Playlist:
I Know A Place - MUNA
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Her skin was cool beneath my gliding fingertips. Rippled with miniature hills from the A/C unit. Pale, somehow, despite the neverending triple digit temperature days. I almost reached for her hoodie, long-forgotten in a rumpled heap at the foot of my bed.
"Want your hoodie?" I asked, refusing to make that decision for her, knowing she'd never forgive me if I did. My fingers dipped between her shoulder blades, coaxing a shiver from her bare skin.
She tilted her head, pressing a cheek into my pillow just so her brown eyes could meet mine. Unlike mine, hers were pink and red where they should have been white, sitting on purple half-circles that peaked through layers of makeup. Fabric rustled as she shook her head, further dismantling the ponytail hairdo that she arrived with.
"Unless you're uncomfortable," she added.
I reached for the scrunchie gripping the turquoise-dyed tips of her hair, tugging it past the split ends, frayed and frizzed and forever slightly damp from her nervous chewing habit that outlasted her awkward childhood days by several decades. With the scrunchie now around my wrist, the dyed tips, along with their original brunette counterparts, fanned out across her back, stopping halfway down. When down, her hair concealed the bruises -- yellow, dark blue, and black -- better than any makeup or bulky shirt. When down, her hair convinced even me that the bruises were no longer real. Nothing more than a figment of my darkest, most unspeakable imaginations.
"Of course not." My lips grazed the slope of her neck, butterfly-light, nothing more than a whisper of reassurance to convince us both that my words were sincere.
She sighed, but not in the way that I expected. This sigh wasn't light and shallow and capable of unearthing sunshine within my stomach. There were no unspoken desires in this sigh, no hushed pleas of keep going and don't stop. No hitch of anticipation or need or sexually-charged frustration or anything when my lips hovered a little too long over one particular spot. No, this sigh was different, unlikable, gnawing on the ends of my conscience. I loathed this sigh.
"Are you lying to me, Sel?"
