In the bathroom mirror, I study the inscriptions he’s left on me.  The obvious ones, that anyone can see, the more subtle ones that maybe only my eyes detect.  And the other, deeper ones, etched on my bones.

I see his desire, urged on by my own insistent whispers, written everywhere.  Lips scraped raw from his teeth.  They’re red and plumped from his late-night stubble and our kisses that sometimes feel more like transfusions.  I see hair, smoothed straight hours ago, showing evidence of full surrender to his hands and lips and other places. I had curled my hair softly around him, head bowed in supplication to say here, take everything.  Eyes open, I try to see what he sees and I think it is softness; eyes closed, I see his skin stretched across his shoulders.  Half-lidded, I let it all blur into movements and breathing and something so deep I can’t name it, but I want to write it or paint it or mold it out of clay so I can point to it and say this is what we are.

When I creep back into the bedroom, he’s stretched out on the bed, taking full advantage of my absence.  I sit in the window seat and study him.  Half on his side, one arm flung over his head and one across my pillow, the sheets are tangled up around his knees.  His body, delightfully foreign at first, is becoming addictively familiar.  So impossibly long, he manages to be effortlessly graceful, a form an artist dreams to put to canvas or form from clay.  My artist’s eye says start with a cone 10 clay body, requiring high heat and time to mature.  Start at the hip, use a loop tool to define the lines of David, cutting away the excess.  Take a wooden rib in hand, a small one, and start smoothing, smoothing to make skin over muscle, like slip over bisque.  That’s how I would start to make him my own creation.

The lover’s eye takes over and it’s function over form now, and I see strong hands, broad shoulders, a soft matting of hair in a line down his stomach and lower.  So long, I was blinded by the manners of a gentle man, a devilish twinkle, a schoolboy sweetness in unbuttoned collars and loosened ties.  Without knots and buttons and pleats, he’s leather-hard and masculine in the most elemental way.  It’s an intoxicating, mysterious thing that I try to define with my fingertips and tongue, touching and tasting his skin as though I could identify the exact alchemy in this potion.  I’ve taken up lungs full of the air that hovers a millimeter over his skin, buried my face in his hair, pressed my nose and lips into the middle of his back as I lay behind him, inching closer.  He stays distinctly himself, though close to me, vibrating across the bead of flux, that unnamed force that lies between and fuses us.

There is no sign of me anywhere on him, no stray hair or teeth marks, no girlish tattoo that marks my claim there, only the deep rise and fall of his chest.  I watch the cords of his neck pulse and twitch slightly with his breathing as he rolls onto his stomach, revealing the broad, smooth expanse of his back.  Outside of a light sprinkling of freckles on his shoulders, his skin is unmarred; he has no scars, no birthmarks, no markings of any kind.  Like a stretched canvas, like a blank page, with no reason to be without paint or charcoal or ink, I feel an overwhelming need. 

I curl up on the bed as gently as I can and I take him fully into my mouth while he’s still soft, holding him there, matching my breathing to his in a strange attempt to find that perfect connecting point where all his mysteries are revealed.   I want to wake him, have him come back to me only.  Not the coming day or the light or the pillow under his head, only me.  Before his mind can question or his eyes open to something that pulls him too quickly out of dreaming, I press my tongue to him, thinking, stay.  He stirs, stretches, moans, and reaches his hands into my hair.  He says my name and takes his hands from my hair to uncurl my legs and bring me around and we shift and settle and continue in time with each other.  This we can do, perfectly, and it leaves no marks on the perfect canvas I’m stretching, preparing to take on color. 

There is only a momentary question, a blink of hesitation when I tell him what I want to do.  Whatever his thoughts, he doesn’t deny me, but lies waiting for me, patient, quiet, open.

I gather paints from my desk, picking colors that feel like me.  I take brushes, water, and a towel into the bedroom and ask him to lie still, on his stomach and he does.  Only the bedside lamp is lit, giving me just enough light to see and enough dark to be silent.  I line up my colors on the nightstand, ask if he’s comfortable, and when he says yes, I pull off my nightshirt and begin.

I sit on the edge of the bed to mix up Manganese Blue and Chroma Violet and while I mix I think only of the time I lost him, when he was gone and when he returned.  I straddle his hips with my palette in hand and I mix and mix until I know I have the color of my heartbreak and I load my brush full of it, as much as it will hold.  The water is warm, soothing I hope, but I don’t ask and he stays silent as I touch the brush to his left shoulder.  I start with a swirling pattern of strokes, this heartbreak is blue and round and I hang it on his shoulder.  Too far for him to reach or see but it swirls out to the very edge of his shoulder blade, shaded and dark.  The circle stretches to an elliptical form, like the pattern of dust and gravity around Jupiter.  I dip the brush in water, change to violet, and paint dots of my longing, held suspended in the blue mist.  I sit back against his bottom and think that’s enough.  Enough heartbreak for both of us.

Now it’s time for cadmium yellow light and turquoise green because that is our laughter.  Before and now, this is the lightness that buoys us up.  It starts at the base of his neck and radiates out in a wheel pattern to his right shoulder.  Interlocking spokes connect and it’s a circle and a web and a wheel of turquoise green, rolling, in motion.  In between come yellow spirals and bubbles, bright spots of giddiness and coaxing and I smooth these with my fingers so I can feel each moment when we were saved by laughter.  And still, he stays silent underneath me.  I don’t know if he understands, but what matters is he’s happy to just let me do this, satisfy this need.

I look at the paints on the table and think what color is my devotion?  Is there a color that feels like possession, adoration, and surrender?  There is no one color that can say these things and I’ll have to mix several until it feels right.  There is Venetian Red Clay that looks solid and immovable like sun-baked earth, hard enough to make bricks to make a house to live in and last for centuries.  I want to add Alizarine Crimson, a deep red, the color of real blood, to a color simply called ‘Flesh’ because this is no flight of fancy or adolescent dream.  It is real and goes to every cell from the core of me all the way out.  My human body is part of my devotion, my offering, and the shape of my devotion is like wings.  They span the width of his back, starting underneath his shoulder blades, the place where your hands go to lift a child from his knees to your heart.

And love?  Love is Permanent Deep Green, the color of leaves in high summer.  Love lies at the small of his back, the fulcrum of his body.  Love rests at the midpoint and love is shaped like a wave in full swell.  I mix in some Sea Green, like foam, and it floats on top of this wave, splashing over my devotion.  I think laughter lives here, too, so the wave travels up to crash against it.  I lean back and examine my love and my devotion, my laughter and my heartbreak and feel something still missing.  I take Cobalt Blue, mix it thick and deep and set my brush down to use my fingers.  Between Permanent Deep and Sea Green, between the depth of love so deep there is no bottom and the crest of love that splashes over everything, I press my fingerprints.  I press them firmly, one by one onto his skin.  This is no temporary sky blue that can shift and turn gray, no periwinkle blue that can fade and vanish into the night.  This is cobalt: lustrous, magnetic and strong.  This is the color I am, the color of my fingerprints on his skin.

I sit back for the last time, pleased with my work. His entire back is covered and there isn’t room for any more.  I tell him I’m done and he rises up on his elbows to look back at me.  He wants to see what I’ve done to him, the marks I’ve made on him.  I say it’s beautiful…it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.