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One summer night, in the heart of heat, you walk with your best girl out onto the
Echo Lake golf course. You don't dodge the sprinklers at all. You let them go
over you and see her skin showing through her shirt, the hint of her skin, and
you get water on your hair. You start kissing and you pull her down, or she
pulls you down, and you get her out of her clothes fast. You too. Naked, with
the water whipping you once every twenty or thirty seconds, you screw like
mad, like wild things, grunt, shove, dig into the dirt, grass, sky, the sprinkler,
her, shove shove, and kisses, kisses like maniacs kiss, like dying people kiss,
you love her, love everything, love that she likes the sky above you and the
sprinkler, and you keep going. Then she says she's cold so you lead her to a tall
bank of grass, both of you carrying your clothes, and under a tree, out of the
sprinkler whips, you make love, kiss more, talk to each other, say you love one
another, and when you come it starts somewhere down deep, far away, and it
arrives like a sound you have been waiting for, like a key in the door. You feel
like crying and she holds you, and that starts you again. This time more
simply, more gentle, and you kiss until you know it is late, very late, and then
together you gather your things, dress, cut through Wittingham Place, over to
Baldwin, and you can't stop kissing. You wonder why you can't sleep beside
each other, what would it hurt, why is the world like this, and you kiss her one
last time at her door, see the lights go up her house as she makes her way to
her bedroom. You run for the holy hell of it back toward your house, roses out,
stars up, the maple leaves throwing puppets of shadows from the streetlights.
A part of you knows it will never be like this again, not quite, and you smell
honeysuckle, hyacinth, soil. You sit at the kitchen table of your house and eat
a bowl of Cheerios, it's late, the smell of her on each spoonful, milk, oats,
sugar. You put the bowl in the sink, run water, splash it around. Your mom has
left you a note telling you you're the last family member in, lock the door, so you
do that, turn out the lights, climb the stairs. It is hot upstairs, coolness just
outside, and you lay in a single bed, a childhood cowboy lamp beside you, your
hand absently on your crotch. You think of her, remember her pulling you
closer, using gravity to draw you to the center, and you fall asleep like that, one
white sheet over you, your left leg out to get the last of the air on a summer
night.
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©1999
Joseph Monninger and Nerve.com
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