Steps

You come home late again from work.  It’s dark outside, only not really dark, because the street lights out there are full of amber colour, and there’s the passing of headlights, the light from other wide, glass, uncurtained windows.  I can see you reaching for the light switch, but I slide in their first - “not yet,” - and I’m catching your wrist in my fingers, running the fingertips along your memoried skin.

“Long day,” you murmur, neither a protest nor a greeting – just the vocalisation of what is already written in soft braille, and what catches in your eyes.

You always seem so tired these days, as if they’ve drained all of you out, and just sent this flapping skin home to me so I can refill it for them and send it back again into the dawn.

One day soon, we’ll take ourselves away from all this, right?  A beach holiday, all crisp gold sands and turquoise bays.

We don’t say that so much these days.  Bills pile up.  Projects pile up the at the office, drop with a dull thump into our respective in-trays.

I slide my hands up over your chest and around your neck, dipping in beneath your collar, dislodging your coat.  You blossom.  I twist my limbs like vines, threading you out onto the hardwood, sunroom floor.  And this is something like dancing.  What we accomplish with these moments, in rhythm with the silence, and the occasional car’s engine.  This is a waltz that morphs into a rumba, and then there’s some salsa, and is this a foxtrot?  A few steps moved to the right, a couple back.  I release myself into a twirl, and fold myself up again along the length of your arm.  Your hands come to life, snapping into place behind my hip.  Head thrown back, hair trailing, my back arched like a bridge, knee thrust up towards the ceiling because why shouldn’t we?  Whoever declared us middle-aged?

That colour in your eyes: as rich as ever; the fine-planed angle to your chin.  That which is incubating there on your lips – the beginnings of a smile.  A couple more steps to the left, three to the right, out and in again, two backwards.

Oh yes, I know where I want you.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work