You leave me breathless. That’s not a figure of speech. There was the time, last spring, when I walked into your living room and it was so dark I almost ran into the tall, narrow table just inside the door. I almost hit it—there was a slender dog underfoot, and your eyes were trained on me in the dark, and the cumulative effect was, well, disorienting—but you saved me from the bruise, pulled me away from the table, pushed me up against the wall. You saved me from that bruise. You saved me for this one.

I’d worn a tie, midnight blue, nearly as dark as the room. I find ties irresistible: the knot at my neck, the thin pendulum against my chest, all that silk folded in on itself and offered to the world. Offered to you. Your fist, that night, came fast and not gentle. You wrapped the tie around your knuckles twice, three times, nudged my head back against the plaster, where your other fist was already full of my hair.

I could feel my pulse behind the knot, some small, live part of me straining toward you. I gulped—no, I couldn’t gulp, you held me so close my throat could barely open—and watched you watching me. Your eyes were nearly invisible. Your fist’s insistent force, lodged just under my jaw, was increasing.

“Open your mouth,” you said.

I imagined you punching me then, your hand barely retracted before it threw me back against the wall, still held by you, inescapable. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth and thought of your sleeve pushed back, fourteen inches of hairy forearm channeled into that dense knot of finger and meat: a knot that could undo my own. I dreamed—in that darkness, with the sound of a car door’s quick slam from the road—of being undone by you. Slammed shut or open. I dreamed of my face’s ricochet through your fist. I dreamed that your wrist would throb with my mouth. Resonant.

I closed my eyes and opened wide and wanted nothing more than that echo. Take it. I can.

That’s when your mouth closed on mine. Not even closed: there was still some splinter of space and skin between your lips—their barely formed question—and mine, all too ready to answer. I can’t control my lips when I’m like this. They tremble. They refuse to stay still. Even immobilized, even with my head held fast between your hands, my mouth quivers, every nerve awake and flailing.

If I could have spoken, I would have said, Please. If I could have spoken, I would have said, Closer. If I could have spoken, I would have asked you to make it impossible for me to speak.

It was already impossible.

Your tongue traced the thick surface of my lower lip, the pout I’m famous for. I wanted it in my throat; I wanted it lodged somewhere deep in my larynx, right up against my voice. But you were intent on making me tremble. My arms started to shake. I could feel each skein of muscle between my collarbone and my abdomen threatening to unravel. I wondered if you could make me fall apart. I wondered if you could put me back together again.

“You’re trembling,” you said, not even inches from my mouth.

I said nothing.

“I want you to hold still,” you said.

I held my breath instead. I was close to choking anyway. Twitching against that wall, I figured, what the hell, I’ll hold my mouth open and try not to breathe, to stop everything, no matter how much your tongue tries to draw it out of me. I held my breath. I stowed it away and shut it down. Thirty seconds later and my lungs were pushing back. The distance between my lips and chest grew interminable. How can so much space suddenly surface in such a small body? I looked at you, or approximately where you were, since you were, at that point, just one kind of darkness inside another.

Over your shoulder, headlights flashed across the threshold of your door, still open, and slid across a framed photograph of a woman’s mouth. It could have been Hedwig; it could have been Dido. And then fire, she could have sung, shot down. My lungs were burning. Earth and heaven, she could have sung, conspire my fall.

Conspire means to breathe with someone else. I refused to breathe with you.

Your voice, when it came, was serious, darker than your eyes, almost angry. “No,” you said. “Give it back.”

So I did. You pulled your mouth away from mine and gave me one chance—the first, the last—to exhale. I did it because I had to. If I had been stronger I would have held it in, dared you to punch it out of me. But I exhaled, and the breath and spit flew out of me, and my chest sank and then heaved back up, and in that moment of recovery and tense extension you gave me what I wanted. You crushed your mouth into mine. Your teeth tore into my upper lip. (Was it a punishment or a promise? Is there a difference?) Your tongue found the back of my throat. My blood was somewhere between us. Your hand—the one in my hair—let go, pulled back, dragged something out of your pocket, made me notice that I hadn’t been close enough to you to feel your pockets, to touch whatever might have been hidden inside them. You could have hauled your cock out—I could not have stopped you—but instead there was this abrupt, mechanical click, something else unwound and, fast, clamped around my wrists. You gave me steel instead of bone.

