Mess You Made

45.

Malibu.

There's something about the comedown after sex. This is the first time I'm feeling it so I think that means there's just something about the comedown after sex with Miguel Hernandez.

All those hormones and all those chemical reactions start to die down. Oxytocin decreases, and your heart rate begins to slow and the world starts to fade back into your ears but that fall from the high has never been anything except a brutal one for me.

I usually slam back down to the floor. Ribs crushed, body aching. A visceral urge to rub every pore clean, and my body suddenly feels like just a thing I used and lent to someone else without thinking. It isn't my own anymore. Which I only think about once it's over— and that's a horrifying feeling. I can't explain what it is to feel so horrified at yourself.

And so I never believed I could have it any other way.

The gentleness after sex that you read about, or see in films. The fulfilment, the air tinged with something tender. I could never watch it, never read about it— I never understood why I was incapable of feeling it, why my body never sang after sex, but only made me feel the worst I'll ever fucking feel, ever. I thought I was faulty.

Now there's him.

And I'm a bit unsure if he's real.

If this is real.

If I'm okay.

I'm waiting to feel the sickness in my stomach, the pain in my mind, if it's all about to rush through me like it does— because it isn't, yet. Not at all.

If he's done this for me, if he's the song my body wants to sing and I've been lying here, my head on his bare chest in my bed, trying not to disassociate from my body— trying, so hard, to memorise every moment of this feeling I thought wouldn't exist for me. I'm scared, I think. I'm scared with every disbelieving trace of my fingers over his tattoos. I'm waiting for the eventual clock to tick, for it all to fall apart.

I tense when Miguel's fingers brush over my shoulders. He pulls the covers over me higher, asks softly, "You okay?"

I swallow.

I'm tucked against him.

Limbs tangled. His arms around me.

My ear so close to his heartbeat. My hair splayed out over his chest.

It's so quiet and so gentle and we're in complete darkness. I can't explain to you how gentle the air feels as we breathe in sync. And I like it, how intertwined we are. Strangely, his body now feels like an extension of myself after the comedown.

I nod.

"Yeah?" He says. A tired whisper in the dark quiet.

He cleaned me up, and let me basically pass out against him when he snuck us into the house— changed me, but I don't really remember much of it. I was too out of it and then the next thing I know, I was laid down here and he was with me. He was so incredibly gentle. So attuned to me. Kissed his way around my neck about three times to make up for the marks left by the belt— jesus, I can't begin to think about the belt.

I shift my head so I can look up at him. His big arm hooked around my shoulder. I can barely see him in the shadows but I can see how he gives me a tiny, barely there smile and I wonder if I'll ever be able to forget how beautiful he is— if I'll take it to my grave, how nobody could've ever been him, as he adjusts his head on my pillow to look down at me better.