Pulpit

You knock on my hotel door and I hear all the blood inside my body pumping through my ears. I statue on the other side, wonder if it’s a maid bringing the towels I asked for. I let the hinge click slightly, scraping the charcoal carpet in tumbled spurts. I peek out suspiciously, with the lock still latched. 

You are leaning in, a little breathless, staring down at me the way the moon gazes at the tides. I imagine the ball of your fist inches from my body, think of how good it would stretch me. I was always looking at your hands, instruments capable of wrecking, tenderizing, tools to carve through my valleys and make me a pillar of salt while you choke me from behind and I can’t look back. 

“Undo the latch.” 

You say it firmly, covering my stuttered vision with your stormy eyes. You perceive a flash of hesitance, snuff it out with a nudge of your boot pushing at the door impatiently. 

My chest feels like a rounding siren. I can smell the sweat on the back of your neck from the pervasive afternoon sun, the sweet product in your long hair, a tinge of cigar smoke on the collar of your leather jacket that made me feel heady. Instantly, I’m drugged off that familiar aroma I want to be smothered by.

If I open, it means you’re coming inside. It means the wall of my body will crumble down to the root of you, black tread that matches the gruff print you left on my thigh that still hurt in the shower this morning. 

The straight pout of your lips have rhat impishness now, about to curl up on the corners about something only you seem amused by. I scan your face and see the order in your eyes before more words can be said.

I finger the curved lock, a smooth mock of gold between my thumb and pointer. It’s cold between the hot pads of my skin, already warm to curl around your belt loop. The straight lines of my hand ache to cling to your skirt, the stretch of pantyhose that form around your perfect ass, the soft wave of your hair falling over my cheeks like warm rain. 

Sometimes you were gunpowder rushing through the fabric on my skin while the shrapnel of your fingers found the parts of me that hid. Sometimes you were honey in your eyes and violence in your mouth. Sometimes you were a tango of teeth scraping the shivers in my spine, laughing in my ear. 

Before I can say a word, you whisper, “Now, girl.” 

It rakes something up from inside I’ve been holding tight, something I’ve been hiding. it slams a spotlight on that crevasse of me your whispers climb through. I’ve been starved to have it known. 

As the word “girl” leaves the pink of your lips, my fingers slide the door back, still standing beside it like a shadow, curled and tensed tighter around the frame now. 

I’m not dressed for this, for you or the presence you bring. My pajama shorts aren’t tied tight at my hips. The t shirt I’m in is loose and unceremoniously simple. I put my hand up to comb through my hair, a nervous tell you drink down like salvation. As I do this, your gloved hand grabs my wrist, and my eyes are back in yours, at full attention. 

“I don’t care. You look supple. Scared. Pliable as a poem. You look like I’m about to throw you in the deep end and you’re going to learn to breathe on the way down.“

In my distraction from your voice, you advanced over the thresh hold of the hallway, had me squared up with my shoulders flush against the wall.

I had to arch my neck to look up at you, your chest still against the rampage of my own tension. Your boots broaden the space between my hips and the flash of your downward gaze strikes that smallness and you can feel me shrinking. Something that was stiff in my backbone loses its grip on the wall and slides down while I remember my job; sync my breath with yours.

My eyes try to follow the steadiness in yours but I break, look to the side and down at the floor as I feel the buckles and straps and slink of you holding me still with your hips.

I think about your teeth breaking through pulp of me. I think about the plum of my cunt running down your chin, the cream of your cheeks reveling against the velvet of my inner thighs. 

I think of thickness of your boots meeting my tongue and bathing them with devotion while the nakedness of my back reflects the hues of a darker sunrise you painted me with. Tonight I’m a cavern. An opiate. A bridge your fist knows how to cross. A rambling mess of syllables my shaking calves are trying to speak. Tonight the air expanding In my chest will collapse just for you.

Tonight you’re a symphony made of stinging, a god that wove her throne with my tears. You‘re the tepid tread of your boots that peel burnouts down my back.

The mirrors watch us in the dark and I know I sound like the spine of a hymnal cracking, the prayers on my tongue painting crosses all over the pulpit of you.