The Steam In The Mirror, The Fog From The Sea (part1) free porn video

The steam in the mirror, the fog from the sea. Saturday Maybe it's just a question of an inch or two. Yes: I see you nod. An inch less -- there, maybe, where your finger barely grazed my side. Grazed me as if by accident, as I lie here in bed. As I lie where I have let you lead me, where I once tried to lead a girl but now am led. An inch less where your finger barely stroked my side and there would be a curve, a curve dipping closer to my center, as if a potter's wheel had spun a little faster, as if a hand had lingered on the clay a second longer. Or an inch more. There, say, down just a little from your touch. An inch more there and, like the slope of a gently rising hill, you'd find a curve rising to my tilted hip, like the bent wood of some ancient harp. Or there, where perhaps it is best if you don't touch. Not yet. But there, above my heart, where your tongue on my small nipple would burn beyond imagining. Where with just an inch or two there you might discover curves rising from my chest, rising as if an inner blooming could no longer be contained, as if a swell of feeling rose from deep within me. Soft as a cloud might be to touch, as two clouds. But do not touch now. Stay instead, leaning there against the headboard, your broad shoulders resting there as if the hard V of your torso had been carved from that wood, as if it were the bite of the chisel and blows of the mallet that made you appear tonight. As if maybe that's why your arm (the color of oak after the steel's bright edge has cut) lies there beside me, waiting. Stay leaning there, so that I will not know if the pale brown bulge of your bicep is just as smooth and just as warm as I suspect, or if my touch would feel the rough burrs and cool shavings that a chisel left. Stay there, so that the shadow falls across your face, so I can't see your features, so I can't know you. Let's keep a borderland of cool white sheet between us, for a moment, for this moment. "An inch or two," you say. And leaning closer to me, now you show me: Index fingers held an inch apart. "This much?" you ask. And, already knowing the answer, you reach still farther, stretching your two fingertips towards the crown of my head. I feel you leaning, looming over me. Feel you though our bodies still don't touch. Tensing, I try to press my back firm to the sheet beneath, backing away, backing away. I close my eyes. "This distance, the space between my two fingers," you say. And touch my head. Two fingers, an inch apart. Such a small distance that all I feel is a single gentle pressure. One spot -- right there, just where an infant's still-forming bones eventually knit together, where now that we've grown, we adults have become all-too-solid, closed. Where perhaps it may be time, past time, to let myself be open, to be re-opened, in order to be made new, to be renewed. I feel you touching me, yes. Pressing me. "Ah," you say. "Ah, good." Is just one finger that you touch to me, like the finger tracing curves along my side? . "No," you whisper. "No, two. But close, so close you feel just one. A question of an inch, not even two. Trivial things, these inches-or-two, you see. Illusory things, these touches." No, not illusion, for I feel. "Not illusion, no," you say. "But not quite everything. The net of nerves aren't woven tight enough just here, where I touch, for you to feel the two. You need a finer-woven web of feeling, of sensation, to understand the shape of some things. But wait." It is not until you begin to comb your fingers through my hair, that I can feel: Yes, oh yes there are two. We two. Your two fingers. Fingers, moving the way a hand hung over a rowboat's side might barely part the water, moving beyond the power of my eyes to see, like the way that a spring wind riffles through a field of wheat. Is that a ripple your one finger is stirring, a wake rejoining behind; is that a bending of the ripened heads of grain stirred by your other finger, before swaying back to their well-ordered rows? Or is it just two fingers, toying idly in my hair? Combing down, then resting for a moment, here, where a pulse beats beneath thin skin. Feeling: A beat, slowing? Calmer? Or not. You won't say what you feel, touching me there, won't tell me what you diagnose. Nor will I tell myself. Now your fingers slowly trace more lines, more lines: The outline of my face, a ridge of bone. Cheekbones. Brows. Stroking one time, twice. As if considering, contemplating. "Here," you say, "Here, it is not even a question of an inch. Here, fractions of an inches are an issue, fractions: an eighth, a sixteenth, thirty-second. So small a difference." So small, I think. Fingers so lightly touching. I feel them, but barely, Feel them move the way a mesmerist's hands might move, soothing, curing. And as you stroke I also (or perhaps instead) now feel the breeze from the window, the dancing edge of muslin curtain floating. Lying on my back, is it the touch of fingers, or the cloth, or maybe the breeze that now I feel? Yet also I feel muscles tensing, rigid. Feel the pressure of a bowl bowed outward, the small of my back pressed tight against the sheet. This trembling counterpoint: The lightness of the moving air, your stroking fingers like a treble line of melody against the deep bass groan of the dipping bedsprings as you shift your weight. Your implacable presence looming beyond where I can look, dare look. Something could happen soon. We both know this. Perhaps the shift of weight will tip a balance. Perhaps the play of breeze across my skin, the brushing of a finger, brushing so lightly, a touch so delicate it might almost sink beneath a surface. Such a small distance. Not even an inch. Fingertips: Two, now, a symmetric dance. My right brow traced, my left. Cheekbones, jaws. Fingertips: Four now stroking my cheek. Six. Now all your fingers, Trailing now over my skin -- or maybe touching, just a little deeper. Maybe a touch beneath the surface, contact with something more essential. "Do you feel?" you ask. A nod so small no one else can see. "We are layers," you say. "Do I touch the outermost, or is it the next one down? Is it the farthest humming electron of my skin that's touching yours? Or do I merge a bit, the smallest bit, with you? Maybe I touch you deeper down, my finger's touch not the first layer of you, not the second. My finger's touch, here ..." Along my cheekbone, yes. Along my jaw. "A fraction of inch less there, that's all you'd need." Ah yes. "So little, we could barely measure," your voice a murmur. "So little that it would need only the slightest pressing of a finger, like the extra second that the potter's hand rests on the spinning clay." That's all. So small. Small as the shiver traveling up my spine, pressed flat and hard to the mattress though I still am. An undulation, a half-formed "S", a tiny wave from root to crown. Shivering, as if you touched my shoulder at the bar. As you did touch, in fact, and not so long before. And as I shivered. I'd walked past the place once, twice. And finally, the third time, heart pounding, I pushed through the door, sure that just as I turned I saw the knowing smirk of a passing girl, a look that nearly, nearly made me flee, as I had fled before. It is a place that's known, after all. That's how I knew. A kind of place I hadn't dared to go before. Dared now only because this was a strange part of town, and I was feeling strange. I had not long before tried to peer into the steam clouding my mirror, trying to see my face, my real face, now that she'd swept herself out of my life, swept out like the swoop of her arm gathering her nylons from the shower rod behind me. Tried to see if an empty hollowness I felt within was visible without, tried to see if hot, hot water washes the bitterness of certain words away. A cold night, maybe. Or maybe I felt only the chill from all the hours of