deep spacе, dead weight

You try not to audibly groan as your feet find the floor. The body sleeping next to you is lying on his front, his face buried into one of your pillows, his arms wrapped around it like it tried to run away in the night. He’s tanned and dotted with freckles, a summer scene across the skin on his back, broad and taught with muscle. You frown as you look over your shoulder at him, trying to place a name, a face, any memory of the last few hours.

The only things that come to mind are bare skin and a lot of touching. Teeth and lips and hands and calloused fingers that dug into your hips as you rode him. You rub your face, clearing the sleep from your eyes, the tequila and the taste of sex from your lips.

You try really hard to walk quietly to your bathroom, padding softly across the wooden floors, avoiding the board that you knew squeaked like it held a deadly disease in its whorls and knots. The bathroom door shuts with a squeak and a click and you hold your breath, forehead braced against the cool wood but you hear nothing, no sheets rustling, no feet on the floorboards.

Your reflection stares back at you from above the sink with disdain and disappointment and you’re not in a position to disagree with her. Your hair is a mess and there’s leftover lipstick on your neck of all places, like you’d gifted it to someone who’d pressed it right back onto your skin. There’s the beginning of a hickey on your chest, purple and pink and blooming under the bright fluorescent light that’s humming above you.

The shower starts with a groan and a hiss, the pressure battering the floor of the tub and you shed what little clothes you had on before clambering into it, skin prickling at the chill before it rocketed to almost too hot. You hit the temperature dial with an annoyed indifference, hiding under the cool spray until your hair is stuck to your head and it doesn’t hurt as much as it did when you first opened your eyes.

You think back to the night before, eyes closed, your stomach starting to turn with tequila and vodka and cheap beer. You remembered the sticky floors of the new bar you’d been dragged to, nothing more than a basement room filled with sweaty bodies and with brick walls covered in band posters and beer mats from places around the world. There were more people than tables and an oversized disco ball turned slowly overhead, entirely out of place as some indie sleaze song leaked out from the speakers in every corner.

You’d danced with your friends, nothing more than your hips moving in the crush of bodies, skin on skin as you tried to take shots without it spilling over your fingers. You remember licking raspberry syrup from your thumb, your eyes on a guy who stood across the room from you, his brows raised when you grinned.

You remember a song passing, maybe two, before he came over. There hadn’t been any bravado, no cheesy lines, no faux nonchalance. He’d bent down to your ear, a large warm hand hovering over the small of your back as he leaned into you. Someone had bumped him, his lips brushing your ear and he’d told you that you were pretty.

You’d grinned, shyness disappearing under the taste of tequila and when he’d asked you to dance you’d handed your empty glass to your friend and took his hand. It got blurry then, his hips against your ass as he moved to the music, moved against you. His hands, warm and big, laying on your hips, fingers settling into the crease of your upper thigh until you were too warm and the only answer was to pull him outside for some air.

He’d tasted like beer when he kissed you, your back against the rough brick outside of the bar. But his hand had cupped the back of your head to save it from becoming sore and that alone had you arching into him, his free hand around the back of your thigh as you hitched your leg to his hip. There must’ve been a taxi ride to yours and there was a fuzzy memory of your couch, the man pressed into it as you shed your shirt and straddled him, his lips dancing across your throat, your sternum.