Communication Skills Are For The Wicked

Hovering.

I was hovering over him like some kind of ravenous feline. Both legs on the sides of his hips. My torso bent far enough to see the sweat at the top of his chest, just outside the shirt's beginning. Still, I wasn't within the range to wake him. Somewhere in between far too close and just not close enough.

It had been hours and if I were still human my arms would have gave in by this time.

The only thing peeling my eyes and nostrils away from the sight and smell of the skin above his collar bone was the way his pupils darted around the back of his eyes from time to time.

I really hate saying it, but even in his sleep he was never as safe as I promised.

First, it was the heat that hit my mouth the closer I became. I managed to shut my lips the moment I reached his neck, but I didn't refrain from letting the two meet. Then, it was the way the same spot tasted. My tongue slid across what I knew would be the easiest place to accomplish what I despised doing the most. Times like these I wrote myself off as a masochist. Maybe being this close to the one thing I wanted to do the most was my own form of self gratification. I was one swift movement away from tasting him.

I couldn't kill him, even if I wanted to.

Every time I get this close, which is happening more often than it should be, those baby blues snap open and present me with the same look I was given the night I met him. And every time he says nothing when I break the redundant bond our eyes make, practically gliding off his stomach and back onto my feet. Nine times out of ten, I storm into what could be considered my bedroom until I feel the sun rising from outside the walls and crawl in that damn wooden box for hours that seem much longer than sixty minutes a piece.

I saw myself as a broken record when he chimed in, involuntarily reversing my feet's well known track.

Two words, one contraction, one sentence. "I'm sorry" sounded a lot different coming from his voice box instead of the cheap ink pens I buy regularly. The ones I swear I will keep up with but never do. Ten times out of ten, he left the same note taped to my room's door. Beginning to the most recent, the handwriting is no more or less sloppy from the first time it happened. I spend days inside the wooden box, calling it by any other name gives it more glory than it deserves, trying to figure out why he apologizes so much.

"What?"

The hesitation plus the look on his face equaled him not understanding why I didn't already know the answer to that.

"..for waking up again. I know it's a lot easier if I just stay asleep when you-"

"Don't. Asleep or not, I'm a monster not a thief. I'm not stealing from you," flowed with grace and a hint of dark humor in my head, turning sour when it opened my jaw.

I have come to the point in my after life where I can see words forming in a human's eyes before they speak them. As if the same muscles used to form expressions wrote out their next comments on white boards above their heads. Patrick wanted to repeat the first two words for the second time and out of pure habit.

And just before the door met its match and reached the swing's loud belligerent end, he said it again.