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i won't be rising from these ashes

The yellow traffic lines are beginning to blur when her cell phone rings. Her forehead wrinkles as she contemplates who could be calling at this hour, but she leans over and reaches for the phone, trying to keep the car between the lines. She recognizes the number.

Her lips purse, a rosebud soured. Her fingers thump quickly over the steering wheel. Flipping her phone open, she presses it to her ear, letting her hair fall over her fingers.

“Jim?”

-

-

It’s not like they don’t know.

They do. Every press of lips, every intake of breath, every sensation of fingers trailing over heated flesh is a conscious decision. Every clench of the jaw against the names of those absent, a hiss through the teeth that they conceal even though it doesn't matter, even though it's obvious. They know. There is a heat through them and around them and in them that is more than this, more than contact and touch and feeling. A reflection in the eyes, and it isn’t solace.

It is pity.

They pity each other. They pity themselves.

-

-

The end of her cigarette is a lunar eclipse, a slow-burning ember against the dark night. She inhales, thinking of carcinogens and alveoli; she thinks of ash and coals and tar, these black things that make up her body. He shifts beside her, an orange glow illuminating his back. She watches his chest expand and contract with his breathing, watches the shine of light on his hair. Maybe it’s darker than she thought. Maybe he’s shorter, and his nose more sharpened.

But it’s not. He’s not.

He clears his throat. It’s a sound like gravel, like regret, and his voice scrapes. It's sandpaper between her bones.

“You shouldn’t smoke in bed,” he says. His fingernail scrapes slowly against the sheet and she remembers the burn of his stubble between her thighs, against the nape of her neck as he pressed her down into the bed. His fingernail scratches against the starch of the fabric and she remembers feeling every thread between her grasping fingers, the cotton hot and moist beneath her mouth. He'd come and she hadn't, and there was something justified in it. This was taking what you could get.

“I know,” she says. There are a few things she shouldn’t do.

It’s dark in the hotel room, save for the fluorescent light seeping through the crack in the curtains. He’d held her against that wall, there; the picture frame had cut into her shoulder, pressing down, a triangle point of pressure in her skin. She’d wondered if he knew he was hurting her, but he didn’t ask and she didn’t tell and she’d have let him fuck her there if they hadn’t made it to the bed first.

The white sheet she’d had tucked under her arms is loosening, slipping away from her chest. Shadows are blue-black, wrinkles cutting the material into slits, and this is a shroud she’s covered in. It slips further. Her nipple is dark in the blackened light.

The cigarette tastes like ash. His fingers brush hers as he reaches over and takes it from her, squeezing the filter between his fingertips. The paper makes a faint crinkling noise as he breathes in; the end burns brighter.

“I hate cigarettes,” he says. He rolls it between his fingers contemplatively. It makes a scratching noise as he stubs it out in the ashtray on the bedside table.

She doesn’t say anything, just turns her body, letting her legs hang over the side of the bed, the corner of it fitting against her knees. She’s mostly bare, and it’d be poetic in its dark little way if she could look down on herself right now, all gray shadows and moonlit skin. Her eyelids are falling.

“We shouldn’t have,” she’s saying, but then his hand is warm and big against her spine, his fingers running over the bumps, the bones like soundwaves—

(“Jan, Jan! You are the man! … wo… man.”

“Michael, did you need something?”

“You know, Jan, sometimes I think you should—”

“Michael.”

“Jan.”

“Do you—Michael, please listen to me—”)

—and she leans back into it, because when she doesn’t see his face, she pretends. She imagines he might be doing the same as the whorls and whirls of his fingerprints press into her skin. She imagines him leaving inky blots across her back, marks of this mistake that wasn’t really a mistake at all.

When you’re making a mistake, you don’t know you’re doing it. When you’re making a mistake, you’re sorry. Neither of those applies, and she breathes deeply, letting the idea swirl around in her lungs.

Maybe they shouldn’t have. Maybe that’s the truth of it.

Maybe she hates herself a little, and maybe he does too.

Maybe that’s okay.

She swallows, tasting the smoke lingering on her tongue, and then turns to face him. He watches her with dark eyes, his hand fading back across the sheet toward himself, and the words spill from her mouth like she’s brainwashed, like she has no other thought than this.

“Shouldn’t smoke in bed,” she says, repeating him.

He turns toward her, shifting onto his side. The sheet slides and cuts diagonally across his abdomen, his hipbone illuminated in the light from the street outside.

“Yeah,” he says, and it’s a long minute before he reaches across her and grabs a cigarette from the packet on her table. “Yeah, probably not.” He lights it.

The smoke curls into a fog above their heads. She thinks of blackness, of ashes like snowflakes, of regret. She thinks of the warmth of his hand against her spine. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.

She sighs.

(It won’t happen again.)