drizzle seeping from the fog today, the fog rolling in from the sea beyond, the fog that hid my steps until I'd walked past once, and twice before I turned. In the fog: Violet, ruby lights flashing, caught in the corner of an eye, the glow from dark windows only glimpsed before the blowing drops make me tear up, before the chill wind demands I bow before it. Violet and ruby sparkling in the dark wet of the foggy street. The warmth of the entranceway momentary relief. I paused in that cramped airlock between the chill of the streets and -- and what? A step. Dark in here, and warm; a wet warmth that makes glasses and mirrors steam. I see a smear of violet neon in the window, low lights glowing along a bar, running half the length of a wall: dimness beyond. Slowly, focus comes, slowly my heart thuds just a little less. There are two men, chatting, two feet away. One glances, smiles. I hear the sing-song of his voice, though not his words. I see him glance and look away and glance again, see the liquid dark brown of his eyes. The bartender approaches, pausing a moment with the others, laughing an instant before continuing to me. Half-swallowed words, an order croaked out. Waiting, I just stare ahead, as if interested in the rows of bottles gleaming, the mirrored gaps, as if wearing blinders. Waiting, I shake. No tab, no thanks, I tell the bartender when he at last returns. I tell him to keep the change, waving fingers to leave a too-large tip, get a flashing grin, a speculative glance, before he spins away. Gulping a first sip, I almost decide to run. Almost. But don't. I see from out the corner of my eye the man who had tried to catch my eye before; see him glancing again, smiling, as if to invite me over, as if the two of them and me could become three, just chatting, shooting the breeze, the easy-going way that any three at loose ends on a foggy night might do. I sipped. A quiet night. Hardly a soul inside. Safe. As always I have wanted it to be safe for me. And so, the feel of your hand on my shoulder is a shock. You'd come from where? The dimness, in the back? The cold outside? Was it a shadow that I felt first, before your hand, or was it a chill? I cannot say. Perhaps both. Perhaps just a sense that, even more than I was in that instant before I pushed through that door, I am now poised for something big. A step across the threshold. You knew I shook, you must have known. So: from where did you come? Shadows? The chill? "I'll never tell," you whisper now. Your fingers still trace their lines, their lines on me, their hypnotic never-ending lines on me. Were I able to turn my head now, lying here, I'd read what in your face, I wonder. If I had turned my head, there in the bar, I'd have read what? "You didn't turn," you say. "I was afraid to turn. I am afraid." "I know." A long pause. "But not only afraid." No, not only afraid. Now, you lift your fingers, now you rest your hand there, on my right shoulder. There, just as you had done before. "I feel you," you say. "I feel the way you shrink from the touch of my hand here, how you shrank when I came up behind you there at the bar, laid my hand here. I feel, just as I'd felt, the shivering, the S shaped wave of need, as well. I feel, I felt, how that wave rose up from deep within, how it rolled up and up and up along your spine. That's how I knew. How you know." "How I know?" "Shh," you say. "Not now." For now, again, your fingers dance. "A question of an inch or two," you say. No more. "The tiniest affair, so small a change. And yet, it seems so difficult." A pause "But it only seems hard." Fingertips, two fingertips, stroking down arms, stroking back up a slightly different path along my skin, stroke down again, the valleys where my arms, press tightly, almost fearfully, against my sides. "An inch or two here," you say. "Inch or two there." Fingertips stroking: Approach each other, do not meet, then curve away. Fingertips tracing an hourglass on me. "When I first touched your shoulder," you say, "You shrank, and then you grew, you rose to meet my hand. At my touch, a shivering you couldn't stop, a wave of what: Desire, need. Knowledge perhaps." Knowledge? Again, fingertips trace those lines. "You know," you say. A bedspring creaks, a sagging beneath me. Tightening muscle resists the way a shifting surface suddenly demands that I must slide. Palms pressed hard to the sheet, I hold myself from sliding. You move, I feel you moving towards me though I will not look, I won't, not now. Another creak, another dip, the other side of me. And now, I feel you above me, large and inevitable, one knee grazing my hip, your knee just touching as you straddle me, kneeling above me, tall enough so that your shadow falls across me, so that the muslin curtain floating in breeze momentarily enwraps you, momentarily unveils. Yes. Now I look. And think: The shadows, then. It was from the shadows you emerged when you walked over to me, when you came from behind, from out of the blue, when you came and laid your hand on me. I shiver as a tiny shift of weight means now I feel both of your knees, just barely touching me. I feel (or perhaps I merely sense) your calves alongside me. Shivering, I think: Maybe it was the cold then, not the shadow. Maybe it is from the chill that you have come. "I came because you wanted me," you say. I wanted? I see you nod. And now, finally, I look into your eyes. Eyes like a starry sky, a summer night. I see the velvet dark of night, the distant stars, so far their color is palest blue, near-white. Ah, and the longer that I look the clearer does it seem that all I need to do is lift a hand to touch them. All I need to do. It's not an act of will, and yet, my hand is rising, rising. Rising to meet yours, to feel your thumb brush the inside of my wrist, to feel your fingers gently close to encircle me, to trap my too-thin arm and hold me there, where I have nearly touched your face.. "A question of an inch or two," you say. "The smallest distance. Will you?" Did I nod? My hand, held loose, enwrapped, lost in your grasp now gentle squeezing. Squeezing with maybe just force enough to press pliable clay a final, invisible measure, press it towards a shape seen in a mind's eye. Same pressure now, moving down my forearm, as your hands stroke downwards, wrist to elbow. Elbow to shoulder. My other hand. My other arm. Now, one hand there, just where my arm and shoulder meet, your other hand reaches to the other side of me. You press. Firmer, a little firmer than the pressing of your hands along my arms. Heels of hands press lightly, sink easily to my sides. And pressing again, each hand cupped, each hand containing the whole curve of ribs, back to chest, I feel you stroking downwards, downwards towards my waist. The gentle pressure of your hands increasing just the slightest bit as they travel down. Then pressing easing as you reach my hips, following the curve, forming it. A shift of weight as you twist, so that your two hands now hold one leg, my left leg. Two hands holding, pressing, stroking downwards along a leg somehow I'd lifted just so you could reach. And as you let me go, and as I feel the briefest dip of bedsprings as you twist to my right, you take my other leg now in your hands and again I am feeling the pressing of your hands, the movement of your hands I don't look as you touch; your touch is overwhelming, as overwhelming as you yourself are, looming over me. Your touch making me shake. But now, my right leg sinking back to the bed, feeling your half turn, feeling you lean towards me -- now, you become too much, too much a presence and now I need to look. And now I see, now I feel the first brush of what I'd feared. You rise and arc: A scimitar. Nested in a dark forest between your legs, curving, yearning outward. Towards me. In the dim of the moonlight, glowing: violet, ruby. As you approach, I feel the heat of you, how firm you are, how you burn, will