Shadows play provocatively across well defined shoulders as your arms reach out for the security of the soft pillow in which you nestle your head, face tilted ever so slightly towards me and giving me the striking visage of your peaceful features caught in a refuge of sleep and bruised lips I want to lean over and snatch more than the brief feathering of a kiss that seems to fit the atmosphere. I’m closer to you than you have ever let anyone get before in your life; yet when you’re awake you still play your games, trying to persuade yourself that you maintain the icy barrier between yourself and the emotions which you think could be your downfall.

You hate the fact that you feel this way, hate the way your cool composure falters into nervous submission when we are together like this, but at the same time it’s what keeps you sane, it’s what you unashamedly yearn for. The damn duality of your emotions turns you into a walking contradiction, all the more easy for me to channel your faltering feelings into undeniable lust.

Oh, you try to play it cool, as if you are nothing but in control of your senses, as if my manipulation is as irrelevant as the inner turmoil you deny having but at the same time you need it, adore the feelings I awake and realise for you. You respond to every kiss I plant demandingly on your lips, let me take every liberty I want with that beautiful body of yours, all mine, for only my eyes and my touch, and you have never once refused me and my insatiable demands.

And as you move slightly in your sleep, the haunting shadow of a pained expression across your face as your dreams seem to be less peaceful than I assumed, I know why.

Dictated by an irrational fear of something far from inevitable, why are you so scared that I’ll hurt you and leave you? And is there any way I can convince you otherwise? God knows, I thought the very fact I’m with you tonight was evidence enough.

I just suppose it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Not us or our relationship. I understand that. Well, I don’t need to understand all the whys and hows. I don’t need to know your reasons for falling for me just as I don’t intend to analysis my own in some vain attempt to figure out all the bloody things that make up our weird and wonderful life. Just why you feel you have to protect yourself, withdrawing into the security of your thoughts, to shield you from what? From me? From the fact that you love me? You can’t possibly deny that. I’ve seen the evidence in the way you kiss me, how you hold me often with brutal desperation to stop me slipping through your fingers.

As if I would.

Is it because very shortly I’m going to be leaving our newly born and carefully cocooned world to venture out into the big bad world alone? You knew that before we even embarked on this affair and it didn’t stop us giving into sanity and deciding nothing else mattered. Are you jealous that the second I step out of our mutual garage to pastures new, you’ll immediately be surplus to my requirements?

Yet, you tell me that you trust me, and I’m inclined to believe you, the sincerity in your oceanically blue eyes, tinted with concern and fear, does nothing but convince me otherwise.

I just have to wonder who has hurt you so much in the past. They have a lot to answer for ..

Only when you sleep so soundlessly beside me can I feel the same tranquillity I see in your face, the same ambivalence to life and the shit it throws at us just to see if we can hang on with little more than fingertips to our sanity.

I know I’m living in costly naivety, living for the time when twilight passes into night and swallows up all my fears and rationality as easily as it devours the light of the sun for another day. I don’t care. Because when you wake up, heavily lashed eyelids fluttering open to greet the new day, you shatter that bond I hold so dear with a flick of your head and a boyish grin towards me, crucifying me still further. Yet, I crave the feeling more than I can describe, more than I can understand.

You don’t have to leave our team to leave me; someone would have torn you away from me regardless and I would be just as powerless to keep you with me, in this bed and in my arms. I can give you anything and everything you want, surrender entirely but even that will never be enough. There will always be someone else, someone with a more alluring smile, someone who can offer you more than I can possibly give, and you will leave me as soon as that opportunity arises.

Only when we sleep can I forget that you’ll never really need me.

~The End.