Sugar

It’s the wanting I remember most. Not what came after — the wanting, stretched thin across a cafe table, made to last.

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Your hand is on the back of my neck, under my hair, and you’re saying something I’ve stopped listening to.

“That couple are watching us,” I say.

“Then we should give them something to look at.” You don’t take your hand away.

I put mine on your thigh. It’s there before I’ve decided to put it there.

It comes to me then — half a dare to myself.

I pick up a sugar sachet and hold your eyes. “One of these on the table,” I say, “every time one of us wants the other badly enough to leave.” I lay the first one down.

It’s a coffee shop. There’s no shortage.

Something crosses your face. Your eyes are warm and mischievous at once. You take a sachet and set it beside mine without breaking my gaze, your hand still where it is.

I put one down too.

I turn your arm over and stroke the inside of it, wrist to elbow, slow — giving you back exactly what you’re doing to me, watching to see if it costs you anything. It doesn’t, or you don’t let it.

The woman by the window has stopped pretending to talk. She isn’t smiling. She’s just looking, the way you look at something you’re trying to work out.

I find I don’t care, which is new.

So I lean in. I put my mouth to your neck, and run my tongue along the edge of your ear, slow, because I already know what it will do.

Your eyes go darker. You swallow.

That’s all. But I saw it, and you know I saw it, and you set a sachet down without quite the steadiness you had a minute ago.

Then you even the score. You slide your knee between mine and press — not a question anymore, a dare. Do you want to leave? You hold it there and hold my eyes, letting me feel exactly how little would need to happen.

I think about the bathroom at the back, past the counter. How close it is. How little it would take.

Then I think about the walk to yours, five minutes, and how we wouldn’t make it — how it would come apart somewhere on the way, in a doorway, against a wall, long before your front door. We both know it.

You’re watching me know it.

Then you find the triangle of skin at the top of my thigh and pinch it through the denim several times, because you know what it does to me — the same way I knew about your ear.

Not fair. None of this is fair.

I don’t move.

I take a sip of coffee I don’t want, and I lay another sachet down instead.

You breathe out, slow, and I understand I’ve won something, though neither of us could say what.

We could leave. We don’t. The cups give our hands somewhere to be that isn’t across the table.

I could end this. One word. Five minutes of not making it.

I smile, and lay down another sachet instead.