burn, how you demand. How you need. How I do, as well. Now I reach. Now I hold you, feel the velvet of your skin, the hardness beneath; now my fingertip traces a line, that curving arc of the bottom of your shaft; now my fingers hold you, pressing you gently as they stroke. Now I feel you shiver. Feel you. I feel your palms now on my chest, feeling how as you've risen, grown towards me, so now I grow, so now I rise, swelling to meet your touch. But not down where your thighs entrap me, not down where I had in my time risen to meet a different kind of lover's touch. Rising here, here above my heart, where I feel the touch, the gentle touch of your hands on my chest, on my breasts. Feeling a warmth of my own, rising from within, from deep within -- call it my heart, yes. Call it my heart. I feel my heart expanding in the warmth as your hands cup my breasts. Still you move, now the weight of you begins to hold me, I am bearing you on my hips, holding you now, as you approach, your fingertips on my face, most delicate work yet. The smallest distance, yes. Gentle pressing along the curve of jaw, a cheekbone's ridge. Touch here, there. A arc, like this, traced with a finger. Another. Finger tip down my nose, finger tip tracing the edge of my upper lip, right side, left side. Finger laid lightly, oh so lightly on the swelling softness of a lower lip. And then, waiting. Waiting. You fingers combing through my hair, fanning outwards, holding me. I feel your breath now on my face, feel you coming closer, closer, closer still. That moment, wondering if you will lean in that final inch, knowing and not knowing that lips were meant to touch. That moment, beating heart, shuddering breath. Waiting. The first touch, light as butterfly might touch, alighting. For just an instant, I feel how your lips are slightly rough, pressing against the smooth wet of mine, but you keep pressing still. Your head tilts just a bit, or mine, so we may fit all the closer, closer still. Your hand slides down my side. My lips part and I feel the probing of your tongue, feel you in me, feel you in inviolable me, feel my hips arching towards you as your hand slides past waist, along the curve, pulling me closer. As your belly presses mine, I feel you, hard and round and warm, feel you pressing a shallow valley in my now-softer skin, your burning, purpling head below my navel. My hands now on your lean hips, feeling the ropes of your muscles tensing, shifting over steel-hard bone, each muscle sliding smoothly over others as if washed in the finest, fragrant oil. I feel you lifting hips, feel your chest sliding against my breasts, feel the bed dip, hear the creaking of springs. My hands trace urgent circles on your waist, your hips, your thighs, feeling your muscles swell with power, poised. And now you come to me. Like a wave rolling in from the center of the ocean, unstoppable. I feel your body's weight, heavier now. I feel a pressing between my legs, inevitable, the wave rolling, pushing, pushing. But not crashing on this shore. For as I feel you enter where surely you couldn't, where I am sure I feel you enter, where reason, where a lifetime says you couldn't enter, I know (deeper than any feeling) that you are slicing in towards my core. Knowing this, from the feel of you, like the thrilling shock of silk or satin parting, like the way a razor's lightest touch makes you shiver in the first instant before the welling of red tells you you've been hurt. But now, no welling of the red, only you moving, moving into me. Like a wave rolling, a giant wave, an ocean's width of heaving energy in a single rolling wave. A glowing ball, iridescent, expanding as you move in me, until, almost unbearable, it vanishes like a bubble, flash of rainbow; then comes the next, the next. I feel a thick sweet flow, like golden honey, moving like the bow-wave of a ship before your head, flowing through secret channels I had never felt before, a warming, thick sweetness. To breath now, I must gasp, it seems. Must shudder. Beneath the weight of you, I cannot move. And yet I need to move, must move. Beneath the surging of you into me, wave on wave, I can only be carried. I feel you, with my arms enwrapped, my legs enwrapped, around you, hard and urgent, muscles shivering as gather and stretch, driving you onward, inward. I feel how you burn, how you throb in me. Feeling waves iridescent, now golden, arise within, expand, I feel them grow to fill me, to the farthest ends, so that fingertips clutching you are aflame so that the ends of my hair fanned in their halo flicker orange and red. I feel you moving, moving, feel a strange electricity that neither shocks or burns, yet still can make us shiver. Can make us tremble. I feel your muscles bulge and stretch, feel you moving beyond any power of mine to stop you, moving against the inside of my thighs. I feel your hands grasping me tightly. Feel you moving, moving, waves of the ocean surging into me, easing back, surging again. Feel you more urgent, more urgent still. This cannot be, this cannot be, I think. My hands fall to the bed. Oblivious, you shake, I feel you shaking. Feel you exploding. I feel you pumping, pumping, pumping onto me. A pond of you, on my belly. ***** Almost, we danced away. Almost. But then the world began collapsing into the ordinary. A dim room, the hour before dawn, the wet pool just below my navel still warm against my skin. I lie here in the moonlight, watching the muslin curtain dancing in the breeze. Wondering what has happened to me. No one to ask. Alone, I am alone. Arms crossed over my chest, I hug a too-familiar flat plane of skin and rib, lock my ankles tensely, press my legs tight together. Rigid flesh guarding an inner, empty spot, an inner space of me I do not know. Holding myself this way, I cannot touch what I would have touch, were I to know for sure. Were I to want to know. I will not touch and so will keep myself here in that limbo between. Where have you gone. And I, where had I been? I lie here, waiting. Waiting. Blanket kicked free, sheet beneath rucked and rumpled and still warm. I lie, still burning after nearly leaping free. The gauzy curtain dances, dances still. Billowing in a warm evening breeze, beckoning waves, inviting, inviting. What is it about a thread of pale white, loosely bordering emptiness, that makes a fabric meant for girls: Start here. Start with a memory of breezes though a bedroom window years ago, breezes carrying the sound of laughing voices in a summer night, for memories from long ago are where it always starts. Silver in the velvet dark, an echo of my cousins' sparkling, shimmering delight just a few hours before. Delight as my mother swept an ivory band of lace from deep inside a cedar chest, so that it swirled through the sunlight air and then floated down like a mist onto her lap. Caught by the fluttering of white, I'd stepped in from the hallway, unconscious that I had, just watching, just needing to watch. I saw my smiling aunt trace the patterns of arabesques and flowers for my cousins; heard my mother tell of how their mother and their mother's mother patiently knotted and tugged and wove the airy fantasies of thread. Saw a smile I'd never seen for, heard a tone of voice never murmured to me. How wonderful it will look, my aunt had said, a trim for that dress, veil for that. And my cousins laughed like tiny silver bells. Laughed again, with a hint of some other feeling, when my aunt turned to the faint sound of my unthinking step. Were they embarrassed at their joy? Or were they merely mocking me? Laughed when my aunt turned, and asked what I was doing there. I was, I should have told her, too little to go with out her sons, with my cousins' brothers; I was, I should have said, gravely informed that I was unready for the adventures that they had planned. I was, I might have said, scared of the freezing water of the lake, unsettled by my pacing father -- impatient