Rainy Night
It’s been a strange, tense day. It has rained more in this not- yet half-month than it did in the whole of last winter. When we drive through the stormy dark to and from work the car skates along the surface of the road and the windscreen is periodically obscured in sprays of water. At work the rain pounds down on the flat surface of the roof of my room, and a leak starts in the ceiling in the corridor. The mayor has declared a state of emergency and the river is rising. If ever there was a time to be glad you lived in the high, wooded hills and not in the centre of town, this is it. But nevertheless, I will be sleeping in the centre of town, near the river, tonight and the night after, when the river is so high it threatens to burst its banks.
When I get to the room the rain has abated. The shutters are shut but the chandelier above the bed shines its harsh yellow light, and I pull my dress off, crawl over the bed and sink down on his cock, because it’s there and I can and I need it like this, fast and furious and selfish on all parts. Later the rain starts again, but this time the lights are out, and the dark is inky, warm and soft, and the room is silent apart from muffled water and breath in sudden expirations.
In the dark it’s as though everything has space to float inwards, undazzled by light and visual juxtapositions. Every slow kiss on the now invisible bruises on my breasts, delivered in silence, sinks in through my skin. I close my eyes anyway, because I always do, and when I open them a faint sliver of light coming through the edge of the wooden shutter silhouettes the bodies on the bed. There is no conversation, or urgency, or bells and whistles. Just this, slow and languorous and silent; all sensation, magnified by the dark. Outside the city has settled into its drama, but still it’s better now to be inside (inside me, slowly heated through, slick and smooth and carmelised). In the dark, there’s time for everything to find its place, and it does, unhurried but not entirely peaceful.
You can say it’s making love, because it’s silent and intense and trailed with kisses. You can say it’s making love because it’s focused and intent and imbued with tenderness. But you can’t say it’s not fucking when my hips rise to meet his, and you can’t say that the fuck of before or the savage selfishness of the one next morning are more loveless or less loveful or that any of them outpace the others in an animal slaking of lust and desire. You can’t quantify it by the frenzy or lack of it, but only by the connection, and that is as likely to be found in the white heat of desperate fucking as it is in the sensuous warmth of the slow dark. It’s just a different dance to a different tune, but the band is still the same.
