Lips Like Red Thread
The bedroom has no walls. White bed, white sheets, white nowhere. Someone took an eraser to the world and left only Lina.
Red hair like wine poured across a white tablecloth. Red mouth. Freckles scattered across skin the color of heavy cream.
She smells like rain on hot asphalt and American Spirits. She tastes like honey cut with gasoline. When she touches him, her fingertips leave warm tracks across his chest, his stomach, lower.
She belongs to Kate. Best friend. The one with the knife-edge smile who sleeps over Thursdays, leaves her mouth on coffee mugs in lipstick, borrows Kate's silk robes and returns them smelling like a different country.
In this dream, there is only Lina.
She straddles him, thighs gripping his hips, naked from collarbones to shins. Freckles everywhere, a field a tongue could spend hours crossing. Nipples the color of raspberries. She rocks against him, slow circles that arch his spine off the white sheets. Her mouth forms his name. Her nails score lines down his chest, drawing blood in parallels, red threads rising on his skin.
She reaches between them. Wraps her hand around him. Guides him. The pressure of the moment before entry, his pulse in his throat and the wet heat of her closing the last inch between their bodies.
He wakes.
Sheets soaked, the evidence rigid between his legs. Kate beside him, one hand curled under her chin, the other resting on the Murakami she fell asleep reading. She dog-ears pages. He has told her a hundred times to use a bookmark and she keeps folding corners anyway.
The dream coats everything. He lies still, Lina's phantom weight still on him, her heat, her wetness, and stares at the ceiling fan, the slow rotation of its blades, the pull-chain swinging in the draft from the open window.
He rolls toward Kate. Kisses her shoulder. She tastes like Dove soap and the melatonin she dissolves under her tongue every night, the bottle on her nightstand beside a glass of water and a hair tie and a tube of Burt's Bees lip balm she applies in the dark without a mirror. He maps that nightstand with his eyes shut. The melatonin bottle. The water glass. The hair tie. The lip balm.
He swallows. The dream sits in his throat, the taste of someone else's mouth.
Three weeks of this. He wakes every morning hard, the dream still on him like lipstick on a glass rim, the kind that won't rinse clean. He stands at the bathroom sink and runs cold water over his wrists and waits for his body to forget what his brain won't.
Thursday evening. Sex with Kate. She's on top, her dark hair falling around his face, and he closes his eyes and red hair fans across the pillow behind his lids. Kate says his name. He says hers back a half-second late, the wrong syllable catching in his teeth. She pauses. Tips her head.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Don't stop."
He fixes his gaze on the small scar below her left ear, the white seam of it, and holds it like a rope until he finishes.
Saturday. His shower. Eyes shut. Hand moving. Behind his eyelids, freckled skin and the sound dream-Lina makes when she comes, a sound pulled from somewhere low in her chest, guttural, a sound he has invented for a woman who has never touched him.
In the real world she looks through him at Kate's dinner parties, her gaze sliding past his face to the wine rack, the window, the other guests. When she does make eye contact, her smile lands on him and stops there, the kind of smile you give a stranger holding a door. She turns before he can respond, the ridge of her shoulder blade shifting under freckled skin, a loose red thread from the couch upholstery caught on the knit of her sleeve.
Once, in Kate's kitchen, reaching past him for the wine opener. Her forearm brushed his. She pulled back like she'd touched a burner. Didn't look at him for the rest of the night.