to move on, impatient for his next ship -- afraid he would be insisting once again that I must swim, must finally learn to swim this summer. I might have said that though I had been happy enough to read there on the porch of uncle's old place by the lake, I had been rousted from my nest by the nagging that it was too nice a day for that, silly to let the moment pass, for we'd only few days to stop before driving on so my father could report for duty. I was a stranger to them, really. And so, no wonder that my cousins laughed, laughed maybe because they were unsure of why the floating cloud of lace might so entrance someone, maybe laughing just to tease the boy who was stranger, when my aunt held up the youngest's satin party dress and asked me what I thought, if it might fit. Their laughter drove me off, running. But later, the silver bells of their voices in the night, echoes from a world I did not know, invited me, invited. And invited, I lay there listening to their laughter. Yearning to join them. But, no, I did not rise to step out into the violet of that evening long ago. When do we understand there is a difference? That for some, a plain edge, a clear boundary, is what is proper. That for some, what suits is thread-trapped spaces patterning a band of lace, a mist of cloth obscuring borders, like drifting fog. When do we understand that some must brave the icy water's grip and not complain, that some need never know the breath-seizing panic of a lap between the buoys that you are too tired to make; that it is fine if she reads on a summer afternoon but there's a ballgame in the park and they need a ninth so badly that even you will suffice. Or, from another time: When do we understand the meaning of the playground chanting of a mispronounced girl's name and why that makes you redden. The odd smile when the girl in French class shakes her head and says she'd already seen the movie that you've asked her to come see with you. The way she took my hand, straightened a wrist that I had, unthinkingly, held limply bent. Murmuring that sometimes I seemed a bit -- well, anyway. Are we so much what others see? "Not all," I hear you say. "But some, yes." I feel the bed sag as you sit. You're back. Back in my room -- from where? Your presence, sudden, seismic as the bed shifts beneath your weight-- undeniable as you were before, beyond any power of mine to resist, as you were then. You project yourself into the world, into my world, as you will, when you will. As if nothing else matters, as if you are that big -- big enough that you can reach, so certain, to take exactly what you want. And though I once again tighten legs, back, stomach, so that I do not slide along the slope you've pressed in the bed, I wonder: what about what I want, what about me? "And what about it," you reply. You are a shadow, dark against the moonlight, sitting, back to me, at the foot of the bed. Perhaps because my glasses lie just out of easy reach, perhaps the dimness of this room, the damp fog rolling in from the sea, makes it so hard to focus, so hard to take your measure. Perhaps it be because I do not want to see. As your shape shifts, as the springs creak, a gust makes the curtain dance round your head. You're turning, reaching for me. The shifting of your weight tugs at the sheet, as if to pull me to you. "What do you want?" you whisper, as your finger, just your finger, stretches to me, touches the white jelly still pooled on my belly. Whispering gentles your voice, what is it now that harshens mine? Around your head, like long hair floating in a breeze: is the curtain dancing? Or are you someone, somehow different? "You want something else? Someone else?" you whisper, holding up the finger that you touched to me, so that I see the gleam of the semen you touched. I wait. "Is this yours?" you ask, moving your finger towards your lips, as if to taste. Then pause. "Or mine?" And your finger approaches. As I reach to you, did my fingers brush a breast, maybe for just an instant? As I turn, did my hand brush along and down a softer curve around your hip? As now my hand moves up along the inside of your thigh, as your slim finger retreats, I feel a possibility of another path, where I might lift myself onto you, press your soft lips now with mine, let your finger touch your red lips and know how floodgates opening my hot and urgent need must drive me to you. A possibility, perhaps. But now I feel you lean to me. Now your chest is on mine. Your advance, my retreat and now I know what you will ask and what the answer is, if only I can be as bold as you. "Yours?" a flute's note suddenly deepening into the growl of the viol's lowest and thickest steel string. "Mine?" Yours, I know, at the moment your finger touches my lips, eases so gently past, to lay what you have touched and lifted from my belly to my tongue, for me to taste. Salt. Like a tropic sea might taste, intensified, reduced. Brimming with life, life waiting, ready to flower, to fill a world. My hand, still stroking, feels muscles firming, your muscles. Feels you growing, taking form. My touch draws you to me. As I taste, as the taste of you now dissolves on my tongue, your hands begin to move on me. And as you, so must I, palm following the slope of your leg, upward, upward, until I cup you, until the egg-shaped pair lie heavy in my hand, cradled there in the basket of my fingers, and I feel your shaft stiffen against the smooth skin along my inner forearm. "Yours?" you whisper once again. "Yours," I breathe. Did you hear? I feel your fingers toying with my hair, feel you once again pressing the spot there on the crown of my head where once bones knit and now, and now ... I am not quite sure, not quite. "There is a moment," your voice rumbling as a mountain might if it could speak to me. "There is a moment to let go. A moment to surrender. Even were your vision of me to differ from what you see right now, even if that instant where you thought you felt soft skin and the swell of a breast were the way we went, you would to surrender. Surrender to joy, laughing delight. Surrender is the key. So, now: Surrender. Surrender." Must I? Can you feel that I am afraid? You must, for now your hand is stroking me. Now, along my ribs, heel of your hand pressing down the slope of my waist, fingers smoothing the hipward rise. Can you feel how I pause: For now I feel your palm above my heart, feel myself swelling to meet your touch. Feel the almost-pain of thrilling to your touch brushing a nipple. Can you feel how I tremble here, on the brink: and now I feel your hand cradling me, between my legs, feel a slow undulation of palm, of fingers, where once there was and now there's .... Oh. Surrender, surrender. And if I do, must I then lose myself? As I lie here, holding you, lips so close, so close, what are the stakes. A question not of inches, but of giant leaps. A moment on the edge of becoming -- but becoming what? A taunt? One of them? Or am I to become someone else entirely -- are you that much, that unavoidable? Your hand stroking again, again along the curve, deepening curve of waist to hip, again to weigh a breast, again to that space between my legs. "Yes. Or that," you say. "To become that person." Ah. Surrender. And so as you tilt your hip to me, I bend to you. In the basket that my fingers make, I feel those two roundnesses moving, blindly moving with their need, heavy with their need. I feel, even as you lie still, waiting for me, how the life, the desire, the need that is pulsing beneath your skin makes your shaft tremble against my skin, makes it move, seeking my touch. I feel the shock of holding another's erection in my hand. Familiar and yet so different. The thrill of pleasure of a finger's touch, sensed in the way you shiver, the way you throb. Like a heart pounding blood through the veins, like my heart is pounding now, holding you, feeling you growing, still. Feel you stiffening, feel you needing. Must I? "Surrender," you whisper. "It is the gift you give to me. And in giving, you'll find ... well, you'll find what you will find. Surrender now, that final tiny step." "And give up? What do I give up?" "A picture of yourself," you say. "Just that. Give up a little bit pride, give up a kind of approbation that you've wanted for the reasons you can't admit. Give up some of the judgments you pronounce. Offer up yourself." An inch. A question of inch. You. Me. Your body next to mine, still as a wall, your shaft in my hand, pulsing, glowing with warmth. I know what I am to do you, and yet it is so hard. "Much easier to have thought that you were dreaming," you agree. "Easier to tell yourself you dreamt. Except this: the taste of me, when I touched my finger, my seed to your lips was real. To say you dreamt, much easier. To say you dreamt, you let the world collapse back to the normal, when what you need, when what you want is change. Just an inch. Less. Surrender, now, and see." And so, hesitant, lips touch lavender skin, damp with the palest milk. And so, tongue grazes purple edge, and you shudder in my hand. I bend, and feel your warm shaft against my cheek. I turn, and touch its curving bottom with my tongue, flattening my tongue to touch you more. And more. Lick. Oh. Fingers toy with my hair, stroking that spot at my crown. Assuring me that it is alright, this is alright. Touching you with my tongue. Just touching. And again. My tongue, the tip, just the tip of my tongue, traces a line down to where my hand still cradles you, traces a line down along a path I know you burn to pour yourself down. Lifting my head, daring a glance into your eyes. "Surrender," you breathe. Lips part, now. Encircle. Holding you gently, lips on purple edge, your warmth in mine. "Surrender." Tongue touches just below where my lips hold you. You gasp. And so do I, as if in sympathy. A gasp, inhaling. Gentle suction. Drinking you in. You fill me, I need you to fill me, need you. Drinking you in, then, needing to breath, letting you slip past my lips until you gasp again and I do and the soft inhalation brings you back to me. Slowly, easily. Inside me, something spiraled tight slowly unravels. Inside you, perhaps, something is winding tighter. Inhaling, releasing; inhaling, releasing. If time passes, I cannot tell. There is only you and me. My heart beating, slowly calming. You trembling, faster. In a while, in a minute, in an instant, the dam will break. Surely it will. I can't. I can't. Not this, surely not this. But before I can lift my face from you, I feel your hands cupping my face. Palms cradling my chin, fingers fanning across my cheeks, their infinitesimal flex raising me so I look into your eyes, so you slip from my mouth. "This is the way this works," you say. You're panting almost, as if you are trying to catch your breath. "We can dance here, again, along this tightrope. And dancing in the way we've danced, Your touch, the lightest touch of your fingertip, would soon nudge me one way, nudge us. A way you know, the safer way. When, in a hour or two, the dawn comes, you can shake your head, again. The sky outside your window will again infuse with blue, the white corner of your neighbor's house, the wet black of the street beyond, will be there, once again, inviting you to step along, follow its curve into a kind of future, changeless because you went the way you know is safer." I bend my neck and see how much you tremble, rose and violet, inflamed with need. It would be just a touch. The lightest touch. So casual, forgettable. "Or," whispering now. "Or now you can do something you've never dared to do. From this tightrope where we've once again capered, fearing to fall but dancing nevertheless, from here, the tightrope swaying as we pause to catch our breaths, from here: To leap." I could. A question of an inch or two: my fingers, trailing up from where they cradle you, a touch or maybe two. My lips, so close to the fire. Some of us reach, and take. The boldness is in the pushing forward, pushing onward. I could just reach. For some, though, the courage is in daring to open, daring to surrender. Daring to immerse ourselves in a world, rather than merely taking what we will and build our walls to hold at bay the rest. To reach, to leap into the midnight dark. A question of an inch or two. Now, with my hand on your waist, ready to reach, I feel you arch your back, a bow bent now to fire your arrow at me. Feel your muscle tighten, ready. Know now: To reach? To leap? I bend my lips to you. And leap. Sunday Surely, what my own fingers, my own skin remembered wasn't this. That outward surge, that urgent flood. I felt your pumping, pumping, pumping into me, deep into me. I felt how you had wrenched an essence of yourself from deep, so deep within you, or had it wrenched from you perhaps, feel that in the way you clasped me, the way the muscles of your thighs had turned to iron, the way you arched your hips to me. I felt a rich and salty draught pouring along my tongue, flooding down my throat. I felt I tore this from you. Gulping you down. The fountain that my own fingers recall moved merely inches. No flood pooled on my belly, nothing like this. What I recall: Drawn from a pond, a puddle. But, oh, how I felt an ocean of you crashing in. Ocean: warm saltiness of life, thick with potential, humming with energy barely contained, condensed of beating hearts and fluttering gills and lashing tails of a million, of a billion tiny creatures saying: Live, live. A warm seawater jell to nourish, to fulfil. As you pumped, pumped, pumped into me and as I swallowed, I felt this gift flowing through, flowering outward, along perhaps my arteries, my veins; along, perhaps, inner pathways I've never know. As I had felt the touch of your hands seem to reshape, to sculpt an outer shell, now I felt from within reshaped, reformed. Even now, later, hours later, past the midnight that makes another day, I am expanding from within, as if the touch of your hand, like the potter's on the spinning clay removed a heavy earthen excess. Shrinking from without, spun beneath your hands, as the same I am burgeoning from within, a bud opening, opening. Shall I now disappear, now that I have surrendered? No. No. I rested just a minute there. Rested on your shoulder. Drifted ... Drifted. Until: The arch of sky outside my window now is just barely washed with blue, the shadows that the new-risen sun cast are still lavender. Pale light in my room, where the muslin still billows in the fresh air of a new day. I am alone. Hair fans across my pillow, strands of hair touch my cheek, catch on my lips as my hair never had before. The distance that my hand now crosses, reaching for my glasses, seems an unfamiliar extra inch; the brushing of my fingers on my face seems lighter, My glasses don't seem to settle quite right. Somehow I know what my touch will now find -- perhaps because I know that I surrendered, know that, whether in dreaming or in fact, I crossed a border I never dared before. Somehow I know my hand will cup a breast above my heart, a small breast, yes, but still a breast. Surely still a breast. I know that (sleepy as I am) I will feel breasts nestled in the hollows of my hands, that nipples will swell and stiffen into the center of my palms. That I will feel a shiver of delight, a gentle glow arise. Somehow I know the curve my lightest touch will trace from waist to hip. Somehow, knowing that where my fingers will follow a smooth, soft swell along my inner thighs, I'll find only a simple flattened curve where my legs meet. An inward turn. Somehow, my heart does not thud as I lay a finger between those lips, feel how they will part, how they could open for another's desire. I wonder if I'll dare: for now, there's just the small weight of my finger, laid between my lips, barely easing them apart. My shiver in response is just enough. I wonder