Shakti, By Way of Puerto Rico

"So we should kick around sometime"

The words are out of my mouth before I can reach out and recapture them. Kick around sometime...

...seriously?

She smiles. I remember.

I remember the exact dance of her fingertips across my back. I remember the adrenaline calling me back from the massive shut-down the rum had caused my brain to begin Friday night. I remember reaching back over my shoulder.

I chuckle, because I even remember the way our fingers laced for just a moment. Two years coming and in that moment my body buzzed with the electricity of someone overwhelmed. I am so very rarely overwhelmed. By someone that doesn't have a permanent place in my life? Never. But there it is, bliss traveling up my arm and down my chest, fingertips grazing back and forth and me screaming at my own mind

"Stay awake, remember this."

I don't know many people that can make my mind shut down so efficiently. I have stood before her tongue tied, drunk beyond all reasonable expectation, shirtless between her and her friend-

-then the moment comes, and she's looking at me, and the words bang against the front of my skull;

"I want you. I love every single cell of your body, your presence anywhere near me drives me literally dumbfounded crazy and I've waited quiet for two years just because I was scared saying so would make you go. So don't go. Keep those eyes on me for just a second, close the distance. React. Touch me, and I will do things to you that you have never felt before. Open me up and find such a storm you would not believe. Or dont, and at least tell me that something in what I'm saying is getting through. I've offered to have my ass kicked by you just for an excuse to touch you. Feel this. I swear I can make you smile with it."

Instead, I say "Unnnnnghghgh" or, "So we should kick around sometime."

But, the other night, the vein in my finger responds with a pulse as she runs her fingertip over it, and one second before oblivion sets in I see shangri-la. I feel Shakti bliss. The room becomes all colors again and I smile, grinning schoolboy crazy and blushing in spite of myself.

Then, headlong I dive down, as deep as I want. No one gets hurt tonight. No one gets yelled at, I slide, sated, into sleep. Into amnesia. Into bliss.

All from a fingertip. My god. What wonderful little tortures I put myself through. How closely I covet them.