tipsy

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Thank God, she thinks dimly. Over and over, thank God, and now it’s directed at the open door, frozen in a wide arch of welcome, and she feels the warmth of the sun stroking her arm with its fevered touch as the man wrapped around her finds his rhythm. She can’t find the difference in her weight from his anymore, and knows only that his breath tastes like heat and relief all at once. The wine rocks her system even as his body rocks hers—she’s perched on her tip-toes. He grips her left thigh and holds it tight, keeping her leg wrapped around his hip. He pushes down, and her heel is a breath away from level ground; he pushes in and she is yanked to her toes once again. The sun inches through the doorway, creeping through her overloaded senses and lapping at her ankles. High tide is approaching, she thinks. Shakes her head from side to side to side to clear away the wine and the man from her head, and suddenly its right there in front of her—everything she clung to, every reason she tucked away into the curls of her hair and the slant of her smile, everything she knew before she opened the door. She’s almost there, almost to even-footing, when he nips at her ear and m o a n s.

She’s yanked to her toes again.

She’s tipsy and she’s drowning, and she doesn’t know why she doesn’t care. Her shirt is shoved down to circle her waist, and her bra has landed on the coffee table. Her back slides up, her back slides down. The bra is a shock of blue against the stability offered by the brown wood of the table, just as she is a shock of contemporary against his traditions, his white picket fence—or maybe, in his mind, he is the culture-shock. In his world, she’s the one left grasping, clutching. And this, this is payback for all the times she left him tilted, left him with just a little less solids then before she put her tongue to use.

There are words inside her ears, ushered there by his clever tongue, and the irony is lost on her as she gasps. As she clutches. Sunlight lingers on her thighs, embraced by his vocal fingertips as they flex against her flesh as they once did against a trigger. And isn’t she, isn’t this just a trigger of another sort? Her heel brushes against tiled floor, and high tide has long since arrived.

She’s yanked to her toes once again.











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