Parlay and Desecration

As our lips danced and wrestled and our tongues formed the frontal assault into enemy territory, it felt as if we had been locked in a heated, passionate battle for hours. The cold, harsh reality that existed outside of her plump pinks and my smaller, firmer mouth was that it had merely been minutes.

Her hand rests on my shoulder, steadying her, steadying us both. Stolen words of broken promises and biblical prophecies of our love are exchanged between the battles.

Her brown eyes sparkle, they always sparkle, don't they? In prose and poetic conjecture.

Glimmering a sense of something greater. My hand easily finds her back and holds it, cradling her as we sway. Sway to an imagined waltz-like ballad. Lovelorn lyrics, in Spanish, French, or Italian. Soprano and tenor mirroring our conflict ballad.

Our love, our lust stretched out like the canvas of the night sky as it too waltzed from the lowlight spectacle of evening through to the dramatic majesty of the effervescent starburst sky, echoing, at least in my mind, her dreamy brown pools.

My heart wants to crack the protective coating around hers and pour out my passion into her. Time ignored, the looming apocalypse and planetary regen cycle could bring terror and devastation. But not to us, locked as we were in our bedside oral altercation.

The kind of kiss I used to dream about on the bus to school, or on the way to my first job as a kitchen hand in that greasy Mexican restaurant. Free tacos and burritos at the end of the shift were not enough of a perk in exchange for the rancid smell of old mince and broken beans.

As the electricity burned through our souls, I swear the room disappeared into a chasmic void and all around was doves and a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.

Illicit lust and too much tequila can send your brain into overdrive — when double agents on either side of the battle lines commit national, patriotic immorality. It's the beat of the heart of the wife of your best friend against your own, in a naked tangle of limbs and breaking cardinal rules.

The imagery of battle lines as we stood toe-to-toe, toeing that line between wanton bodily depravity and sanitised, clinical chastity.

It should not have happened. Should not have happened.

What does that even mean?

As our tongues twine like the marital binds we were about to break, not with the clear-cut legal ease of pen and carefully drafted documents. No, with a jackhammer of self-justified destiny of desire.

It should not have happened is a casual passive missive. An oops. Our passion was nothing as trivial. Our tryst, nothing as easy to dismiss. We both knew it. The moment we passed no man's land and the cape of no return, our fates were sealed.

The soft shuffle of her silken toes and the delicate drag of her skin-nipping nails, the tentative tussle between want and responsibility, need and consequence.

The textual declaration of a parlay to engage in a cease-fire, a peace treaty that quickly dissolved, as soon as we both knew it might. There was always that risk. In trying to do what was right, we did something... different. Yes, it's difficult to call our conjugal conglomeration, the unlawful union of our non-sovereign states, wrong, when it blossomed into something... good. Good for us. Great. Greater than us. But that is the problem. What of the greater good? The good is built on the protection of the greater number than just the individual. As we disavowed ourselves, taking independence from our unwitting sovereigns, there was no safe haven. There was no easy fix.

You’d think something so intense and vivid a memory as a kiss and conquest between two star-crossed lovers. Star-crossed lovers who were already married and part of the same friend group. You’d think it would remain in one’s mind with reverence and beyond corruption.

The lick of lust, the layered lie of love beyond the sordid iniquity would be as real, as tangible as the toast and two fried eggs, sunny side up, over easy with a cup of the finest 100% Arabica coffee beans, espresso.

But, as my phone rings out the chime and vibrates the plea of “low battery,” I realise, as the rising sun of a new day exposes the empty bedroom I am always in.

The same empty bedroom I’ve always been in.

I realise that I am just an individual member of a sovereign state.

A slide of the screen, a tap on the unsent message.

Confirmation: my desecration — the congress of two points that should never meet. Never met.

*

Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: This is an entry into two channels - Leave the Light On and The Shape on the Thing.