I had been gone too long.
There was nothing to say in return. Just a moment when I looked at his spirit and he knew I knew my spirit and I knew he knew I knew.
We were laying on the extended bed (if you could call it that, it seemed rather like a large seat for an obese person). For the two of us though, it was enough to lay, with legs entangled, hearts close together, and an intense feeling of something else we should be doing but would rather not be.
The rhythmic movement of the train over tracks accompanied our blood pulses. It seemed enough that we laid together, although it normally wouldn’t have been, not in the past. Ada would have needed more… a shirt disappeared… an arm falling asleep that needed relief… or a promise that tomorrow would be the same or better.
But just now, the only thing she needed was Edin to relax himself so much that she couldn’t feel any tension in their need for each other.
And for that man who kept peering around the corner to go away.
Just when she felt that they might drift away together with her head on his tickling chest and her hair trailing waspishly in his face, the man crept ever closer. She had never seen him, but that didn’t mean she trusted him.
Suddenly she felt the cold sweet glass of a bottle of gin against her lips encouraging her to forget those worries that would take her away from pleasure. She needed to move on, sluggishly, but as she always slept naked when heavy blankets would envelope her, she pulled a long, black, pin-stripped dress that would hide her curves against a man who needed no reminder.
Racing throughout the train without a purpose, because where could you hide on a train against a man intended to find you? In many places we find a place to hide ourselves, behind heavy burgundy curtains, yet the threat of the man interrupts our happiness. Until there’s no further to go.
And there he finds us, our final resting place, on a cramped bed with my head on his chest and his hands on the top of my back and our muscles tense enough to find at least a dozen more civil wars.
Surprisingly, his smile seems slightly nonthreatening. He has questions to ask that we can easily answer. And then he disappears.
I breathe out. I’m safe. Edin is still tense, with those wrinkles on his forehead that I tell him will never go away.
Movement that I can’t stop.
Edin protects his manhood, but what is a manhood without your heart, as it is being stabbed, drilled, gored by his impossibly large knife? What use is your love then?
What use am I when I can only scream… in my safety?