I’ve been toying with this all week now so it’s time to give it up to my peers. Don’t be gentle. Gentle is for people who don’t want to get any better. I can handle it, I am fairly secure, just five me a hand here.

Quiet, individual desperations change with an unexpected call and answer for comfort. Relief begged and given in a twisted penalty that calls for further grief. Desperation with teeth and tongues.

It’s in the hitch in the bottom of the lungs, like trying to breathe through their body. Pulling air through the meat of his throat my lungs ache like a heartbeat – tongue and teeth desperate.

We act in violent defiance of biology, stealing sugar and streetlight, refusing to surface and breathe. My lungs shake, trying to forget with the lips, the teeth; the tip of the tongue.

I remember suddenly – as suddenly as I had forgotten – whose desperation I am sharing, whose sugared meat through which I am breathing and suffocating. Whose lungs may also be aching, heart in time.

I pull back from my surrogate lung and crash back into biology – gulping air. In my sugared, laboured breathe –

“Maybe we can tell no one.”

It still hurts after they go. Even with the lock broken and the knot untied there is still that specific shiver up along the spine that rushes across my scalp and forces memories and senses on me.

Later, my tissues whisper to me and keep me awake. They tell me next time my lungs will stick and I will begin to suffocate only when he leaves. I can’t loose that hitch in the chest, like trying to breathe through their body or the ache of desperation in the rib’s cage.

There is no grasping the slickness of it. Desperation with teeth and tongue, desperation with a partner that I lie about and forget and while whispering insist –

“It’s just a kiss, it’s just a kiss.”