On an Edge of Glass

him.  When he sits on the edge of the bed, I stop breathing.  I. Stop. Breathing.
                  “Ellie?”    
                  “I’m here,” I say to the darkness. 
                  He reaches out with his fingers and finds my arm.  I bite back a shiver.  My heart aches.  It’s so acute that I think if I weren’t already on the bed, I would be falling over from the strain of it. 
                  “Ellie?”  His chest heaves under the stress of breathing properly.  He comes closer, his body pushing the cold away, making my skin pulse with red heat.
                  Ben moves his hand.  He grazes my elbow, my shoulder, my collarbone.  I know when he realizes that I’m not wearing much of anything because his four fingers stop and press into my skin.  Then, at a maddeningly slow pace, they glide over the swell of my breasts and down my body.
                  “I’m sorry,” he whispers, pulling his hand back like he’s just realized that he’s touching something that’s off-limits.  “I know that you were probably sleeping and this is weird, but I couldn’t—” 
                  I don’t wait to hear the rest of what he’s trying to say.  I move quickly.  I kiss him.  I kiss him with so much urgency and bottled up passion that I think that we’re going to ignite.  We will be a raging fire.  Maybe by morning, we’ll be nothing but a pile of ash, and when she wakes up, Ben’s mom will look down at the soot in his old bed and wonder where we went.
                  I’m spinning.  Flying. 
                  Ben is above me.  With his lips, he breathes stars and stirred up words and memories down my body.  He slips lower, pulling at my underwear with his thumbs. 
                  “What you do to me…”  He’s speaking so quietly that I can hardly hear him.  His chin scratches against my ribs.  “You’re like a fire inside of me.”
                  Inside of me, I think.  But, I don’t talk.  My tongue is too busy tasting his skin.  I shift, using my hip bone to push Ben flat on his back.  I straddle his narrow waist.  I run my fingers up under his shirt, over his smooth chest.  I tug once and the shirt is off, balled up on the floor beside the bed.
                  I trace the hard line of his shoulders, and move my fingers up over the prominent lines of his face.  Now that my eyes have adjusted to the darkness, I can just make out his moon eyes and his exquisite mouth.  I touch his bottom lip.  Then I kiss it.  I touch his top lip.  Then I follow the angle of it with my tongue. 
                  Ben is heaving.  The air is pummeling through him like a storm over water.  I bend down.  My hair falls with me.  It tickles the taut skin of his stomach.  I place one, two, three… ten soft kisses along his body.
                  His pants fall away.  He is gasping now.  We’re on the edge of a cliff and we’re dropping, dropping, dropping, and Ben is gripping my waist like he’s afraid to lose me. 
    I’m afraid to lose him.  
                  I pull him closer, but it’s not close enough.  It feels like nothing will ever be close enough.  Like I could burrow a tunnel under his skin and swim in his veins and still, it won’t be enough. 
                  Enough
                  He closes his eyes.  He opens them.
                  He grasps my face between his palms and looks at me for a long time.  So long that my hands stop moving and my jagged heartbeats find an even rhythm. 
                  “This,” he says quietly—solemnly—like it means something important.  “It isn’t enough.”
                  Before I can shake of the slap of his words and respond in some way, Ben is pinching his clothes under his arms and slipping away from me.  I haven’t said a thing and Ben’s feet are moving and he’s shutting the door to the bedroom.  To my heart.
                  I am on an edge of glass.
                  And it’s breaking.
                               
                 
    The morning is a blur of suitcases and cold cereal and robotic thank yous.  It moves fast and it’s all I can do to keep up. 
                  Ben doesn’t