There's already hesitation in your eyes as the car begin to slow down. I can feel it, your hand squeezing mine, the other on the steering wheel. Just a light clamp of pressure like that from familiar skin can say in seconds what hours of conversation may still dance around.

I want to tell you that we don't have to do anything. We can turn around and go back to our separate beds and sleep next to who we're spending our lives with. The ones who see us every single day, even though we've become like statues to them: Something they easily recognize the cut angles and specific planes of. But, the inside is a mystery living beneath a surface that is durable, but cracked in places you can't see until you get very close.

None of the words leave, though, because I think we already know. We can pretend that the loneliness we share, this warped gravity that draws us towards one another, somehow lessens the severity of what we're doing. That, maybe, we're like objects on space that have spent years on a course that can only result in our collision. How much of that is true, that we're an inevitability, I don't really know. What I do know is that we have craved one another for a long time now.

Only a few weeks have passed since we were together last. Every day and night since has left an ache in me I can't stand anymore. Especially at night, when I'm in bed listening to the relaxed breathing of a stranger who has shunned my affections for too long. I never knew that kind of pain before, an awful abyss opening up inside from simply not being desired, regardless of what I tried or how much time passed. It's a pain that made me retreat further into how much I long to see you. Just touch you.

Be inside of you.

I see the same ache in you as soon as we started going down the road. A longing burning in both eyes that only we seem to understand in one another. One that only we know how to quiet.

Your seem to sense this, how our need only swells more when we're around each other. You pull off into a small trail we know of around here that goes on for miles, all winding gravel curves that dead-ends into virtually nothing, just a big stretch of forest and camping grounds where the road was never finished. Plenty of places like that around here, city projects waiting on replenished funds or developing subdivisions, usually. Places perfect for sneaking off to once you're in a situation where you must seek out discrete locations. It's surprising how many are out there. It's like all these narrowing trails, incomplete roads, and solitary tracts of land exist for us at night, dark pockets of the world to hide in together where we can temporarily share our own little universe.

Once we're on the trail, the headlights barely seem able to cut through the black cold night. On either side, there's nothing but the vague silhouettes of hills, skeletal trees that will remain bare for months. The shadowy outlines of their branches are like gnarled and thin monstrous fingers, some beckoning, some gesturing to stay away. Or maybe it's just me. All psychological, the surrounding landscape taking on more ominous shapes the farther we drive.

I squeeze your hand this time and look over at you. We've been silent most of the way. With no radio playing, we just share the quiet together, listen to heater's faint hum, the whirling crunch of tires spinning along the gravel. I've always liked that about you, about whatever this is between us, that we can share the quiet together for seemingly endless stretches and every wordless moment is still somehow so comforting.

And now, when your hand squeezes mine again, your thumb caresses back and forth, something you love doing. Those little gestures, like when we hug goodbye and your fingertips stroke the back of my neck or when we share a deep kiss and you plant smaller ones over and over on my cheeks and forehead. They're all so much more than the words we can string together.

Your hands, fingertips, eyes, and lips speak endless volumes to me. Countless intricacies and notes wrapped up together and passed along through your affections.

Your thumb stops, hand pulling away as you slow the car down, reaching the trail's end where the gravel pours out into a wide pool. Beyond that, nothing but tall and thick rows of trees towering over us like still sentinels. You cut the engine and lights off because, even though it's highly unlikely, we don't want to risk being seen by anyone who may drive through here or come out from the woods tonight.

Once the vehicle stills, we become a frenzy of motion out here in the cold, moving to the backseat. Seeming to race one another there, clothes a whirlwind of cotton of zippers, your perfume furiously pushing through the air from your coat and blouse fluttering away, hair like a silk auburn curtain whirling in a steady breeze.

It makes a flowery warm wind rushing at me through the freezing air. Each second I inhale you make my blood feel like low-burning coals run through my veins. Oxygen pulled into my lungs carries your essence in every particle of the air and is made to cause the heat in me to rise, to become impatient fires that will burn me alive if I can't have you.

We're cramped in the cold space of the backseat, turning our velocity on another to help free us from what few articles of clothing we still have on. I hear and feel the metallic clinking of my belt being undone as I unclasp your bra. The belt sounds like a whip flying through the air when traveling away from every loop on my pants.

The more of our bodies we reveal, the more the cold sweeps over our skin and into our pores. At the same time, there's already a heat beginning to overpower it. Time always seems slow here to me, crawling between the moments of fevered initiation and joining. Those moments when one can still turn back, when we're on the cusp of abandoning what control remains.

Because I can map you, ignite and soothe all the soft places along your body, the delicate textures of your skin. The vulnerable slopes and valleys of your every curve. I just want to be what you need here. Don't we all deserve that, even if it has to remain a secret? Someone we can lose ourselves on the surfaces of, in the folds of them taking us. I can take you, fill you to the brink of fire spilling through your being. I can gently caress and cradle you in the aftermath.

Or we just snuggle in the backseat. Use our coats as blankets, stay sheltered in this steel and glass husk from the worst of the cold. Let the trapped warmth beneath rise the longer we stay, looking at the dark patchwork above illuminated by every still star.

There is a need, though, radiating in your eyes, something you can't fight or still long enough to understand. Some things need no explanation, no language to wrap around the fragile meanings of. There is a beautiful and dangerous simplicity in this, to want another so entirely. For the weighted consequences to be temporarily jettisoned off to some distant void in the mind where they will stay as small ripples we've grown numb to.

Any second thought I may have had in the recesses of my mind are attacked and dissolved now by your lips almost furiously covering mine. As if you felt a graze, just a tiny wave of my reluctance and had to claim me before any other tide could sweep me away from you.

