most beautiful broom in a broomcloset of brooms

More than the fuschia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

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Ilya’s obviously a nuzzler, coming in behind Shane to kiss his neck, run his hands over his stomach and chest, but that’s not always a prelude. There are subtle differences between a touching base and sex. Usually the cant of his hips or if one kiss becomes two or three. If Ilya touches Shanes’ jaw then it’s a definite ‘yes? now?’ question.  If Ilya pauses in the middle of the room and gives Shane the slow up and down and Shane gives him any attention at all then it’s over. Shane better put down whatever he was doing.  

Shane’s overtures would take him a little time to perfect. Not the obvious ones, they definitely still have ‘we have both arrived in the house, time to slam someone against a wall’ moments. But the small ones, the tiny silent inquiries that speckle through the louder things. If he runs his fingers over Ilya’s forearm while they’re watching tv, just light enough to almost tickle. Or lingering a little in a doorway after announcing he’s going to shower. Maybe he deliberately takes off a layer during colder months. Drags his hoodie up the right away so it flashes Ilya’s his stomach for a second.  

They have moves they share too. The coded language of a long-term couple. If we’re already holding hands in public, but I press my thumb into the center of your palm that means ‘as soon as we have privacy'. If we make the right kind of eye contact and I run my tongue over my teeth than that’s a question asked and answered. If we’re both awake too early and you kiss my shoulder and slot your knee behind mine and I roll my hips back, then its a go.

There are deescalations too. Times when the question is asked and the answer is not now. A kiss on the jaw gets a kiss on the cheek in return ‘I see you, I love you, I’m in the middle of meal prepping give me an hour’ or a long look gets a head tilt instead of a leap off the couch ‘I see you, I love you, but I’m having a shitty moment and I’m not in the right head space’.  In bed instead of rocking back into it, rolling over to exchange a kiss that doesn’t deepen because they both have to be out of bed and getting ready too soon.