Posted on by Allison Marie Conway

Cigarettes After Sex

Your fingers trailing along the tears in my cutoff shorts as we sit in our small garden on a Sunday evening. Sadness and sweetness hang suspended all around us like twinkle lights. Tanned knees and crisp white wine. Behind my dark sunglasses, I close my summer sky blue eyes, taste the grassy notes on my tongue and thank god for foolishness, fools in love, fools for thinking any of this was going to last forever.

The problem is you distract me. Like the constant buzzing of the rattling air conditioning in the stuffy room at the back of the house. My mind flashes. It hinders, hovers, blinks against glimpses of you and I on the beach at night, the wilderness collecting our bare feet into the soft beds of silken sand. Darkness falling behind cranberry clouds.

I remove my shirt and straddle you in your chair, the glare of afternoon light stinging my bare nipples, now exposed and hard despite the scorching heat. The trouble is I can’t stop myself and the truth is I like the trouble that you are. Hands in my hair, gripping my neck, sliding up my ass, sucking me into you like water rushing the gutters when a late June rainstorm slashes the heat from the streets.

I rise like steam. I take your mouth with my mouth and forget how to breathe.

They took bets, you know that, angel? They bet against us from the very start. Thought we were full of shit. Full of ourselves. Lost in a fantasy which could only culminate in disaster. But what they couldn’t see was that disaster was the least of our concern. Our skies had fallen ten thousand times already. We taught ourselves to raise them back up.

The other shoe was always about to drop – that’s how life is. They were pointing out on the blackened horizon while you and I were behind them alone and on fire. We were the emergency. We were the only responders to each other’s alarms.

And you can hold your breath and shut it all down or you can scream with everything that you have, with everything that you are, with your whole body and mind and spirit, and your heart racing in your chest, you can scream until the pain of the deafening silence stops. You can fuck until the tears come streaming down your burning face and you finally feel anything but numb.

You can let it all out and let it all in and crawl broken and mighty into the arms of a love which promises everything and guarantees nothing. And if you are very, very lucky, your wild desires will find you a cave in which you can duck out of the fears the world is trying to sell you for a while.

Just as the wine seeps warmly into my soft gray blue blood, you bend my body over the wooden table and make me ask for what I want.

Let me hear you say the words.

You, baby. Please. I just want you.

29 Replies to “Cigarettes After Sex”

  6. “They were pointing out on the blackened horizon while you and I were behind them alone and on fire. We were the emergency. We were the only responders to each other’s alarms.”

    “You can let it all out and let it all in and crawl broken and mighty into the arms of a love which promises everything and guarantees nothing. And if you are very, very lucky, your wild desires will find you a cave in which you can duck out of the fears the world is trying to sell you for a while.”

    The touch of the erotic was nice, but these two quotes resonated with me deeply.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  8. It is almost a poem for me … When I read your words, I imagine you and I feel as if I am that man you are interacting with … Sometimes, we feel we need to hear these encouraging words and like the image of a bent body on a wooden table

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  12. A need so raw, yet cooked hot with a fire only cooled by sweat… such is the pulsing electrical current that takes two away from everywhere known, to a place… out there… way… way out there… when the return does comes… two falls into one… and only the sense of smell keenly remembers the flames…
    🇯🇲🏖️

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: