Break-up Sex

Good but sad.

I lay next to him and we were holding hands, sticky with our sweat and juices and I could hear his heart pounding in his wrist.

"Why didn't we have sex like that when we were together?" he asked, and I turned away because I was afraid that I might cry. I held my breath till the wave passed and I was dry-eyed and tired and sad but I would always remember the break-up sex I had with him.

Not a word was spoken. I was there when he opened the door and we kissed, a desperate kiss, something long and taken in stages like a degustation. A gentle kiss with the door wide open behind us, a pause to close it, an ever desperate descent into the kind of passion that we never managed when we were together.

There was this sinking sensation which was just our love for each other surfacing briefly, bobbing up and falling away again, the corpse of it, plummeting.

There was nothing new revealed in our sudden nakedness. There was his skin and mine. An abundance and a poverty. So many contradictions. I loved him like family. I knew him like my own self. I would never make love to him again. Just this once more. A full stop.

We used out teeth gently although we wanted to bite down on each other's skin, to ingest a piece of our history so that we would never forget.

We would never forget.

I would never forget the time he made a flower for me out of paper, crafted by his own restless fingers. I would never forget his timidness and his care. He gentled the bars of my cage with his concern, thick and soft as cotton wool, and when I flung myself against his boundaries, wild animal, longing for some other kind of life, I knew that I was safe in his clutches. Bored, panicked, crazed, limited and safe.

The sex we had that night was not the comforting kind that we had grown used to. We stole pieces off each other, samples of skin secreted away under our fingernails, the taste of sweat, the bitter burn of his semen that I would taste at the back of my throat for days. He pressed his thumb into my skin so fiercely that I felt the flesh give and his fingerprint is still on me, a lasting scar.

We didn't speak of the bad times but they were there too in the way we tugged at each other's hair and in the tears that inched their way out of our eyes and into each other's mouths.

We lay then in the ruin of our relationship and the glory of our sex, all contradictions, loving each other and hating that there was nothing left to do but part.

"Why didn't we have sex like that when we were still together?"

"Because we were still together."

I unknit my fingers from his large safe hand. And on that note. We parted.