if this is what I have really wanted. I rise now from my bed, that extra inch or two I have to reach making for a momentary awkwardness. I take the extra step I must now take to reach the closet, for now I need to look into the mirror on the inside of the door. A mirror I rarely bothered with before. It's true, could it be true? My breasts, as I touch, so small they might almost not be there. My hips curve, as I had never seen before, to frame that small triangle of hair and -- and surely not nothing else. Nothing else that I can see. My hair, tousled as ever, thicker somehow. My face, in the misty light of dawn, seems more delicate now, as if a curve of jaw and chin is sharper, as if faint shadows now frame a rounder forehead. But still it is my gray eyes that gaze back. I wonder if, having flowered from within, contracted from without, I'll feel a frailer wall between me and the world, a thinner skin. Wondering, calm as if I were watching a dream unfold, calm as if knowing I will awaken. What I see, what I think it see: Impossible. As if I've shed a layer or two -- or even a smaller change, a change like one I might imagine if, emerging from a long soak in the bath, I peer through the steam to see, faintly in the mirror, a reflection of a possibility. Still me. Thin skin, pale through whatever now clouds vision; An edge of rib, a shadow of hipbone. Hair a halo framing face, as if each strand had drunk so deeply of the steam, as deeply as I drunk of you, that it had thickened, been infused with the electricity that jolts a finger on a doorknob, needing to fly from each neighbors' touch, so tender still from drinking. Still me. And yet, beneath my arms, crossing my chest, below the smooth curve below my navel, where I will not look now -- and yet, I know I've changed. Change. Demanding change. Inescapable change. What we want-- what we say we want -- whether or not it is this particular change I see now in my mirror. But change is what makes us tremble when it comes. For change demands the person changed to manage, to cope. To fit the change into the interlocking tiny pieces of our daily lives. To discover how to continue when, looking within, there are no memories to help, no guidebooks to be found. When looking within I see: I am still me. If I am changed, I still am me. How now will I learn to sit just so, to walk this way, not that; to put this on, and that. Know this will be alright but that will never do at all. I do not know. The list of what I do not know unrolls as quickly as spilled water races across the floor, and all I can do is gape. If I have changed, nothing else has: The book I read last night still on the floor beside me, the trees, the wall, the corner of street that I can see through my window just the same. Inside my closet, there are still only the jeans, the khaki trousers, long-sleeve shirts, the dark suits I have always worn. In my dresser, only the boxers, socks and sweaters that were there before. I need -- well do I need? What do I need? I pull a shirt down from a hanger, slip on the trousers I had let drop to the floor last night -- but now it feels as if I cannot clinch the belt tight enough, cannot kick free the cuffs so I can walk. The shirt falls to my hips. I'm swimming in these clothes. I cannot go outside like this. Cannot be out and seem to be, be seen to be who I have been. I can no longer hide. As I had hidden? I let the trousers fall, step free. Padding into my living room, feeling as unexpected swing of hips, a sense of being rooted to the ground a little differently, more heavily. The weight of breasts, small as they are. Real feelings, real as -- more real than -- a reflection in the mirror. Real as the extra inch I think stretched to reach my glasses, to swing myself from the bed. Or did I; perhaps I still am dreaming. Perhaps this change -- let's say that I have changed -- cannot last: how can it, after all? The blue of the sky deepens, shadows move, their color darkens. I pace. I pace. Hours pass, blankly. I cannot think. I dare not. Just pace. The feeling that my center's shifted downward, that shift of weight that makes hips sway, begins to fade as I pace on and on around my place. So, too, the tug of breasts, less noticed now, as the midday sun beams in, less noticed as the shadows of the afternoon lengthen, crossing the window's sill. Perhaps whatever'd changed is now collapsing back. Perhaps I will return to normal. Perhaps in just an hour or two. Perhaps tonight. I cannot stay within my walls forever. If I take these old jeans, roll up the bottoms, punch a new hole in an old belt -- a sort of fit. This tee-shirt, that baggy jacket. The door swings open to an empty street, always empty this time of day, on a weekend like this. The shadows of the trees stretch all the way across the payment, green lawns glow in late afternoon light. Step. No one to see. Down the walkway, step by step. Pause at the sidewalk. Should I need to, it would take just a second or two to dash back to safety. The park is two blocks to the left; by now, the children's soccer games are done, families encumbered by their folding chairs and picnic baskets have all straggled back to their vans. In the lake, the ducks will still be on their patrol for crumbs, full as they are. The couples will finish their last strolling rounds; perhaps one or two will eye the little stands of oak and maple, the swaying loblolly pines, that dot the sweep of grass, hoping for one more private moment before parting until tomorrow. Familiar walk, familiar time. The easy amble comforting, reassuring. The bench down by the farthest curve of the lake, as ever, empty for me to sit and watch. The sun reddens as it sinks, as I saw yesterday, the day before, the day before; the clouds overhead blush pink and purple as the blue light of the arch of sky turns steely and violet and then a deeper, deeper blue. Beneath the darkening sky, there's you again. That presence, in the corner of my eye. Your shadow, maybe seen, maybe just the slight shiver as you block the last rays of the sun. Perhaps it is the sheer weight of you, I feel; effect of gravity, demanding, unrelenting. We watch the sinking sun together. I hear the low rumble of your voice in the dusk before I hear your words. "Comfortable?" you ask Comfortable enough. I think. Comfortable enough for now. It's good to feel the familiar warmth of sun, the ease of the end of day. To feel the world regroup. Return. "Ah," you say. "Return. You felt, perhaps, as the hours passed today, your return. What you wanted this afternoon was not so far a reach; the steps easier to take, the weight you sensed where you'd not felt weight before began eventually to lighten." "Yes. You know?" "I know. I know what you think is happening, what you think now is ebbing away. I know the yearning for the familiar that brought you here, to this spot that you like so well, this time of day." "I feel that I am coming back." Beyond the trees, the first star sparkles. Lights of the city flicker on. "You do?" I hear the smugness in your tone. "Tell me." Easier now as the light fades, as I know I fade into shadows, as I sense you staring ahead, not at me Easier to say, something impossible seemed to have happened, a change I thought I made, so sure, I felt it in my very bones, so sure, I saw in a mirror, I glimpsed it, glancing down, at my hands, my legs, my ... "Yes?" you murmur, "Yes?" But now the strangeness fades, slowly, more slowly than the pins and needles of a long-cramped leg; slowly as when you realize you're breathing easily again after than flu, that that ache in your neck from where you'd slept so oddly still so long is now a bit less sore than yesterday, as yesterday was from the day before. I am getting back to normal, I can tell. "Or perhaps -- perhaps you are merely becoming more accustomed?" you say. Accustomed, I wonder, wanting to ask: accustomed to what? "To yourself," you say. The