I sidle next to him. My thighs touch his. We don’t look at each other. We’re both staring forward. But our hearts are beating together in time. They are racing, as if they wanted to break out.
Eventually, I look at him.You’re allowed to, I tell myself. I’m allowed to because I know that Knox wants me. It’s time for me to stop moving and to turn toward him instead of always walking away. It is time for me to let go, so I can finally start over.
“Hello, Snow Queen.” Knox’s eyes are glowing. The bright points in the green combine with the black light of the recessed lights. He looks at me hungrily. As if he had been fasting for weeks, just for this moment, just for me.
I like it.
My nerves are tingling, I want to touch him. It feels like having a plate full of french fries in front of me. I can taste the salt on my lips. I can smell the fat. I want them, but I can’t because my life isn’t made for fries.
I’ve always stuck to that. To the rules. But I don’t want to anymore. I want my fries.
I want Knox.
Water pearls from my hand as I raise it and touch his face. He’s burning. His lips open and he lets out a soft sound. Something likehruhh, meaningless, in other words. Just for me. For me, thishruhhis everything.
My body is pulsating. With the outside of my hand I caress the outline of his face, past his ear, past his birthmark until stopping where his pulse wants to nestle up against me.
“Is this okay?” My voice is fluid, very soft. It lands on the quiet surface of the water and is carried away, but Knox smiles. Real faintly, and a little cloudy somehow.
“Yes.”
His Adam’s apple bounces. With fluttering lids his eyes wander to my collarbone. He caresses the tender bones as if wanting to explore them, and then along my jaw. For a second, he stops at the point below my ear, and I know why. He can see the faint, semicircle-shaped scar, a white half-moon on my skin. I break out in goose bumps.
“Here,” he says, before moving on to my nose and drawing the direction of the sky. “Here, too.”
My cheek grows wet as Knox moves the knuckle of his index finger across it: my skin tingles, electrified and charged, as his little finger runs along the shape of my ear. He stops at my earlobe, rubs it between thumb and index finger. “And this here.”
“Tell me,” I whisper. “Tell me what you mean.”
“These are the places I lost myself and found you.” His glance is careful. Slow. His eyes like a spring leaf, like the spot beneath the morning dew. Water is dripping off his hair onto my arm. I don’t even feel it. “I can’t get past these places when I look at you.”
My fingers leave his throat and wander upward. Stop at his birthmark. Touch it.
“Here,” I say.
Knox’s fingers slide away from my ear. They dig into my hips, just a bit above the loose elastic band. His thumbs are on my hipbones. He strokes them, takes me as I am, with my tattered cotton panties and broken heart. We look at each other, we both see it, this longing, thishunger, and then he kisses me.
His caresses feel right. They feel sure. As if I could let myself fall and he would catch me. He will always catch me, no matter how deep the earth below me breaks. That’s what his kisses say. And I can feel it.
Seconds pass. Minutes. Time goes by but neither of us interrupts what we have. I think of a jar of jam. I think about capturing this moment and being able to keep it forever. The feeling of his warm lips on mine. The warm water on our skin. The cold air in our faces. The crackling of the fire. The silent snow falling from the sky. This hot, irrepressible, and unconditional longing.
This here. Jam-jar moments. My moments, and I take them, hold them, they belong to me. I hold Knox, because he belongs to me, too. His lips. His birthmark. His caresses, soft as silk, wild as fire.
Knox and I are a storm. We are storms and flashes of lightning; we are thunder and rain. We are perfect chaos; we’ve lost control, each of us in our own way, but together we make sense. He the violent heat, I the long-evaporated water—ultimately, we had to come together. Ultimately, nature wanted it this way. Water and heat have to touch in order to explode.
Knox and I have exploded. We touched each other and exploded.
My hand makes its way through his wet hair, makes its way over and over through every individual strand before my fingernails move to scratch his back and come to rest on his wide shoulders. Knox growls against my lips and, with a single movement, spins me around so that my back is now against the side of the pool. His chest is pressing against mine, his hips against mine, his thighs. I lay my hands on his back, can feel the taut muscles, wrap my legs around his body out of the fear that he could slip away if I don’t.
All around us is water. Heat. Cold. But when Knox lays his forehead against mine in order to catch his breath and makes that sound again—thathruhh—I don’t notice any of it any longer.
Swollen lips. Lowered eyelids. Blotchy neck. That’s Knox.
Racing heart. Pulsating desire. Captivating,authenticfeelings. That’s me.
I kiss him; his kisses are everything. They are the light in my darkness. They are the line that pulls me to him in my isolation. They are quiet and peace where previously there was only a hate-filled hissing, where previously there were memories that did not want to let me go.
I don’t want to stop kissing him. I am hooked on how he makes me feel.
