The noise is a kind of sensual assault that leaves me feeling buzzed and giddy. The large space is jammed with people, hundreds at least, possibly more than a thousand. Most of them are young guys with pretty faces and inflated muscles. And leather everywhere. Juliette told me this is a week-long festival with different events each night, and this is the Leather Ball. 

Blue and violet light beams roll over the mass of bodies in accompaniment to the monotonous techno music that pulses from speakers on all sides. We dance together near the edge of the crowd, far from the stage which a few moments ago featured four or five mostly naked women with neon hair dancing and messing around with each other. Nobody much seemed to notice them. The real show is on the floor, which is lit up with an energy that pulls you away from yourself. You can almost feel the structure around us straining to hold it all in.

I am wearing my black charmeuse dress with a pair of leggings and platform stiletto boots. It’s the only dress I own and is starting to fray at the seam around the left hip, but it is short and sleeveless, the kind that looks good and sexy on just about anybody. 

Juliette has on an indigo denim jacket over a muscle tee and black skirt that falls halfway down her thighs. Her wavy chestnut hair sweeps across her shoulders as she moves, and she is wearing dark lipstick and thick eyeliner which give her soft, Eurasian features a vaguely punk edge.  

All of this makes her look much different from how I have ever seen her when she is working behind the counter at the dépanneur, and I have never seen her outside of it until tonight. She doesn’t look better exactly, not from these changes directly, at least. But they do make me notice the better things about her face that I always missed. Like the really unusual shade of green in her eyes, the funny scowl that her mouth makes when she is not making a face at all. Those kinds of quirky things that, once you notice them, are always there when you think of a person and try to form a picture of them in your mind. 

“Is that your friend, the one you said that got you tickets,” I ask, shouting to be heard over the pulsing music. I point toward the stage where a lone figure in a dark shirt buttoned to the chin labors over what I assume is a turntable. 

“What?”     

“Is that your friend? The DJ?”   

Juliette stands on the tips of her boots to try to see through the crowd. “I have no idea,” she yells back and laughs like she is a little crazy. I understand and feel it too. There is something about the atmosphere here that makes you want to laugh in a deranged way just like that for no reason at all. 

She begins to dance with a guy in a half buttoned dress shirt who has wandered beside us and they move around and against each other like loose fishing floats in a storm.       

The music dissolves into another beat and Juliette disentangles from her random partner and moves closer to me. She pushes herself against my body with the particular kind of gyration that belongs as much to the act of fucking as to dancing. It feels good, the heat she exudes, the energy. 

She leans forward and suddenly her face is up against mine. It is so fast, almost violent, that I think she has been shoved from behind, but our lips are touching and she does not move away. I feel the pressure of her tongue against my mouth and involuntarily yield for her to find her way through. Our tongues meet and flick against each other in an unseen battle, sending a shudder through me like something electric. 

I pull away without knowing exactly why and cover for the distance that has come between us by starting to dance again as if nothing has happened. She does the same and seconds later she is tossing her head and flailing her arms in a sort of frenetic abandon so that she merges again into the forest of bodies around us. 

________

The diner is quiet enough for me to notice the incessant ringing in my ears from the last hours. Only the sounds of kitchen work and a few subdued conversations from a handful of other midnight customers.

We sit at the counter on bar stools. All the vinyl seats are cracked like the wrinkled face of a very old person. The place has a natural 1950s style to it, as if the world has rushed by all around it and left this space like a kind of undisturbed tidal pool. The sidewall is covered with old photographs of what the city and the people used to be like before it became whatever it is today. I try to picture photographs from our time on a wall in this room years from now. The present as past, it is not so easy to do. Thinking of the future, for me, always feels like constructing a fantasy that is not related to the world I know.

Juliette drinks bottled water and I’m having coffee, as usual, from a heavy ceramic mug that feels pleasantly warm in my hand. A plastic bowl lined with greasy paper is filled with poutine, potato fries in gravy and cheese curd, which sits in front of each of us. I ignore the food and focus my attention on Juliette. She notices me studying her face as I lift the mug to my mouth and she seems to become a little self-conscious. 

“What,” she asks.     

“I like your hair that way.”     

“Oh, yeah, I change stuff up sometimes.”      

“It looks good,” I tell her before we again come to silence.       

“Mei, can I ask you something? What they say massage places really are about.”   

