After the locks click and hum, and the windows begin to frost, we still sit, holding hands across the gear shift. Your hand is balanced on top of the shaft, fingers curled around my own. The sleekness of your skin against mine reminds me...
***
Earlier - perhaps in the restaurant after the show, snuggled against one another in the booth - our hands found each other and began to tease. I started to stroke your wrist, to emphasize a point, and then traced your palm and the web of skin between your finger and thumb when you responded. Your eyebrows arched when you countered what I had said, but you didn't stop speaking. By the time you had finished your argument, your fingers were creeping underneath the cuff of my jacket, tickling the soft part of my wrist. You smiled when I took a breath and collected my thoughts; your fingers had found the tender spaces between mine, and were mimicking an imagined coupling as I tried to speak.
***
The windows are fully frosted now, and the glow coming from the dashboard console throws a quirky reddish light on our faces. You push my hand toward me, and mid-sentence, brush my knuckles lightly against the fabric of my blouse over my breasts. The texture of the knit and the pressure against my nipples stalls my speech, makes my breath hitch momentarily, and then I continue telling you my thoughts on the show:
***
In the middle of an epic Act II, our fingers had become tangled up. You had leaned over to whisper something silly – perhaps how the sax player's love life was as messy as his rendition of the song – and put your hand over mine, as if to anchor yourself to me physically in the hopes that it would anchor us together mentally. I turned my hand over beneath yours and pressed into your fingertips; we stayed locked together until the next dance break, and then began tracing the curves of fingertips and knuckles, slipping about one another in the darkness of the orchestra section while the tap dances and duets rolled across the stage. At the first blackout, a mere hour and ten into the act, you plunged your fingers between mine, at once clasping my hand and penetrating it. The woman in front of me, with the frozen-in-time hairdo, turned around at my gasp.
***
Using my hand, my fingers, almost like a tool, you trace the baseball diamond of bare skin above my breasts, running around the frame created by my blouse, jacket and scarf. My fingers tingle as you run them across my collarbone, and I break off in the middle of a sentence when you let my hand go and begin to stroke just above my breasts with your own finger. The silence surprises you: until now, I've been a marvelously self-conscious actress, and it is only now that I slip and lose track of my words. Your hand stops moving, hovering above my blouse. I can feel the heat of your palm, hear your breathing, before you ask,
"Should I go on?"
There is no need to ask whether you mean to go on with your analysis of the show or with our lovemaking: they have become lost in each other, any distinguishing features stroked and talked away. In response, I arch my back and push my breasts into your palm. There is a moment, just before your hand molds to me, when your mouth goes to form a word and cannot find the proper shape to take. Seeing this, I smile, and only then does your hand relax against me. As your lips form a round growl at the softness of my flesh under the blouse and bra, your fingers curve in, closing around first the base of my breast and then sliding gently, carefully, to circle my nipple. Before my eyes close in a clench that mirrors the clench of my thighs at this new tease, I see your wrist bend up, the pianist's delicate bend that means you are playing.
