Meantime

We sway horizontally, caught in a jumble of East and West; of night and day. I see you in soft focus, shining and blurred around the edges, where your red-eye meets my red eyes – our last flickers of light before we finally crawl into the improbably seductive embrace of a cheap motel duvet.

In the city that never sleeps, we are united in our treachery – our muffled sigh is success, not surrender, and when we drift off together for the first time, it feels like something we’ve already been doing for most of our lives.

Hours later, sunlight floods through the paper-thin curtains, bringing with it disorientation and a numbing fatigue. I roll into you, but the jut of your hipbone limits me to a half-turn; defeated for now, I lie there, beached, and you push fingers through my rumpled hair. I close my eyes again, happy to let the waves wash over me.

I clear my throat, not trusting my voice to carry unaided.

“Last night was…”

“…yeah! Not just last night. From the moment you kissed me in the diner downstairs…”

Suddenly I want to play back every single memory while it’s fresh. I’m greedy for them – it’s impatience that should take months to build, but as I scroll through each mental image in turn I’m struck once again by the way our time seems to warp and flex around us, drawing forward nostalgia and extending out to some invisible horizon the impact of your lips on my skin.

Lost in mental hypersensitivity, it takes me a few seconds to circle back and notice your hand sliding around my cock. When you whisper in my ear, I don’t have to open my eyes to see your lips curling up at the corners.

“Well one part of you seems to be on New York time…”

It didn’t feature in any of our long-distance phone calls, this close-range hand job. It’s not that first fuck yesterday morning, or the way you made me strip for you beforehand, exposing myself to your poker player’s gaze. It’s not the way we spilled out of our taxi and up the stairs a few hours later, foregoing dinner to make my bed rattle against the wall for close to an hour, with sweat pooling and shimmering around us.

No, this feels more like the sort of ordinary, pre-dawn ritual that we might have in another, extraordinary life together. I don’t even marvel at the easy skill with which you touch me; it’s clear that you knew my body well before you first spread your hands across it. I focus only on breathing. I try to match my cadence to the rhythm of your fingers on my cock, sucking the air deep into my lungs as you stroke up over the head, before letting it out again each time you squeeze back down to the base.

I have no idea how long it lasts. Time feels immaterial, even as its final precious grains continue to slip away from us. Your fingers are light and slender, but they grip my cock with a strength and purpose that I find inexplicably arousing. The coaxing is cosmetic – as I’m jolted closer and closer to orgasm, I feel helpless to slow what turns out to be a single-minded, surgical assault.

The room is locked in a lazy spin. It swings back round as I start to thrust into your fist, and locks in place a few seconds before I coat your fingers and my stomach in cum. I watch my cock twitch in your hand, and struggle to remember how it felt not to do that with you.

I pull you close to me and we lie in silence for a while. There is everything and nothing left to say, but with the sun rapidly chasing us towards a premature farewell, we opt to let the warmth of our bodies speak for us. We pour ourselves into each other, charging and colouring the memories that will help to keep us in sync, long after we’ve stretched the physical bond between us back to its 6,000 mile length.

Later I’ll walk away from the hotel, letting it play out a few feet at a time. I won’t look back.

I won’t need to.