“You want to know if it’s true?”     

“It’s not exactly a secret,” she says.     

“Well, you can get a massage there. Everyone’s licensed, mostly. But, yeah, it’s…” I let the sentence trail away unfinished, hoping that will be the end of it.     

“Then...it’s none of my business, you don’t have to tell me. What kind of stuff...”     

“You mean sex stuff?” Juliette nods. I am quiet for a moment and my stomach suddenly gets a little knotted. “Most of the time it’s old men wanting a hand job. Not a big deal. But we do everything. Not super kink, but...a lot. Is that...I’m not sure what you’re asking.”      

“And you can deal okay with that?”      

“It’s all normal after a while.”      

“I’m sorry,” Juliette says. “I don’t mean to be… it didn’t bother me until I heard you say it.”      

“Why did you ask?”     

“I didn’t think you’d tell me.”      

“My mistake,” I say quietly, feeling flushed and very aware that I am being shamed.      

“I mean, if somebody asks a way too personal question like that, at least you could lie to them.” She smiles as she says it. Her comment is intended as humor, as an escape - for herself or for me I’m not sure - but I take it and smile also, then keep picking at the fries like I’m about to bring one to my mouth at some point.  

“I do what I have to,” I tell her. “That’s all.”     

“It’s not like you don’t make your own choices.” 

I lower my eyes reflexively. “Is your life that simple?”     

“You should order something else,” she suggests, noticing my lack of enthusiasm for the poutine. 

“I’m just not hungry.”      

“I inhale this stuff. You have to, or it drips fucking everywhere. That’s why it’s so great, you can’t eat it and try to be polite.  There’s no way.”      

“You’ve always lived here?”      

She grunts in affirmation. “My folks are about two kilometers away, in the same apartment I grew up in. Might as well be two million.”      

A young woman behind the counter brings a coffee pot over to refresh my cup. She has a sleeve of tattoos up one arm and black braids that dangle from under a cocked knit cap. The standard uniform around here, in slight variations. I smile a ‘thank you,' and let her move away before speaking.

“So what happened?”      

“No big drama,” Juliette answers. “Only a lot of little ones. Some people just don’t get along, that’s all. Sometimes I think if I jump on a bus and never see this place again, it might be the start of something. Being happy or whatever. I don’t know. And then there are other days.”

She reaches over to take a drippy fry from my plate and puts it in her mouth. “So what about you?” 

"Me?” I have been anticipating the question, yet when it comes I am completely at a loss for response.

“Yeah. I don’t know anything about you, really.”

Something about me. Her question is so ridiculously simple, even banal. Yet so impossible for me to begin to answer. Something about me. I search for anything to say, knowing for certain what I will not say.  The story I will never tell her.

My father works on the floor of a petrochemical factory in Guangzhou, which pays him less than twenty thousand yuan a year. That is a city in China, not far from Hong Kong. With those wages, he must support my widowed aunt, as well as my young cousin and us. We needed more. And I should say, I wanted much more.     

My family agreed I would abandon my liberal arts studies at Jinan University. I resisted the idea at first because I enjoyed school and was seeing a boy. Not a boyfriend exactly, but not just a friend either. But it really was not a choice for me to make. I was in no position to refuse my family and there was something exciting about what was being proposed. It was frightening also, of course, but I tried to push my imagination to good outcomes. Looking back, I was nothing but a fucking stupid little girl.

My father paid snakeheads in Xiamen almost three hundred thousand yuan in loaned money to smuggle me overseas so I could find well paid work intended to help us all. Snakeheads are men into that business specifically. They are generally connected to one organized crime syndicate or another that operates throughout Southeast Asia. 

On Bangkok’s Khaosan Road, I became student Mei Ishikura, holder of a Japanese passport and visa. Never mind that I could not speak more than a few words of Japanese. My handlers put me on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and from that point I was alone. I reached Moscow after eight days on the train and from there I took a flight to Munich and finally New Jersey.      

I had almost no money, only a short name list of people I had never met. And the work I had expected failed to materialize. 

My first massage job was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I met a woman named Josefina at a hostel beside the Queens Expressway who told me it was the best way for someone like me to quickly start making money. But it wasn’t that much money, and it wasn’t quick enough. My family sent word a few weeks later that they were feeling pressure to begin paying the loan. Andre fronted me thirty thousand Canadian dollars. That was about one hundred fifty thousand yuan, a sum that amounted to a price of purchase. Then he brought me to Montreal. That was a year and a half ago. 

