THIS IS LOVE
by
Jade A. Waters
I can remember, sometimes, how we used to kiss. The look in your eyes when you stared down at me, your fingertips sliding around my neck, and up into my hair. Pulling. That I remember well. There was a tension at the base of my skull, almost as hot and heavy as the pound of my heart, the throb of my cunt. Then the way you’d pitch toward me—slow, slow, tiny, quiet ticks of the clock passing by faster than we ever could, because all that mattered to us was this. The weight of the air around us, the press of our lips to come. Sometimes, you whispered my name. Others, you held me, still. But always, I felt it: me, bound to you. Then. Now. Forever.
It felt like this because I loved you.
When we moved together, it was the shock of waves, tectonic plates shifting in violent bursts, ruining the surface of everything around us. We were the only force that mattered. We were the lightning, the storm, the crest of fire blazing across the distant horizon.
We were one.
Mouth to mouth, we lingered. Breathing fast. Bodies close. When our lips parted, I let you in, let your tongue find mine, dance with me. And we swayed like this, hungry and lost, but as easily found in that electricity between us, in the clutch of our bodies, in the gentle hum bursting out to silence anything, everything.
Everything that wasn’t us.
I’d say it was longing, but it wouldn’t be enough. If I called it lust, that wouldn’t be right, either. We were the joining of cells, the collision of atoms, the combustion of two solutions that never quite fit. We were amazing, too. Planets, stars, comets, sun—we were all of it, a galaxy of feeling swirling round us, enveloping us in the way we kissed. In the hold of you to me, and me to you, chests heaving in the blackest night before the rustle of morning wind blew us all apart.
But I know why.
And so do you.
It was all because you loved me, too.
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