tender is the night

it was just past midnight on the road between Sanremo and Cannes, she rested against me in the back of a black taxi with the windows down and the lights of the Riviera flashing past. her head in my lap, my arm around her waist, her mind on the road.

her lips tasted of coconut and lime and flecks of salt from the French sea, her eyes a glassy blue and her cheeks warm. she leant across me with intention, pulling her hair behind her ear, resting her head in my lap with her neck exposed. her body would ignite sensing my lips on her skin, her pulse quickening, her arms clinging to me with longing.

her hands in my hair, her eyes rolling back on fire, the way I whispered her name into her ear and the way she was careless and cool, everything I had ever desired.

we spent the summer drinking red by the beach until we couldn't laugh any longer and began to cry. I was in love with the way she laughed, the way we laughed and the way she smiled on the nights that we danced in the square by the church. I was in love with the way we kissed against the walls of the Castello, the way she squeezed my hand under the table and the way that we couldn't seem to let each other go.

I was a kite dancing in a hurricane and there was nothing in the world that dried faster than my tears. I was at her mercy and she knew it, playing with the idea of us for months knowing that I would never be accepted, knowing that it would never work, always keeping me there but never choosing me.

yet it was the way that her embrace calmed fires in my heart, the way she looked at me with yearning, the way that I loved her and I thought she loved me despite being worlds apart. the way we endured the nights of cold, the days of bleeding and the moments of silence which defined us as lovers in the shadows.

it was the way that my heart was still fighting my fate, the way that my mind remembered every, single, moment. and the way that I kept calling and calling but nobody answered. it was the way that I couldn't bare to keep saying goodbye and although time was running out, everything still somehow felt okay in her arms.

because it was always her, because I hoped it would always be me, and it because it was about us now, and nobody else.