My tongue trespasses into your mouth as I feel your hand grip me below, playful little squeezes before the teeth on my zipper begin to slowly part, your fingertips always knowing exactly how to undo me.

You speed up then, each move calculating and swift .There have been times where I've been in control and when we've traded, handed over ourselves with trust to be taken. But tonight has been all you. The text from you earlier, your car, and your idea of where we should venture off to.

There's something more primal than usual glinting in the oceanic orbs of your eyes as you help pull my jeans and boxers off, something predatory that makes me harder than ever, a sensitive throbbing column of nerves. Your light blue panties, already slightly translucent from your juices, come off in moments, falling on the mixed mass of our clothing on the floor.

In our flurry of moving back here and stripping, I end up sitting right behind the passenger's seat as you come over. Prowling towards your prey.

You grip me with another playful squeeze that, now that I am fully exposed, almost makes my thick head want to burst with delirious pressure, but loosen your hand a little seconds later. Your strokes are soft and slow at first, summoning a relieved gasp from me as my fingers part your lips, already glistening and slick, swollen with need. You also gasp when I first breach beyond them and for a moment I remember how cold it is tonight, that I must have felt like a malleable icicle to you at first. But, as I begin to slowly probe, each movement coating my fingers in fragrant juices, the friction and inner heat warming me in seconds. Your hips sway to my strokes like our bodies are composed of musical notes, songs you can hear and conduct up close or from a distance when you feel my presence. The pushing into your depths. The grip stroking my needful flesh. Your lips taking me with their hungry kiss, your curious tongue wrestling mine. They're all moments we write the very private composition.

Like all songs, the notes build and shift with one another, tempos naturally cresting. Ready to tell another story.

Every moment now, we are blissfully ignorant of the weather surrounding us. My legs tremble a bit when your thumb glides over my tip, squeezing a drop of pre-cum out. Moving back and forth to spread the warm stickiness around.

One hand rests against the seat, right above my shoulder, the other still wrapped around me. The moonlight glimmers along your eyes, your knowing grin, as your leg swoops up and you straddle me.

You gently guide me inside you, slowly enveloping me between and beyond your delicate lips. Inside a fiery, wet velvet tunnel, our shivering moans from this careful breaching joining as one note. You lean a little forward, hard nipples grazing mine, lips against my earlobe as you whisper one simple word encompassing so many complex things.

Mine.

I am and you know it. Know that I will always break away from anything going on to meet up with you and lose myself. You may be quietly reluctant at first. Questioning what we did after. But, once we have started to disrobe and explore, something animalistic is summoned. Something that has you seizing control. Owning me, taking over both my body and heart.

Beginning to bloom open, changing shape inside to take me in, the first few movements are slow as you adjust, accommodate what you have speared yourself with. I feel your fingertips lave behind my neck as you begin to move faster, bringing head closer, greedy mouth to your nipples. My tongue flicks and circles around each sensitive bud, moaning against them as your hips switch between bucking and swiveling, devouring me with slick fire, so wet I can already feel your juices trickling out and coating below in little hot droplets, each new one making my skin there tingle. I push my hips up to match your rhythms, and drive myself deeper into you, my hands wanting to reach for your back. But I can't. I know the moment I touch there, it would be too tempting to run my nails roughly on you and you can't go go home with marks made along that vast expanse of smooth skin.

We must mark each other in different ways.

The teasing clench from you around me when my hands grip and your ass cheeks. My mouth releasing your nipple so I can crane my head and lick from your neck to your earlobe, whispering for you to ride me harder, to never stop. The primal moan bordering on a grunt as you pick up speed, never relenting. Our breath exhaling a fog like ghosts colliding with and merging into one another. Quickening pulses slamming through the tender veins in our throats. Your climax, sudden and quivering, as you scream my name. The volcanic grip tightening around my length, flooding it with your release.

My seed bursting, pumping thick jets into your pulsating sex, bodies both tremoring, the universe around us momentarily obliterated. How your arms drape tighter around me, hugging, my cheek against your hot skin and the thundering heart beneath. The way you stay almost entirely still then, keeping me inside you, as if you not only refuse to let me go, but also want to make me a part of you. Fuse us together. The way you whisper the word just one more time.

Mine.

These are the ways we mark one one another. They are ones that will not be imprinted upon skin. They are marks that go much deeper, thrumming echoes and bright flashes that will always remain with us. Inside us.

I know we can't stay very long. So I just close my eyes and hold you a little tighter, wanting each second here to here to carve itself into my being.

I listen to the wind blowing, swaying branches in a hesitant dance. I know that winter air still seeps through places in the car that can never be entirely sealed off. But I only feel your warmth. The tapping against your chest,soft rhythms that can lull me into sleep.

Something in me almost cracks then, so strong that I almost expect it to make a sound like the snapping of a bone or thick tree branch. It's like my heart almost cracks with gratitude here.

Out here in the late night,in the windy cold of winter, parked near the ominous stretch of forested land before us, I've never felt safer. The real darkness is what awaits us when we part later on, the true cold comes when we close the doors to our homes and seal ourselves away there for the night's remaining hours. The true pain is when we long for a touch that we find home in and realize that the skin we wish to reach for is somewhere else. Someone else. The real ghosts haunting you and I will not be each other, it will be the apparitions in our homes, the phantoms of what once was in each hall and room, in each displayed and framed memento.

But we don't have to worry about that or anything else here. The place wouldn't really matter. Whether parked at the end of an unfinished road or shadowy parking garage or in the small space of some anonymous hotel room, the safe place we have found is a person. A safe haven in one another. And for all the things in the world we can acquire like money, praise, the facade of companionship masking who we really are and what we really want, the one thing in this world we can never have too much of is safety.