Sometimes Chandler spends the night at my house when Mom's out getting drunk. There's no musical score in the background. It's only Chandler's heavy, half note breaths pulsing through me, interrupted constantly when he kisses my neck, my collar bone. There's this space between his shoulder blades that my hand always finds, sliding across his skin.

He's not much taller than I am, and there's only small hints of muscles tracing across his arms, but I don't care, and he knows I don't care, because we're so raw and exposed, wounds stinging like they've been opened again.

My nails coast over his chest, and he winces when I reach a fresh bruise that blooms like a small universe across his side, but he doesn't stop. Instead he closes the space between us again and again.

He is the sun and I am the moon, and we eclipse, rewinding time so we can do it again, soaking in the all-encompassing darkness that we created for ourselves, again so that we can touch in this suspended peace, again because his gaze is filled with longing, the kind that stretches like a rubber band between us, then snaps, snaps us into a million pieces.

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Published 11-28-16
Next chapter 12-2-16