Tony Was a Friend of Mine

I miss him like the cigarette taste in my mouth that he left behind.

Tony was a friend of mine, but he held my hand too close, and suddenly the line was crossed. We threw our heads back into the air and laughed as the smoke curled up around us. We always seemed to be stuck in a cloud of our own, lost in our grimaces and funny faces, children in our aging bodies.

Tony's breaths would come in short, loud gasps whenever he touched my spine. He said the woman's back is the most delicate, sensual part of her body, and I arched back in agreement.

We had an unspoken deal not to get complicated, but it did when his hand rested a little too long on the small of my back, and his lips brushed my forehead in a gentleness uncharacteristic of our loud, boisterous friendship.

The other night, we sat across a table, and he asked me what to do, how to seduce a woman, a woman not me. I laughed nonchalantly, curled my claws back into my hands and talked as if I didn't care, but the line was crossed and I did.

Tony smoked like a chimney and I rubbed his back when he gasped for breath, trying to catch up with me in our runs along the river banks. I could have won, I could have beat him by a mile, but I found myself cheating to let him get ahead of me, let him feel good about beating me at a five hundred meter race.

Tony was a friend of mine who always kept his last cigarette for me, crouching on the back steps of his building door, wrapped up under his blue blanket, watching the passersby. We smiled into the darkness together, as somehow our hands reached each other in an unspoken deal to never quite let go.

And now I wake up with his cigarette smoke in my mouth, from the one urgently inhaled last night in an attempt to bring back the musk of his shirt, the taste of his neck, the feel of his hair laced between my fingers. And the smell of his hands.
My breaths would come in short, loud gasps when Tony's hands traced anti-clockwise circles in my palms. He had that singular effect on me, and yet he called himself a friend.

My chest hurts from too much nicotine.