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I don’t even care if you’re secretly an old married guy or a cruel computer algorithm or a hyperintelligent cat.
I don’t care that you can’t leave the house and I’m in no position to attempt a relationship right now.
Whatever this is, it’s exactly what I want. I want your words. Unpredictable, inexplicable, kind, addictive words coming at me out of nowhere on a tiny screen. Lighting up my face and pillow in a dark bedroom or compelling my fingers to keep tapping tapping tapping while I make lunch. (Cold chicken sandwiches; I’ve got a mayonnaise smear on my phone, rainbow-izing my pixels.)
Better get the boy fed. But here’s my next question for you: what would you like for your birthday?
P.S. I love that you wouldn’t wait. I love that you’d steal impatient tastes on the sly.
P.P.S. When you described your mouth flooding it did unspeakable things to me.
P.P.P.S. My mouth currently tastes like stale black coffee, but ask me again in twelve hours and I’ll say bourbon. And I’ll probably say some other things once that bourbon starts working that I won’t with the sun still shining.
4.17pm
I don’t care that it was lunchtime. I do care that I sex-kryptonited you. My whole body fizzed when I read that—and the weird thing is I don’t even mind admitting it.
Probably because you admit things too. You say things like “crush” and “like” long before I do, and it eases open the heavy metal doors I usually put around any of my needier feelings. It makes them seem less needy and more reasonable.
Even after as little as five days.
Though I’ll be honest: it staggered me when you said them. In my little dark den, time is often fluid and foggy. I think it’s the fourth of June when it’s really ten weeks last Tuesday. But this whole thing has made time even bendier. Suddenly decades are being squeezed into five minutes. It feels like I’ve known you forever.
I’m forgetting what it was like to not do this.
To not be glad for you and your realisation about love. To root for you to find that person who isn’t just the idea of what you want. To imagine the unspeakable things.
Then think about doing them to you.
And the bourbon on your lips…
I went to sleep this afternoon thinking of the bourbon on your lips. Like syrupy sunlight, I imagine it tastes—because honestly I have no real idea. I’ve never had a single sip of the stuff, but oh I would drink a barrel of it down if it came to me from you.
In fact, that’s what I would ask for, for my birthday.
A case of you.
What would you want, in return?
9.10pm
Greetings from the chair by the window. Socks off, feet on the sill, radiator ticking.
A case of me, huh? Was that a Joni Mitchell reference, stranger? If we kissed, would it taste so bitter and so sweet?
Hopefully not too bitter. Sweet with a sting, because, as promised, I’m drinking bourbon now that I’m off-duty, relatively speaking.
Not a big dose, just a single on ice. It’s clinking softly in this quiet room, the glass glinting in the light of the reading lamp.
Rain’s streaking and pattering at the window, and while this time last week that fact would have depressed me, tonight it’s … I’m not sure. Atmospheric? That’s a ten-dollar word, but it’s still not quite right. There ought to be an adjective for when something’s at once melancholy and seductive. Perhaps the French have one.
It feels like longing, distilled.
What would I want in return, you ask? Let’s stick with Ms. Mitchell.
For my birthday, I want you here, or me there. I want the summer, because my birthday’s in late June. I want us on a couch, and the windows open, and the breeze dry and cooling as the sun drops. Thanks to you, I want the first time we kiss to have Car on a Hill be playing, because that song is sexy as fuck. Then Help Me, because goddamn.
You’d taste the bourbon, and what would I taste, I wonder? Do you drink wine? Do you drink at all? Would I taste mint from your toothpaste or gum, or some lingering salty tang from whatever it is I made us for dinner? Or would I just taste you?