The first time, it changes the way you understand yourself. Forever, I imagine. Some girls say it makes them feel dirty, but that was never me. I felt like the lewd worms - that’s what we all call the clients - were the dirty ones. But they left me with a sort of absence that stays with me. 

What you lose is the ability to give or withhold that part of yourself freely. It is a piece of you that has been pulled out. This has nothing to do with acts of sex or the stigmas many attach to them. Or maybe it does. Sometimes it is hard for me to understand the things I feel and the reasons why I do. 

Before long, you just go numb and begin to exist in some half-life stupor, less vivid than a dream, but more tangible in the details that stick. By the time the fog lifts, you feel like you have gone through death and been reborn into a world with such encompassing darkness that there is nothing beyond to encourage even a prayer for release. Then time goes by. That is the best way I can describe it. Diyu.

In the beginning, I turned my loathing toward the lewd worms even more than to Andre or Lijuan, our manager. But now I realize they are not worth the emotion. They are as different from each other as a gathering of family members or any other collection of individuals you can imagine, and they carry all the life that has formed them into the room with me. I can never really give them what they have come for. We both inherently know it long before I lay my hands on them and this produces a sort of low-grade sadness that lingers over our time together. Sometimes it is not obvious, but it is always there. A kind of emptiness. Sex is about filling holes.

People say that power is the greatest turn on, but I believe it is the opposite. Vulnerability is what we most desire. That’s the rush we are drawn to risk so much of ourselves to feel. I imagine my lewd worms to be infants on a table, grotesque in their willing helplessness. My babies. I know it is a strange way to think.

None of this I share with Juliette. Instead, I sit stupidly mute, staring past her at the old photos of people now dead. 

“Me,” I repeat, finally. “I don’t know. There’s not much to say, really.”

_________

The mechanical double doors open with purpose as though the noisy iron snake is belching us out of its body. We are practically alone in the metro station with its low arched concrete roof and walls and a floor of yellow and brown bricks. Something about it makes me feel a little claustrophobic.     

“I didn’t mean to make things weird tonight,” Juliette says as we walk.      

“It’s okay. You wanted to know.”     

“I mean when I kissed you.”     

I laugh in honest surprise. “It wasn’t weird.” 

“You weren’t into it.”     

“I just wasn’t expecting it.”     

The metro speeds away with metal on metal clanging that I always vaguely associate with a sort of violence. Neither of us speaks until the noise fades.     

“Anyway, it wasn’t…”     

“Don’t worry about it,” I break in. “I liked it...it was nice.” I offer what I hope is a reassuring smile. We step on an escalator and move upward toward the rectangular hole to the world.       

Juliette lives on a residential street in Mile End with pretty brick apartment buildings on each side and narrow sidewalks lined with spindly, nearly naked trees. I keep my hands deep inside the pockets of a canvas jacket I wear over my dress, but they still sting a little from the autumn night air.     

“You might not have guessed this,” Juliette says. “I’m an impulsive person, pretty much always.” 

“We’re opposites then.”     

“What, you think too much?”      

“Sometimes.”     

“That’s got to be better, though.”    

I hunch my shoulders against the cold. “Is it much further?”     

“Right up here.”       

“Sometimes I want to just shut my brain off and be more like you.”     

Juliette spits out a surprised laugh. “God, when you say it like that…” 

“No, I mean, it’s like nothing really touches you. That’s beautiful.”     

“My life’s nothing special,” she says softly, a little bit of darkness suddenly coming over her.

A old man with a saturnine manner passes us on the sidewalk. He is quite tall and wears a black hat typical of Hasidic men who live in this area. I don’t know what the hats are called. With him is a small, very scruffy white dog that walks with a heavy limp. 

“Hey, Mr. Bierbrier, hey Peanut,” Juliette calls out as we get close, her ebullience immediately restored.  “How’s it going?”     

“Oh, just out for a late tinkle.”      

“Us too,” she answers. “Coincidence, right?” The man chuckles a little, but I can tell it is just to be polite. “He told me that old dog is so sick that it can’t eat. He feeds it with a syringe.”      

“Cruel,” I answer, “if there’s no point.”     

