His teeth sink deep enough to bruise. She shudders and buckles atop him, cries out his name as she comes.
xiii.
Please, he murmurs, the strands of her hair slipping through his fingers like prayer beads, stay.
xiv.
You think you can live like this: loving her more than you do yourself, a sacrifice made without knowing if she feels the same.
You think, you think, you think—
—you think you can see her smiling at you from the corner of your eye, and you're certain.