Wisping ash from the light of his burning cigarette, macroscopic leafs of charred paper, making out toward some trajectory in space. He is with me tonight.
He is with me.
We lean up against the brick, cold and hard, mediating the pulse and the heat of the club within. Dancers. There is a thin mist of sweat to our laughter, prickling off into the high night wind. It makes our bodies glisten, and our brows, exposed to the air around, electric. He shines, below his smile, his neck and his skin reflecting back the embers of his burning fag in an orange-yellow glow. Suck it in, breathe it out, let the ash fall at rest in your lungs. The cloud is the only thing that surrounds us, and I cannot tell how much is smoke and how much breath in this mingling of gestures and fantasies. His cloud is a halo and he extends it about us both until we are holy in the night, shattered by streetlamps in the stillness. The closeness is potent, and I am high on its drug.
This is my breath. Take it. Take it from me.
His mouth on mine, sucking long and taking out my air to make it unclean. He gives it back again as I linger on his tongue. The cold of the night is without of our circle, kept away and external to all that we do in these twirling shadows. All of the air that we pass in between us is warm -- wet from its journey between two still bodies. He holds the fag between two fingers and passes it around my body, the lighted end flicking subconsciously. He pulls it along, his fingers in my mouth and ashy fingertips playing over still-open, staring eyes. He presses the filter end of the cigarette into my lips till they give and I breathe. I watch. He watches me perfectly, silently. This is consent to a question silently asked. Breathe. Take this. Take this from me. Before I can let go he takes his own mouth back onto mine and catches the exhale. Take it from me.
He pulls the cigarette back up to his own face, and lets the contents of his mouth spill out in plumes and streaks before pulling back in again and again. That was ours. Smoke in jets across the sky. It rises upward, outward to the clouds till it is hard to tell how much is smoke and how much breath, embracing the world in a halo till all of us are holy before the night. Dancing. We are dancing down beneath, in giggles and breathing, oblivious to what has flown away, what is rising up toward the clouds and leaving us naked, alone on the street.
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