Page 71 of Badd Baby

Your hand grazes my cheek, and I remember with shocking clarity the way you sounded as you came, and I can't remember anything but this moment and that sound—your groan, my moan, our mated breaths and the soft slide of skin on skin.

The music pounds, pounds, pounds. Bodies bump into us as we glide together, eyes locked and warring. The myriad unspoken things hang between us, but we say nothing. Mouths are not for speaking, not in this wild glut of chaos and chemistry.

Mouths are for tasting sweat, stealing kisses as hips gyrate and grind, as hands clutch and palms press.

Lips are for stuttering against stubble, not speaking; tongues are for tangling, not talking.

You sweep me away from the crowd. A quiet corner near the buffet table hosts a fraught moment, the titanic freight of unspoken sentiments boiling between us—it's too loud in here to hear, but you see the things we've not said coruscating between us like lost and fallen stars, just as I do. They glow like neon signs—my feelings, your need, our rightness, our wrongness; it's all there, prose written in the lingering looks, poetry scribed in stolen touches.

There's the bride, dancing with her husband, her slender brown fingers interlocked behind his neck, toying with his red hair, her eyes blazing her wild love. He gazes down at her, and for them, there is no one else in all the world but each other.

Do you want that?

Do I?

A surge of humanity finds our quiet corner, and we're parted.

I find you alone outside beneath the rose-wreathed arch, moonlight silver on your skin.

The silence is crushing.

Eyes gleam in the starshine.

Still, there is nothing to say, if only because there is too much to say and our throats burn from too much alcohol and from the weight of the unspoken.

Sidewalk squares pass underfoot. It's blessedly cool after the humidity of breath and the heat of sweat and the crush of dancing and drinking and eating and merrymaking.

Your hand is in mine. It feels right.

The hotel rises before us, doors swish open, ghost closed; the lobby is silent.

The elevator is slow.

You stare at me as we wait for it.

Your eyes burn, goddammit. Like galaxies and quasars, they burn.

—Don’t look at me like that.

—Like what?

There's no reason to answer—you know. I know.

The hallway distorts, morphing into a miles-long tunnel of swirling light from rotating sconces. The floor tilts, an Inception-like twist of reality, and then there's a wall at my shoulder and you drop the keycard on the floor. You fall over trying to retrieve it.

Our room is dark. Silent. Still. It still smells faintly of our sex.

You open the blinds and starshine bathes the planes of your face, illuminates the heat in your eyes.

—I’m going to kiss you.

Your warning is too little, too late: I'm already closing the distance between us.

The blinds rattle as I push you against them.

Clothes fly this way and that. A bowtie hangs from a lampshade. A thong drapes over the handle of the room's telephone. A tuxedo jacket is stained by the pink of a dress; a male sock is wrapped around the white loop of a bra strap.

Hot flesh begs for touch.