Conflicting emotions

You knew he had a girlfriend the night you breathlessly asked him to kiss you. He did not hesitate, he took your face in his palms and crushed his lips to yours. And it felt good, the dance of lips and tongues. You did not want to think of her, because all your life you had been thinking of other people and this time, this one time, you just wanted him.

"Why did it take you so long to do this?" You'd asked, when you pulled your mouth away to catch your breath.

"I don't know... Boundaries. I was trying to respect our friendship and not cross any lines," he'd said, twirling your hair between his fingers. "And also because of her, if I didn't have her, I'd have kissed you a long time ago."

You ignored the part where he talked about her, willing your mind to make nothing of it and drew his face down to yours again, put your open lips on his, and forgot.

Forget. It would be the first of many times to come. You'd forget again, when he holds open the passenger's side of the car door, at the car park of the cinema where you had both gone to see Saving Dreams, waiting for you to get in. You'd drop your purse on the seat instead, turn to him and pull him down for another kiss.

"Don't take me home yet, let us go and have drinks first."

"Okay," he replied. Why, why did he have to look at you like that? With eyes that reminded you of treacherous streams. Soft, cold eyes.

You forgot when you straddled him, tipsy but not drunk, fully aware of your actions. You could not blame alcohol for this one. When you kissed him again and begged him to help you with the zipper of your gown.

I'm not thinking, you'd said to yourself. And he must have heard, because he said you weren't supposed to be. Then he took a taut nipple in his mouth and rolled his tongue over it.

The attachment would be unplanned, you'd simply just stay and ignore it, tell yourself that when you're really ready, you'd shake it off and things would return to normal.

But with time, forgetting would become easier, simply because it was something you had to consciously do to ease yourself. You'd no longer think of her under colorful neon lights on nights too wayward to be respectable, where your body would be crushed to his, where you'd want to run your fingers over him, to ingrain the knowledge of his skin, his face, everything on your palms. What was it about him that was so irresistible? You had never been like this before.

You liked his mind, the way it worked. An autonomous being, detached from his emotions, his body, everything else. You could never truly understand it, but you were drawn to it in the way that one is, to something that stays just beyond the reach of one's grasp. You liked his fingers--long, slim, slender. The way when they curled up inside you, creating tremors down your spine, he leant in and whispered, "see, I told you my fingers were good for something." And you'd come all over them, come to the quickening rhythm of his fingers, the hardening of his voice, urging you on, "come for me, come for me."

But the knowledge was always there, it was there at the table over dinner when he said, nonchalantly, "I need to call my girlfriend. I haven't spoken to her since yesterday." It was always there, over your shoulder, reminding you to not hold on to him too tightly when you hugged, to not stare openly at him when he talked. Because he belonged to someone else. And you knew it.

"You knew this from the beginning, knew I had a girlfriend, what exactly were you expecting? I do not get why you're being so emotional," he said one night when you'd asked him, raising your voice, what exactly he was doing with you, if he still spent all those long hours on the phone with her. He'd looked at you, incredulously and said it. You hadn't intended to come off as needy, in truth, you had always known the stakes, but somehow you had. You didn't want him to leave her, you just wanted him to be with you the same way that he was with her.

You'd kept your eyes on the floor, gritted your teeth and told yourself repeatedly that you mustn't allow him see how broken you were. You'd save it for when he'd left. And he'd leave eventually, back to her, where he truly belonged in the first place.

(image from favim.com)

For a long time, you'd still think of him. The moments you'd shared with him, you'd had enough reason to look forward to the next day. To escape, even if for a while, to live, to be. And you'd wonder if that alone was enough.