I tasted my lip and thought of my wrist. I made room for your tongue and thought of your cock. The steel bit into my skin. You bit me again, more gently this time. Your tongue hovered just inside my mouth, a guest at the door, and I felt, I swear, like one of those flowers you’d shown me along the sidewalk, before the sun had set, before you had opened the door and I had walked inside. Ragged, translucent petals, purple-blue, barely held together. You’d tugged at my tie then. “Irises,” I’d said and looked at yours: blue as a vein, but brown enough, at the center, to complete those flowers’ bruise.

That was when you’d said to come inside.

Cuffed and pressed between you and the wall, I felt you lift my collar. You loosened the loop of my tie, shook free the coil around your fist. A siren wailed. You shoved that length of silk inside your jeans. I wanted your cock to leave its mark, some viscous trail to choke me with. You shifted your hips against mine. Even through your denim, my thin trousers, that clot of silk and cotton, your cock was no secret. I felt its pulse, thick and slurred and almost subterranean. I felt that pulse and wanted—my heart was racing—to give you mine.

Your thumbs moved up to frame my throat: first my clavicle, then the thick cord on either side of my Adam’s apple, then up and under the ridge of my jaw. Your hands were searching for something.

“Found it,” you whispered through your tongue, which had settled into the softest rhythm, barely grazing the tip of my own, your lips intent on coaxing me out. You wedged your knee just under my balls and I felt them draw in, all of me tugged upward, pulled by your hands toward that thin ridge you’d found beneath my skull, where my blood condensed and quivered, barely out of your reach. I felt suddenly porous—as though you could get inside me, as though I could be held in your hand, unwound and wound up again. You pressed harder, as if you could make a furrow in my pulse, an indentation in a vein, some concave line inside the throb that lifted me, up and into you, up and out of my tented trousers, sweat-slick abdomen and hairy thorax, up into your wrists, your mouth, that blunt and summoning tongue you kept sliding into me and taking back.

I was shifting. My ears were full of blood and the slight, moist sound of your tongue, the soft hum you made each time I gave myself a little more, each time my tongue failed to thrash, each time I grew more listless, eyes closed but some new darkness pushing in. I couldn’t tell your hands from my throat. I couldn’t tell your weight from the wall. The cuffs were just an echo, indecipherable.

I couldn’t think. Not even of the ways the blur that crept into my eyes—your hands—felt oddly like the fur I’d glimpsed inside your shirt. Not even of the ways your tongue grew hair and combed me, lip by lip, out and into you. Not this. Not this. Not this. You were squeezing my throat, pressing into my blood, unfurling me. Breath fuzzed out and stuttered, iris-blue, my heart smeared in your mouth, your thumbs inside your tongue inside my gasp and gasp and gasp.

Then—pop—I’m blank.

This fall and float and flutter and oh.

And then the heart-lurch, the revenant stab, your hands back where they had been, my eyes flinching open, my voice far away: did you? Did I?

And your backlit, somber nod as you held me, your mouth closed on whatever I’d given you. Your mouth still closed as you let me go, as your hands folded back upon themselves and I—helpless, unhanded—fell down the wall, slid before I knew it. You let me fall.

That night, once I had fallen, you picked me up and carried me to your bed. You made a hollow space within your arms for me, a thick cocoon. That night—spaniel scratching at the door, more sirens, the vaguest rustle of rain—you held me so long and hard I thought I might not ever breathe again. I thought I might be happy not to breathe. We moved from one dark place to another.

I am in thrall to that darkness, the slams and scratches as you held me in place, the ghosts in those rooms.

It is nearly fall now. Your irises are gone. But if, tonight or years from now, you pin me to the wall, I promise I will fall again. I will fall harder next time.

 

© 2007 Cary Steven - Contributor's Bio