SISSY: When lust won’t bow to love, every touch is a free fall

It’s all too much inside – the music is a living thing, pulsing thick through the walls, slick against my skin like bad breath.

I slip out to the kerb, lungs straining, heart chewing through the static. Outside, bodies are strewn across the street, laughing, spilling drinks, kissing. I wipe the sweat off my collarbone – mine, someone else’s, who knows – and cut towards a circle of strangers glowing at the edges. Someone hands me a fag without looking. I nod, mutter a low thanks, already stepping back, letting the noise blur behind me. I take to the empty road, humming, and dig for my phone in the pit of my bag, fingers brushing past crumpled receipts and lipstick. My feet ache, but I attempt to walk with my cigarette before ordering a cab.

Then, a hand, sudden and hot, locks round my arm.

I look beside me, and cynicism cracks across my chest like a match strike. It’s her – a girl I kissed once in a hushed library. Same crooked grin, like she’s read the last page of something I never finished. Her eyeliner’s wrecked, beautiful, softening her in a reckless way that I like. I remember the way she’d reached for my hand back then – light, hesitant, like we might break into hysterics. Now her fingers dig into me like she’s claiming me, and I freeze. My body’s quicker than my mind, remembers the shape of her, the weight of wanting, before I can even say her name.

We move together in a kind of fragile orbit, her shoulder brushing mine like an afterthought, like she doesn’t realise how it makes the air viscous. My cigarette burns down to the filter while she tells me she left the party for the same reason I did – too much noise, too many people trying to be louder than themselves. We don’t look at each other much; our eyes catch in short, violent glances. I keep walking because if I stop, I might lean in.

The streets are damp, slick under the street lamps, reflecting us in watery fragments. I think of the library again – that hushed, powdery smell, the dust motes dancing in the afternoon light, the way my pen had hovered above my notebook, words evaporating because she’d been sitting opposite me. She’d been reading some battered edition of Woolf and underlining, mouth parted just slightly. I’d wanted to write something that would make her look up. Instead, I’d asked if she had a lighter. She hadn’t.

"No matter what I write, it will be about her. Every story will have her hands, her grin, her eyeliner smudged like a surrender"

Now she does. She stops to spark her own cigarette, cupping the flame like it’s a secret. I watch her lips close around the filter, watch her inhale. I wonder if she notices my stare or if she expects it, if she’s always known how to choreograph want.