“He knows it, but he can’t let go.” I nod, but my mind is drifting now. “You’re doing the thinking thing, aren’t you? What about?”     

“I don’t know. Lots of stuff.” I do know. My mind is still at the diner and ponders what Juliette thinks of me now. Part of me is kicking the other part for being honest, but that other part feels good that at least she knows.      

She stops at the stoop outside an apartment building. It is two stories of tawny brick and sits at the corner of an intersection.

“Stuff like what,” she asks.      

“Like how I’m freezing my ass off standing out here.”     

“Yeah, seriously.” She unlocks the door and we both step inside the narrow stairwell. A dusty pendant bounces dim light off the yellowing walls and stairwell that leads to two facing doors at the top.     

“And that I think I like the way you kiss,” I add. My stomach is churning again, like I have to go to the bathroom. Juliette stops, looking suddenly very serious.       

“I’m really attracted to you,” she tells me. “You know that, right? I’m not just…” We are both quiet for several seconds. I feel my heart beating too fast, too loud, like some drum rhythm drifting into my ears from inside out. “I want to kiss you again.” 

“Okay.” The word comes out as a faint, cracked whisper that sounds foreign to my ears. Juliette leans forward and meets my lips with her own. I close my eyes and part my lips and we kiss long and intimately. I clasp my hands around Juliette's back then  slide them forcefully lower across the contour of her ass, pulling us together at the hips. When we finally release each other, we both are breathing heavily and I am turned on in the kind of way that feels incredible and hurts at the same time.       

We climb the stairs to her apartment and Juliette switches on a lamp. She twists a knob  at the base of an old fashioned radiator that begins clanging as if in protest at being forced into service. The small studio space has an exposed brick wall and a dark wood floor with heavy varnish that makes it shine like it is wet. A daybed is centered against a stark white wall and a leather chair fills one corner.       

“This is nice,” I say.     

Juliette takes my coat and places it on a hook in the hallway, then moves into the tiny kitchen which is separated from the rest of the room by a bar under which are tucked two steel and bentwood stools. “I’m subletting. The girl has it set up pretty good.” Juliette opens the mini fridge.      

“Everything is hers?”     

She brings out one bottle of pale beer and pops the top. She takes a drink as she comes over to where I stand in the doorframe. “Mostly. I’m a minimalist.” She hands me the beer bottle and I take a couple of swallows. “Meaning I don’t own shit.” Juliette smiles. “So...”      

We stand close on opposite sides of the small kitchen doorway. My senses are so on end that I feel everything more intensely. The sting in my throat from the cold liquid that just went down, the pleasant dizziness centered at the base on my skull. I am wet and churning like I’m being touched already.

I push myself away from the wall and slowly bring my body up against hers and can feel her hands on my waist. We kiss, tentatively at first, testing, then again, longer and with growing confidence. Our mouths open and I hear myself groan very softly.     

Juliette slowly brushes her lips against my cheek, then move them down to my neck. She whispers something I cannot understand.     

“What,” I ask.    

“I’m nervous,” she repeats, just loud enough for me to understand this time. “I’m actually fucking nervous.”    

Together we break into half restrained laughter that fades quickly into an intimate silence, but the moment has dissolved the tension.

Sometimes the girls at the spa are made to do it with each other for the lewd worms. My first time was with a girl named Abigail from somewhere in America. It was scary at first, but only for a minute.  Abby is gone now. None of us talk about it. 

For me, there is no real difference between men and women for sex. There’s not much you cannot get used to. Hairy flesh on bones, sweating holes, throbbing little cocks oozing onto themselves like slowly crushed insects. A thousand bits of the senses that become one human animal stinking with desire - at once overwhelming and comically ephemeral. I have become dead to it all and attach nothing of myself to what my body is doing. 

But this moment is something altogether different and it scares me. I understand what Juliette means. Why she is nervous. We are exploring an unknown place together and neither is sure if it will be a sort of sanctum or if there is a danger hiding in that place, to one of us or both. 

I move closer to Juliette so that our lips are only inches apart and our bodies brush lightly against each other at the hips. As our lips touch, I part mine expectantly, welcoming her tongue again. 

As we kiss, I feel Juliette’s fingers moving across my body, caressing one breast, flicking at my nipple. I kiss her harder as she works her hand down across my stomach and to my thighs. 

