Dreams of 18

He does it still looking at me.

He doesn’t close his eyes. He doesn’t get lost in his climax alone.

He gets lost in it with me.

The girl he can’t love but looks like he does.

The girl who’s thinking, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I can’t lose that look. I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him the truth.

I love him.

He steals all my thoughts and my chanting when he grunts and almost falls on me, his hips thrusting one last time as his orgasm runs its course.

But he doesn’t rest. He doesn’t look away from me either.

In fact, he has a frown, a thick one, bisecting his forehead while he pants over me, all sweaty, his fingers still framing my face.

“Graham?” I ask, my legs coming down and grasping him around his waist and my hands coming to rest on his jaw.

“I don’t…” He pauses as he gathers his thoughts. “Did I hurt you?”

Frowning, I shake my head. “No.”

His cock pulses inside of me and my channel ripples making us both almost close our eyes. But he pushes on. “I’m not like this. I don’t… do these things.” He swallows, looking at me with both marvel and confusion. “I’m not this rough. This insane… I don’t know what happens to me. When it comes to you. You do something…”

He lets his sentence hang and my heart swells and swells. It pushes against my rib cage with so much love for him and his half-made statements.

He appears so lost and so dumfounded and so fucking laid bare as he tries to explain this change in him. The change that I’ve brought, somehow.

Me.

The girl who barely makes a dent in the universe is making a dent in him. I’m somehow transforming him and the things he does to me, with me, are new to him. As new and wonderful as they are to me.

I wanna cry. I wanna laugh.

But all I do is smile slightly and reach up to kiss his jaw, which he turns into a long, wet, sloppy kiss on the mouth.

When we come up for air, I whisper, “I love it. Whatever you do, however you are, I love it.”

I love you…

How can I tell him the truth about me when he thinks I’m doing something to him? Something is changing in him because of me and because of that, he looks at me with wonder. He looks at me like I’m special.

How can I tell him?

How can I lose that look?

I can’t. I won’t.

I’m too hungry. My heart’s so hungry. My soul is so hungry.

That I’m ready to eat up his fake love.

That I’m ready to lie for it.

There’s someone here.

A man.

I didn’t notice him at first or even hear how he got here, possibly by a vehicle of some kind. I was busy with my little vegetable garden.

Oh, yeah. I have a vegetable garden now. It’s a little patch where I’m mainly trying to grow tomatoes and peppers. Because I thought it’d be something new and fun and also because they’re the easiest to grow here. Or at least, that’s what it said on the internet: my source of all things because I don’t talk to people.

I can’t.

But a man is here and as soon as I hear his voice, panic skitters down my spine, a frisson of it.

“Hello?”

I don’t turn around. I can’t. My knees are stuck on the ground, grinding actually, scraping into the dirt and I’m staring down at the mud with wide, fearful eyes.

“Hi, excuse me?”

He calls out again and I clench my eyes shut, my breathing going stuttered. I can feel his eyes on the back of my neck. I can feel his gaze prickling. Itching and scratching.

And that’s the only reason, this incessant prickling, that I turn around.

I come to my feet and see him.

The man who’s staring at me curiously.

He’s so sharp and clear and so in technicolor that I realize I don’t have my Audrey Hepburn glasses on. I don’t have my cap on either.

In fact, they’re nowhere near because I haven’t encountered any situations where I might need them in a long, long time.

Possibly in weeks.

I don’t go anywhere.

Whatever I need, I order online and hide the boxes as soon as they arrive so Graham doesn’t find out that I’m a hermit, or I just tell Graham to bring me things.

I don’t even have to tell him, actually. He just anticipates them and brings them for me. Lollipops; dresses that he promised – I’m wearing one even now, white colored with giant red roses; glitter pens for my journal; all the Bukowski that I need, since I started reading again; roses from his garden.

He brings me everything.

It’s the best arrangement really. He doesn’t do dates and I don’t do going out so we’re always here.

In this little secluded piece of the world where no one ever visits. Not even the wind or the sun.