It is dark in this hallway. In the foyer of my parents house. My hand is on the wall, feeling for a light switch.  Your hand is on my hand. You are behind me. Covering my back with your front. My hand with your hand. My mouth, with your mouth and missing. Searching with lips stretched thin. Over my face. Your breath is warm and smells like scotch. I am afraid of you. I want you more.

Or want you to want me more.

I am actively mistaking your desire for affection; your hand on the back of my neck, on my throat, my breast, for love. My mouth on the edges of your mouth, open, the edges hard, as if preparing to bite into something – an apple – but freezing before teeth. Keep quiet. Embellish breathy sighs. They are sleeping two floors above us.

Rhythm, sway to the way I want you. A rising. A suspended fluttering. A fearful fall.

Uncomfortable and elated and cured by the moment you’re body comes inside mine. An addictive engulfment. One that will charter whole courses of my life.

Give me that. But wait. Want me more. Then come, create anew a want in me you will not return. I want you to want me, love me, love me more.

You are older. Your hair smells unwashed. Musty. It fits in between my fingers.

I stop searching for the switch. Your face is on my neck – in my hair. I am reaching for your ear with my teeth and not finding it. Somewhere, always in the back of my mind flutters that fear of inadequacy. I have been with other men. Boys. But never with trust or any real affection. I feigned it at the time, for my own sake. I am seventeen years old. I want you to want me but more, to love me.

Many men do not a lover make. Affection is the first step in how to touch another well. I do not know this yet. Do not realize you will walk away and think nothing of me. That I will skip away a girl still breakable.

The air is cool. I have kept my shoulders bare. They are peppered with goose bumps you bite at. Kiss.

We are tired. Your mouth moves, systematically now, from my neck to my mouth. My shoulder to my neck and around again. Your hands are on my waist, my thighs, the space between my legs and I guard against your touch there. I want you to want me, to guard me. To want to wait. For me.

You are tired. Pushing at the hem of my dress, moving it upwards. Your palm on my bare skin. Goose pimpled where before it was painstakingly smooth. I am increasingly cold.

They’ll hear us, I whisper with each upward inch my hemline makes. I touch your hand, your mouth is on my mouth. If this were a romance we would smile as I playfully pushed you out the door. You would stand on the threshold and want me more for it. You would love me more for it.

This is not a romance. You will leave, frustrated. I will tip toe, elated, up the stairs and lie under covers, heart pulsing, mind recapitulating those moments between kisses where, mouth to mouth, hot breath hung between us. I will smooth over the lines of my body, smell my hair, pick leaves of grass from it and fall asleep excited to awake in four hours time, loving the pain of my exhaustion and performing our secret like a lover.