Juliette lifts the hem of my dress and begins to firmly massage me through the crotch of my lace panties, which sends a radiant frisson all through me. My hands clutch the muscles of her back as she slides my panties aside and slowly works my dripping lips in deep, circular motions. 

She keeps going this way until I am on the edge of climax and I push my face against her shoulder with a soft, uncontrollable groan. Juliette brings her fingers from inside me and lifts her hand to her face as my sweet and pungent scent begins to permeate the space between us. She touches her glistening index and middle fingers to her lips, then opens her mouth to envelope them, indulging in a slow, lingering suck, before smiling impishly.

She leads me to her unmade bed, then silently loosens my dress from behind and slides the straps from my shoulders. I stand in place, flexing my torso slightly to assist the dress’s descent to my ankles. 

Juliette cups my breasts, which are slight like the chest of a boy except for umber nipples that are alive and engorged. I feel her lips work their way from the nape of my neck down the ridge of my spine with delicates kisses until they reach the cleft of my bottom.

She slowly pulls my black lace panties from the waistband, over my rounded cheeks then past my thighs and knees before letting them settle at my ankles.

“Turn around,” she whispers. “I want to see you.”

I awkwardly step out of the shoes and clothing bunched at my feet, stumbling slightly before turning to face Juliette. I clasp my hands behind my back and submit to her visual  examination of my body. I am slender and naturally muscular, especially from the waist down. My skin has a slightly olive hue and is unadorned by tattoos or piercings.

“Fuck,” she says softly.

‘What’s wrong?”

“You’re so beautiful.”

She says this less like a common compliment than a quiet acknowledgment of something profound and undeniable. In my life, I’ve no memory of  having the sense that I was beautiful, but in this moment I understand what it means to feel it and I submit to this woman in front of me to give and take from me whatever she will. 

Juliette guides me onto the bed and places herself fully clothed between my open thighs. She begins at my breasts, sucking them, moving them around her mouth with a flittering tongue. Biting them delicately and making me ache to rub myself to immediate orgasm. But I resist this impulse and leave my hands above my head, allowing her to fully control this moment. 

She slithers down my body until she is kneeling on the floor and her face is nestled between my legs. She uses her tongue to taunt me by gently brushing my sensitive inner thighs. Building the pang and fever of anticipation.

Almost at the moment I can endure no more, she clamps onto my soaked, spread pussy with her mouth and begins licking my supplicating clit with a mix of aggression and delicacy that causes me to gasp. 

I place my hands on her head, entwining her hair in my fingers. She grabs me tightly by both forearms and pulls me onto her face with even more force. 

Her tongue keeps working against my clit as the primal urgency builds inside until I arch my spine fully and groan like a wounded animal in total, transcendent release.

She pushes herself from the floor as I lie naked and splayed beneath her. I am aware that tears have sprung up at the corners of my eyes and I push them away before rising onto my elbows. 

Juliette slides her skirt down casually and without presence. Her body is more voluptuous than mine, with papery skin and a somehow incongruously robust tuft of dark brown pubic hair. A tattoo depicting loose violets entwined with a thick, partially coiled rope stretches from her left hip up the side of her torso.

She climbs onto the bed beside me and we kiss again for a time as I move across her body with my fingers. 

I prop myself on one elbow and observe her as she lies on her belly. I kiss the tender coccyx - the small of her back - and slide my hands across the velvety mound of her fleshy bottom. I gently spread her cheeks to reveal the rounded opening of raised, folded flesh sometimes referred to as a chrysanthemum in Mandarin because of its likeness to a blossom. 

I run my tongue down her crevice and flit it gently a few times across her hole, which makes her shiver just a little, but a slight groan escapes from her and she reflexively opens her legs a bit wider. I bury my face between her cheeks and breathe the aroma of fresh sweat and that distinctive, often pleasant scent of ass.

She continues to make soft, guttural sounds as I move my tongue in and around her delicate anus. The taste is metallic and slightly earthy, and I smell the juices from her  moistening  pussy just below my nose.

What I do is not intended to be indecorous, but an expression that my desire for her is without limits. Body and essence, what is beautiful and ugly, what is fragrant and what is fetid. Without one there is no other, and in that there is a sort of symmetrical perfection.

I playfully swat Juliette’s pleasingly doughy butt and guide her onto her back. Then I slide her muscle tee above her perky, well-proportioned breasts and lick her pink nipples, giving ample time to each until both tips are firm and throbbing.  

