The gravitational pull at her ribcage sucked everything she was into an eerily rotating mass, drawing her sex up inside herself, drawing her shoulders down and forward, lodging her stomach against her lungs. She sipped shallow breath through a fixed jaw, down the narrow passage of her throat. She barely registered the fading memory of how to breathe properly, how to expand her diaphragm and envision oxygen flowing through her bloodstream, feeding her starving extremities. She was tight, wound up. She sensed herself as dismembered, and cradled a crisp notion that clenching herself together would keep her from unraveling, from flying away like dandelion seeds.
Seeking connection, redemption, she managed a soft smile and eagerly agreed to roll around in bed. Fumbling there, she shyly admitted that she felt like a pubescent boy, groping and grasping, with sheer need and without providing pleasure to the one she groped and grasped. Her admission was met with a demonstrative kiss from her practiced lover, one who knew of topography and riptides and the curve of ocean meeting land. She allowed herself to be prodded toward surrender. Her cries were actually pleads for release, for mutuality, for a glimpse of her lover's slow knowing, for patience, for forgiveness. Gripping hands, eyes squeezed, she willed herself over the sharp edge of the earth, where land and sea dropped away, leaving nothing but cold darkness.
It was there, in the expanse, that she slept, better than she had for weeks.
