Lucy's pretending

Lucy’s pretending she can’t taste it.

She tugs at the swell of her bottom lip, sucking the burnt orange liqueur into the cave of her mouth. He always tastes like ripe fruit, just before the flesh turns. She’d shaken her head no, I’m a whiskey girl, but he’d reached up into her hair and wound the locks around rough hands, nails bitten low and tobacco darkening the fingertips. He’d tightened, all her strands howling at the tug of it, and held her in place as he brought the glass up to her mouth. And she’d opened, and let him pour the fire inside. You allow me so much, he’d smiled, and she felt the words tip to the front of her mouth, swept aside by a wary tongue still coated with the sticky orange splash: you could do anything, anything, and I’d breathe it all in.

Lucy’s pretending she can’t see it.

She turns her head as he moves past her, his hand on the curve of her hip. He strikes the razor against the side of the basin and sends his fur sliding down the porcelain, the black tumbling amongst the grey in a line she wants to press against her fingertips and bring to her lips. The whorls in his chest hair are her secret, and she can’t follow their path down his belly without her hand resting in a gentle flutter around the bones of her neck as she stares, unblinking. The hunger burns in her stomach and a place far deeper inside her that hasn’t caught fire for three seasons. She wants to shave him but she knows her hands would betray her. She watches the muscles dipping under his towel and catches her tongue between her teeth. She bites harder than she thought she’d need to, but she still can’t look away.

Lucy’s pretending she can’t hear it.

He hums, for her; a blues line that growls across the table and coils around her wrists, keeping her still and bound. They heard it the night they met, when the heat of the pub cracked the double bass of the band, and the noise of the crowd swam past her. There was moonlight on a bluestone wall as he’d held her against it and opened her mouth with a fingertip, opening her legs with a thigh held hard between them. And he’d hummed the song in her ear as he slid one hand into the chink in her armour, and circled it, slowly, until her ribcage filled and her head fell and all the resolve trickled out through her open palms flat against the roughness behind her.

Lucy’s pretending she can’t feel it.

There’s a head in the small of her back, keeping her pinned to the grass as they read. She’s never liked being held but his warmth fills the curve of her spine and brings a curl to the corner of her mouth. She knows these are footsteps down a new path, and she’s so used to hiding in the shadows that this light is making her shield her face, and her heart. But now there’s the weight of him against her, his body on hers, making her skin flush and her throat burn and already she can’t quite remember not listening to him breathe as his hand slides between her legs and the ground rushes up to meet her.

Lucy’s pretending she’s not on fire, but we’re all keeping warm by her flames.

© bellmusker 2009

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Tags:

bellmusker, desire, fire, regeneration and spring