evening breeze catches my hair, I feel a strand dancing along my cheek now; feel ends of my hair begin to float. Unsettled, I try to shift myself an inch or two away, along the bench; I feel the tee-shirt brush a breast. I want to argue back, want to demand; now, after all this time, to scream the scream I should have when I first looked into the mirror: No, no. You're wrong. I can't. What have you done? Why me? Or do I want? I want, I don't want. I don't know. "Shh," you cut me off. "Someone is coming." And, as if on cue, your cue, I see him, rounding the bend of path that leads beyond the trees, white shirt gleaming in the dusk. I wonder how you knew he comes, when he has only now come into view; I wonder why we wait as he strolls along, a minute, 30 seconds, 10, from crossing right in front of where we sit. "Shh," you say once again. "Wait." He ambles on, so casual. As if the world is his, as if, for a man like him, the world would have no choice to be, as if, just as the white shirt hugs broad shoulders, the curve of bicep, so too the very air, the light, the glances of the passers-by must so caress. His hair, bleached by the sun, his mouth not quite a smirk -- a smile, perhaps, or perhaps just a warning. And now, he passes before me. Nods. I see his eyes glow. As if, when glances meet and bounce apart, a spark is struck. Or maybe, as if a hunger inside, flares, the way the flames of a fire do when you blow. Glances meet and break; my eyes sink, his linger, I can feel, the way his hands might, trailing down along breasts, and down, and down, as that fire within burns as his one question remains unasked, hangs between us, if I were only to glance up again. He paces on, a step, another; glancing back at me, again his eyes gleam for an instant before he turns his head and steps into the twilight. "You see?" you ask. I shake my head. "No?" you continue. "No? You've never seen that look? Never looked that way at the girl across the way, the woman in the line down at the store, or her, walking oblivious to your glance, along a downtown street? What do you think he saw as he walked past you here? What do you think that almost-smile almost asked?" Now, you lean towards me, your fingers capture a strand of hair still dancing in the breeze, you comb it gently back, tuck it away behind my ear. Now your hand drops to my shoulder, lightly strokes down an arm. If I had felt myself growing, solidifying once again to what I remembered from the time before your touch, the brushing of your hand now tells me I was wrong. The mirror I'd avoided through the afternoon perhaps might say the same, just as the mirror of your eyes tells me right now. Just as I'd see, were you to cup your hands around a small mirror, mirror one might find in a purse, hinged to a small round case of pressed and fragrant powder, mirror that you hold before me as I turn to you and try to make your features out in this deepening dusk. In this mirror, fogged by my breath, I see my eyes. My Grey eyes, inward windows into my mystery, as ever impossible to read. I see my brown hair floating -- is it longer than I remember? -- caught in the moving air of evening. I see my face, familiar but changed: a curve of jaw, an arch of brows, a delicacy of features always there beneath the surface now exposed. You do not need to say that I am changed. You don't need to now, I need you to tell me something else, many things else. I need you to help me with the tide that's crashing in, racing in, as if to smash me on the rocks I sense but cannot see approaching me. I don't know what is to become of me; like a frenzied printer spilling paper onto the floor, questions racing: what about this, how will I that, what will he say, and she, how can I do.... "You can by doing what we do," you say, taking my hand. "We cope, that's all. You have, you will." Your touch so light, holding my hand like that, so loose, I think I understand. "Yes," you whisper. "You will cope. You'll find a way. You will. Not I." It's dark now, so dark. Even were I to turn, I couldn't see you. "When you rise from here, in a minute, you might turn right. You might turn left," you say. "This path, when you follow, loops round the lake; you'll reach another spot where you might turn, might go ahead. It's really just what you do now, what we all do." "And can I not simply turn back?" "Sure," (And do you smile? Is that what I think I see in the darkness now?) "Sure, walk on round the loop, spin round and walk on back. You can retrace your steps, but that's a new path, too, you see." "And you'll be?" "Walk round the lake, turn back, and I'll be gone." Alone. I'll be alone. You will leave me alone. Again. Loosely as you now hold my hand, still I feel you gently stroking "Alone," you say. "If that's the path you chose. But really, you know that one anyway, don't you? You know the paths that keep things neutral, keep you from being hurt. The paths that keep you safe, that let you spread on a layer, another layer, and another between you and what could be. But there are paths, thousands, millions, paths beyond number that could take you other ways. Paths that would let you find ... well, that's for you to see. But paths that might even lead you on back to me." And why you, I want to ask, knowing nevertheless that those are the paths I'll want to seek. So you can tear me apart again, I wonder. Or would you then make things right for me, would I then return back to what I've been, to what I know, to the calm safety from which your touch, it seems, has ripped me. Here in the quiet twilight, I think: Have you any idea, any notion at all at how the night must make me tremble, how much I yearn for what you've taken, the balance that was there, the certainty that I can function, the way I managed, somehow, to meet their expectations. Why have you done this, why have you dared to do this? Who are you, to do this to me? Who are you, you whose face I've still not seen? You let my hand fall to the bench. "At some point," (I can barely hear your whisper now) "At some point, maybe, you'll see me, you will ask again. You will not really need to, but -- well, perhaps you'll ask. Perhaps." **** How true to type. You come, you want, you take. A presence I cannot, that we cannot, ignore; like a Sun insisting that we revolve round you, that we turn our faces towards you, drink you in, expand perhaps in your warm light before, indifferent in your power, you move on. Leaving me, leaving us, to cope. To clean up afterwards. True to type, too, I guess. Perhaps we all are true to type -- or perhaps not. My type perhaps you know, without of course quite knowing me: For instance, that I am this certain age -- did that particular shade of fuschia in the party dress my aunt held up so she could tease me on that summer afternoon so long ago help you to date me? A color, fashionable once, then fallen out of favor? Does the way I shake when I hear that one particular pejorative tell you the decade when I was a child or about the kind of not-so- little towns where I grew up, maybe give you a hint of where? If as we trudged back from the lake to my uncle's house, the pale dust of the unpaved road hanging in the air behind the car that just raced past, would your fast glance to see the shape of tail-light, color of license plate help you to pin me down? Or would it matter, to know this: I am a Navy brat, as rootless as a myth, disconnected as cool dispassion that I have lied to you about, that neutrality with which I dance around the issue at the center here. I tell you I am sure that I did, in fact, change in a way we cannot, not really. But am I sure? Did I change? Or not really? I was, no question here, hammered under the unrelenting fact of you, as if you were an oblivious, gleaming giant machine battering my metal into a new form, as if I were half-melted metal to be reshaped, as if I were that malleable -- or even more so. So I will tell you this: