“Look at me.”

There really are no words to describe how she made me feel. Not that the words don’t exist . . . it’s just that the words leave me. I am incapable of fixing the right words to the right feelings and the images and the reasons; she was neither cause nor effect for me—she was total affect. Affection.

“What do you see?”

The light of the room, dim, would envelop her, surround her like the glow of a lamp. The air, no matter the time of year, no matter the weather, in that room, would be thick and hold just the hint of musk from armpits and pubic hair, my musk, her musk mingling together with her perfume, her fragrance, lightly sandalwood and cinnamon, sweet.

“Do you really see me?”

The hold she had over me was oriental, like a geisha’s. I was her thrall. Her handservant. But she was my possession.

“Me?”

The way she would hold her breast, cup it as though she were about to coax milk; the way the nipple looked, deep brown and round against her sand-colored skin; the way it would perk up in my mouth, my tongue sensing the twitching and the hardening, softly; the sounds of her ooos and aaas; the way her tongue, a fat pink snake, would coat her upper lip with a sweet venom; the way her body felt, smooth, soft, and brown.

“Do you?”

My tongue knew every crevice of her body from the indenture at the base of her neck to the mole on her left shoulder, from the birthmark on the inside of her left thigh to the curve of her waist just above her hip to the tendon’s flex just above her heel; from the taste of the juices of her mouth to the lush redness between her legs.

“Do you even want to, really?”

Inside her was another world. Her legs folded behind me, her breath in shorter and shorter puffs, tickling my ears. The total, the sum, the smell of our bodies, the room, the heat we created, expended, the sounds, not just of our breathing, but of the clock on the wall, the house settling, mice in the garret, the taste of her saliva and my saliva and old tea and wine, all seemed to add and add, the intensity beginning to glow. There are times that one extra caress would take me away, send me over the edge, as though I were outside my body watching two undulating forms violently trying to become one, groping deeper and deeper into one another’s soul until . . .

“Are you even capable?”

The metaphysical poets called it a little death. I think they were right.