She lit the entire room like a sun with all its warmth, and the same gravitational pull. She brought the rain, the wind, the life to my world. All it took were a few words.
“I’m writing, too.”
Before I knew it, the characters we had in our heads were playing together. We made new ones to fit in each other’s worlds and we passed stories back and forth. We drew each other; we drew our characters; we shared secrets and gossip through notes and doodles.
Then I heard her sing, as I tried desperately to sing along so that some of her rays might shine on me, too.
I never had so many friends as she did. But with her radiance on me, they noticed me.
Her bedroom walls were windows, filtering in dusk light onto the soft white sheets. Candles kept us warm as leaves turned red on the other side of drawn curtains.
I noticed her fingers, beautiful and delicate, and so undeserving of my clumsy stubs that I could never attempt to interlock them with hers. Hands that could carve out my heart and hand it back to me with my thanks.
“If you had to kiss any girl you know,” she asks me with a twinkle in her eye, “who would it be?”
A hiccup in my heart, a nervous laugh, whispers in the dark, and our lips brush. Bodies flash hot, come together again. Touching, kissing, pulsing, and needing.
In the morning, a car comes to take me home. We climb in together, a mutual friend in the back seat waiting for us. Her friend more than mine. A little cloud that wraps around the sun to leave me drowning in the shade.
“I’m straight,” she tells us a few days later. Releasing a harsh flare with just a laugh.
The sky turns gloomy as my world tightens around me. I demonstrate my straightness, too, holding my arm forward and unbent.
She is warm as she takes my arm, bends it at the elbow and laughs like a gentle sun shower. I smile back.
Her light glances off the walls surrounding me. The world in shadows is cold, but the outside is all ash left behind from orbiting too close to the sun.
ekdwriter.com 