I am, in my own way, a child of salt water, fog and rolling waves -- you can check my certificate of birth from the Naval Hospital, the photos of my blue-suited father in the album in my mother's house. My father, so much older than she, Navy man set quite firmly in his ways: our Old Man of the Sea, if you will. My mother, slight and shy, following patiently as he bounced from this coast to that, this ship to that. Patient as he stewed, anxious to be away, when shorebound in between cruises. My mother, singing happily, pottering in a garden, a garden as much like the garden that her own mother had made, next to a house like her never-forgotten home in the little town by the river. My mother, singing to herself in some small yard or tiny kitchen, knowing that in a year or two it would be her turn to sigh and fret and pace as he went off across the sea. Eventually -- was it after the summer sweltering in Norfolk when the fleet was in the Med, or was it the sulfur air of Jacksonville, or the time when we waited by the empty Pacific stretching before our eyes? -- eventually she had enough, my little nymph of a mother, and took us back to the river, and her little town. Can you foresee the future as once I could, or do you now only look backwards, just as I do, towards the places and the time from where I come? Oceanus and his Niaid had a child, their Proteus, mutable, flexible. And if, perhaps, I can't see where I am bound, can you blame me if I seem to prefer to shift my shape rather than speak the answer to the question of my fate, or yours. For you remember, surely you remember, that Proteus the changeable never answers questions. Or rather, answers only the one who captures him. Or her. Changed now, shall I be true to type; or perhaps shall I be no type at all? Or maybe simply play with types. Maybe I'll say its just a game, to try this playing true to types -- as you might play with a type, with your grunt, perhaps, as you set that just-emptied bottle of beer down by your side, so like the grunt of yours as one last thrust of hip impels your seed into your lover. As she plays with types too, not with brute grunts of course but let's say with those lowered eyes, that palm-out backwards comb of fingers through her hair. Ah yes: I see now how that would work, why my hand rises so to the way a stray strand tickles at a cheek, and dances so beyond my reach, impossible to glimpse. See why a hand would turn that move, move thus, and why the little flourish tucking hair securely -- not so securely, really -- must happen. Not so securely, for in a moment, in a hour, I will comb my hand backwards to catch a dancing strand again. I see why, as you watch me, my eyes should seem to look away and down; should need to, all the better to see you with. For I will want to watch most carefully now. For things have changed. Haven't they? Uncaptured still, time to move on into the night, to make my loop around the lake, to find that you -- ah yes, so true to type -- have slipped off into the dark. And I must cope. Here, at this end of the park, when it is as still as it is now in the dark of evening, you can hear -- you could hear, were you here -- the wavelets of the inlet lapping the shore, smell the wet salt air, the rich fishy scent of the edge where worlds of water and of land meet. On the smooth silt, packed firm and cool by the waves, I see bubbled dots from where the clams sucked in the sea, see nervous, pale crabs scurry away. Were it light, the swooping birds, black cormorants, diving pelicans and the ever-screeching gulls would claim this place. Here, by the ocean's edge, is where, of course, I have washed up. And washed up, now move up. Adaptable. Changed, though masked enough, in this baggy shirt and jeans cinched tight, that I can slip safely into the night, explore. At the far end of the park, a low bridge carries the street across the inlet's mouth, the street leads on into the center of the town, quiet and empty now of all but the most strange. A good time now to see, to try at least to begin to see, the way the land lies. Quiet, except for, every few minutes, the sound, like cloth tearing, of the passing cars. Dark, except when a pool of harsh fluorescent light spills from an empty store. Walking. Mainly dark at first. Then more light. And in the rising, ebbing shushing whisper of the tires of the passing cars, a momentary pause. A glance, perhaps, out of a window to the night. A muttering. snatched away as the car moves on. A whistle in the dark. At the stoplight, a car waits, trembling at the red, ready to race on: Where? Two young men; the passenger glances out, sees me. And I see him. Young man, a kid. His close-clipped hair, like the bright Hawaiian shirt he wears, the sunglasses dangling from the cord around his neck, the rumbling of a muffler deliberately modified all spell: Swabbie, weekend leave, pent-up need, a frenzy waiting for release and soon to find it. Our eyes meet for a moment. Lock for moment. Then, the light clicking green, he's gone. In his eyes, in that moment, I see. The hunger, switched on in an instant, the way your knuckle flicks a light-switch and the room's illuminated in a flash. Hunger: a glowing in his eye, the flush reddening his skin, engorging his ... It must be almost automatic; for in an instant I flush too, for an instant I feel a glow of warmth, a shivering of brief, perhaps, desire. Shiver, perhaps, of fear. That it could be so easy, so beyond control. And then, flush of resentment that it is so automatic, that he, with just a glance, sees -- well, maybe the swell of breast pressing my shirt, a strand of hair blowing free, a curve as I step forward. Resentment that that tiniest of sights might be enough to make him slaver, that I might be reduced to that. To think a glance might make me shiver. There is a thrill in being read, I know I shouldn't say. There is a thrill in being so desired, even if in the merest, hungry glance, the most casual, licking-of-lips lusting of callow sailor boys roaring along the boulevard from base to town. Resent being reduced this way as you might want to do, but understand this: That to be reduced to the prey in his hunt tonight touches a need in you, as well. Another car tears down the fabric of the night, another dopplering rise and falling swoosh of tires on wet pavement. Hungry eyes glance my way; glance and return, glance and linger. Another car, another. What must I look like? -- swimming in too-large shirt and pants, caught here halfway between all that I know, all that I've learned and all that I am still to learn. What I must know? -- knowledge demanded by a new form, only sometimes visible to them when a small gust of breeze or twist of arm presses cloth tightly to my skin. Perhaps they see only a halfway person. See only what I have always feared they'd think. Perhaps as their cars race down the road so fast away from me, there is a echo of my cousin's laughter, the words the girl from French class wouldn't say. Ahead, at the next light, there is a pool of light spilling from stores, a glow from the traffic on the avenue that's to be crossed or turned onto to, six lanes to the Beach and to the Interstate. A long light, there is a line of cars here waiting. The cars that passed, whose drivers and whose passengers had glanced and -- well had glanced and turned again indifferently, had glanced and glowed with momentary hunger, had glanced and raced off laughing into the night. I step into the pool of light. A step, two steps. I sense, not seeing, glances darting my way again, and turn. Turn away. The light around me spills from the plate glass window of a store, the impassive gaze of plaster faces easier to bear just now. Three of them: the middle wears a dress the blue of midnight when the full moon's risen, soft cloth that flares so that a toe-tips spin to turn and greet him might make the hem float for an instant. How do I know that? Behind