Flights of Fancy

a friendship sadly lost

We saw each other again in the city where it all ended, where it once began again. She was with two female friends I'd never seen before. I hadn't seen her in two years or more, so I'd forgotten the color of her skin on her face and that look she gave that infected my insides at once. To think I'd been taking the cure for years; one glance and it was useless. I didn't know what she would do—I hadn't had the faculty to imagine us meeting ever again—and for a second it looked like every possibility was plausible.

But then we hugged, and I liked the temperature of her hair against my cheek, and she was kissing the side of my face like a mother, and it made me feel new, so I had to do it to her too, we exchanged kisses on cheeks in the midst of our hug, and before I knew it our lips had zippered together all four of them, and I guess I'd forgotten what fast metabolism tasted like. All our friends were looking at us, swaying on their feet, and their mouths gave me the impression they'd never studied history.

I guess my hand wanted to stay on her hair because I'd always liked it, but the argan oil was making it slip to her back, which wasn't a bad texture either. I liked her denim jacket, even though she couldn't button it. It'd been winter in May for too long; I did long for spring to come back.

"We should get going," one of her friends said, crouching because we were on the ground, she was lying on top of me, and we were kneading the insides of our mouths with our tongues.

"Tell them I'll be long," she managed to say in my mouth. "I have something to do."

Her friend laughed, and the other followed suit. I could tell from the tone of their chuckles they couldn't see my body. "But what do you have to do?" one of them said through the giggles, and I felt both important and impotent at once.

But my friend, the only one who'd been silent, was filming my crotch. As a matter of fact I was inside her, even though we still had our clothes on.

The ash of the cigarette burned the hairs on my middle finger, and I recoiled. I stared at it for a while and then took a new drag. For a moment there it felt like home.