Sometimes we tear each other limb from limb.

You claw at my skin and I ravage your neck. You press into me with the weight of good, sturdy love, but it’s really less of a pressing and more so a violent collision that leaves us both panting, reeling, screaming, lusting after each other long into the night.

These are the exhibitions of chaotic passion that leave the house in ruin, disarranged and disheveled. A bra hangs on the coatrack alongside our inhibitions. The sheets are in the kitchen. The porch light is still on at 8 a.m. because we fell asleep on the living room floor without closing up for the night.

We love this sweet ruckus. We love the consensual violence of the glorious f*cking we can neither postpone nor rein in. Our bodies were made for colliding and we do it well.

But…

There are also times when we slow…down. When we ease in. When we place careful kisses, delicate and sweet, and savor the feeling of velvet flesh upon supple lips. When we make the time for my hands and yours to explore the skin we often forget.

Give me five minutes with the inside of your thighs. Give me an hour to wrap my arms around you and pull your back to my front and to linger my kisses beneath your ear as you giggle and sigh and press back into me.

There are times when it’s best to shut out the noisy cacophony of the world outside, lace our fingers through each other’s fingers and let the heavy weight of the world hang on the coatrack for a while. In these times, the only weight we need to bear is the weight of my body or yours, one atop the other, gently rocking back and forth as much for the dance of it as for the love we make. I know you sometimes hate that term—making love—but I have to tell you, sometimes there’s no other way to put it.

Because in our slow surrender we make something from nothing—no…we manifest love from lust. We transform the gravity we feel from each other into a magnetism that seems to attract all that is good in the world to us. Our love is alchemy. Our sex is beyond sex. Even when it is quiet, mild, sensuous, and languid.

I will say, though—you don’t have to be in love, to make love…you know? You need only a hunger for the finer things in life and the patience to appreciate them fully. Two bodies drawn together by lust are just as capable as ancient lovers of drawing out the Selah, the incantation of reverent pause, of exhale, of savoring.

Savor your lover. Love them to pieces.

As I do with you. As we do when a diffuse and snowy light finds its way lazily into the room where we wake up on opposite sides of the bed, drawn together in our waking like boats that drift on a placid lake and eventually end up bumping together merrily in the fog of an autumn morning. That soft light brings a softness into us, and it pervades our delicate fingers which meander delicate skin which wraps our delicate bodies still tender from dreaming.

You nestle into the hem of my arm and your hair paints my neck and my chest in auburn. And all the while your fingers trace tiny circles on my stomach. And there’s a pressure from your hips into mine as your leg makes its way over the top of me. The fire grows steadily in the hearth, though still, it does not lap at the flue nor char the brick. Ours a steady flame but not overeager.

Slowly, we grow hotter for each other. Slowly, I swell and you swell and we press together with more honest weight until we’re so close we might as well merge. But even still…even still, it’s slow. You climb atop me, kissing me everywhere, your hands and mine easy and playful and caressing.

And then you guide me in, into your heart and your body at once, and it’s the warmth that overcomes both of us, sending a chill up my spine and a sway into my hips, sending your eyes back in your head as a moan escapes your lips. One. Inch. At. A. Time.

Slowly and unhurriedly and savoring every single millisecond of the whole experience. You lower your chest onto my chest and your skin enlivens my skin. There is so much of you to grab onto, so much of you I want to dance with. You touch me and you touch yourself, and I watch you do it and it swells my heart. Even if we were not in love, it would swell my heart. But we are…we very much are in love. I am very much in love with you.

You whisper into my ear how good it all feels and I bring your forehead to my lips and kiss you long and with an exhale to match the sigh that comes from you as I do it. Our pleasure is mounting, rising higher and higher, this particular pleasure not needing the greedy escalation of intensity that sometimes pushes us over the edge.

And we climb up and up and up, the pinnacle of our pleasure now within view and our bodies eager and present and alive. Oh, we are so alive. And with so much stamina left for what remains of our journey, we make easy work of climbing higher and higher. With your eyes locked in mine, I stare into the windows of your soul and it brings me to smiling, because, there you are. There you are on top of me, and we’re swaying and rocking and the world sways and rocks with us. And we arrive. The bells toll and we have died into each other, a quiet, peaceful death, but nonetheless ecstatic and beyond words. I could never explain that feeling we find together, so I won’t soil it with trying. But you’ve been there. I know you have. So there’s no need to really even say it.

We drift away, carried by thermals up and up and up, but our fingers are still intertwined and we do not drift away from each other. We float, more so, and we float together, the ocean beneath and all around us, the salty sweat of passion like the sea breeze drifting through our hotel window in Seattle. It makes it all seem as though nothing else that will happen today is as important as the good work we’ve already done.

No, Love, nothing else matters quite as much as what we’ve already done together. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That’s what we’re all after. The bliss, the connection, the depth, and the pleasure.

What more could we want from this goddamned beautiful life?

~