I force my eyes open. They are standing over me and I drink in the curves of their face, their hair cascading down their back and haphazardly draping forward over their shoulder, one hand between my legs, the other wrapped, momentarily, around my throat. I’ve seen that look before, a slow spreading joy, drinking in the way my body moves and responds to their touch. When I watch them, I recognize the potency of their desire colliding with the force of mine. My desire is not inconsequential; it builds and fuels their movements, and they smile, dangerously, not unkindly, as I move to press against their hands, small nods and gasps and desperate pleas without words. I can’t stop watching their face as they play my body like a piano laid out just for them, fingering the notes of a melody that comes from deep within. Fuck, but they are beautiful.
So am I. In these moments, sprawled out across a table, my limbs curling and stretching, contracting inwards and pushing out, I am beautiful. My hips rising to meet their hands, toes curling and clenching. Even when my lips cannot find the way to shape the words, I am prying my eyes open to watch their desire played out across my skin, different notes and rhythms echoing out in gasps and whimpers and crescendos.
They show affection; I respond with a challenge, put the guards up because it makes me feel stronger, in control. Battleface. This moment is captured, not once, but twice: their hands holding fire, mine holding a knife. That look that I give every person that passes across this page was always meant for them: a dare, compounded, to send a picture that I was too afraid to send and too afraid to ask to send because I have been so afraid to show smallest fragments of my own desire. But if you take both pictures and place them side by side, you would see the same challenge as when you danced along the edges of my skin slightly less carefully, slightly less worried about the damage your movements might cause.
They take out my legs to get me to relax my weight into them, press the tension points to get my muscles to release and smile sweet smiles of satisfaction, low throaty chuckles of pleasure that make my blood race. A non-apologetic shrug. “Sadist,” they said, and they are, but is it in the ways they mean to be? Bruises fade far too quickly; my body adjusts, acclimates, absorbs and reflects, but I want them nonetheless, some mark of the way they held me harder than they have before, a memory of a space where I was with them and we were seen, in that moment, as we are.
They pull me into them, kiss the sides of my neck tantalizingly slow, bite the edges of my skin with building pressure and I fall forward into them, my mind finally quiet, the gentle buzz and hum of chronic movement still. I don’t care what we look like; they could take me by the hair and lead me anywhere in that moment and my legs would follow without thought. The world around me fades to silence; there are their hands, their teeth, their desire for me and if I cannot wipe the challenging smile spreading slowly across my face, I know it would take very little to put me on my knees, here. They are learning my bravado and the ways that it plays across my face; they smile like they can see the ache that lies just barely underneath and their fingers dance across my back, slipping under my clothes to pull me tight.
Relax into the pressure. I believe in their desire, which echoes my own. I watch it, when I can stand to immerse myself within it. We are here, right now, trading secret smiles across crowded rooms and squeezing hands for reassurance.
Open my eyes. I can finally see you- and you, and me, and us, in this moment, are beautiful.
Monomaniacism 