I move my face quickly down toward her sex and, unlike the way she teased me, I immediately press my mouth firmly into her, working my tongue through the hair and skin until the mass parts and I reach the dripping nether flesh. The sensation is satisfying in the most primitive of ways, not unlike a carnivore tearing into its prey and consuming the life force it contains. 

Juliette bucks and grinds her hips against my mouth. She heaves in a steady rhythm and places both hands against the back of my head to push me more forcefully against her.

I peer up at her stretched torso and see her face in pleasure/pain contortions. My tongue and neck begin to ache and I struggle to keep pleasuring her with the same intensity. I can detect the muscles of her stomach tensing increasingly until finally, like the crescendo of an exhausting musical piece, she orgasms with a low scream from deep inside, then falls still and silent.

——

We lie together in a pleasant afterglow, passing a beer bottle between us. Two empties sit on the end table beside the bed. I glance at an acoustic guitar propped in the corner.     

“So, did that come with the apartment too?”     

“That’s mine,” Juliette says. “My one prized possession.”      

“I guessed you were a musician.”      

“Trying, anyway.”      

I motion to the guitar.      

“That’s a Seagull S6,” she explains. “I can play, but mostly I’m a vocalist.”     

“Can I?” I reach over and take the guitar in my hands, letting my fingers trail the edges of its contours and brush across the strings, which produces a soft and rounded high-pitched tone. “Do you perform?”     

“Sometimes. Small venues. A lot of coffee shops. I played Redhus on St. Laurent once.”    

“What kind of music?”   

“Mostly pop pieces where I work with the arrangements,” she says. ‘And some of my own stuff too.”     

I hand Juliette the guitar. “Sing something for me. Something that’s yours.”     

“My head’s not in it.”

“I want to hear you,” I gently urge.     

“My neighbors don’t. Not at two in the morning.” 

“I think it’s a lot later than that.”     

“Seriously? Alright, give me a second.”     

I lean back on the pillow. Juliette drinks a little more beer before picking up the guitar and strumming it a few times. Then she closes her eyes and sings. The way she sings is the ugliest and most beautiful thing I have ever heard. Ugly because there is pain in every word. And beautiful for the same reason. Not a put on, showy kind of pain, but something you know inherently comes from someplace real. You know it because it hits someplace real in you. Again, symmetrical perfection.

Her voice is honeyed, the lyrics spoken in French, which is still difficult for me to understand. But none of that matters. 

She finishes with a little strum of the guitar and opens her eyes to see me smiling. To fail to see me fighting to hold inside everything, the emotional compounds I do not recognize, that I can’t even give names to. Containing them physically hurts, but releasing them is unthinkable. A brief pounding on the wall breaks the silence.      

“Sorry,” Juliette calls out. “All done, sorry.” She points accusingly at me. “I told you!” 

This makes me fall backward in laughter and she throws her arms around me, laughing also. We stay like this for a time, like young girls having fun, and suddenly a feeling comes to me, that mix of intoxicating joy and nearly overwhelmingly sadness when experiencing a perfect instant that you know will soon end and you will never get back again. 

 _____

The diffused sun of daybreak filters through the bare window and coaxes my eyes to open. I find myself lying on Juliette’s sofa bed as she sleeps beside me on her stomach, with a raised arm folded beneath her head. She is nude except for the tee  shirt which reveals a delicate patch of hair under her arm with the same texture and chestnut shade as her pubic tuft.   

Koi no yokan is a Japanese term that, as far as I know, has no equivalent in English or French. It is the name given to a singular feeling that you are destined to someday fall in love with a particular person. It is not the intoxicating jolt of love at first sight, but a more nuanced melding of infatuation and the intuition that an irresistible emotional depth is certain to grow from it. A premonition of love. 

I cover Juliette with her denim jacket and reach out my hand, nearly touching her cheek, but I withdraw it slowly for risk of disturbing her. If she sleeps forever, I will have her here forever and samsara will never find us. I prop my chin in my fist as I  examine her face and the words come to me that I will later save in my journal, unless they are the fish that slip down the river of my consciousness.  

I taste myself on her breath. Feel myself through her touch. Her kiss is wild and desperate, like she wants to take an imperative something from inside of me. A frightening kiss. More real than what is real, more intimate than is possible in life. This is the morning dream that awakened me.