The grasses are overgrown and wildflowers have grown wilder than they ought to be allowed. Threatening, stinging potency. Taller than your head. The smell is palpable. Medicinal and dizzying. The bees are drunk. You could get lost in this meadow. And this is what you want sometimes.
You can still see the house from the center of it. The window, with the shower steam clinging to the pane and thick drops streaking down the inside of it. Wet and dripping. It stays contained. But some can smell it on you. You smell it on each other.
He has a peaceful life. He has made a home. He's built a life. You will sleep in the bedroom on the other side of the other side of the wall. There is some physical separation.
The reunion was wrought. Hot and troubling for the both of you. Your fear of someone else sensing the palpable confrontation kept you from being too in the moment. Which was a good boundary to have.
Tonight you will do drugs and gather around a fire in the wonderland of strewn punk art. The lawn of terrors and delights. With abandoned buildings and many, many corners to fold your shame into. You both know it could happen if you let it.
So here is the fire, and here is the gathering, and all is going well until you feel the prickle inside beckoning you to explore the dark corners. Little Jack Horny. Curdling and weighing. Off you go to see and sense.
You're wearing a short dress. So short the hem tickles your upper thigh like a foul uncle. He is not allowed to look at you, it seems. But as you wander away, you feel his gaze follow you like a thick plume of smoke, or a heavy moist cloud. He rises with a drink in his hand and stalks you into the dark like a mesmerized zombie. The drugs have made it so the earlier invisible boundary is showing chinks in the fence. Where the air can get out. He slips through a hole big enough for him to squeeze through.
The building is an old farmhouse. The space is wide and there is dirt and debris on the floor. Old rusted tools line tables along the walls. There are many instruments. You stand in the center of it and wait.
His dark, hunched, shameful silhouette appears in the doorway. You cannot see the eyes but feel them. Bass thumps in the near distance. Loud voices and laughter make a wall of sound that closes the chink in the fence you both climbed through.
A sliver of moonlight penetrates the broken window and illuminates your body as the shadows pool in the hollows of your face. Like a sleeping faceless doll. It needs to be this way. You unzip the front of you. The small, swollen globes of your breasts meet to make a well he wants to curl his tongue into. Crickets whirr. Cicadas scream. You stop the zipper below your navel.
He hesitates. Takes a drink. Looks over his shoulder at the congregation. They are talking with one another boisterously. He considers turning back. But when he glances back and sees you re-zipping your dress he moves towards you.
He stands in front of you. You both smell like sweat and dirt from this filthy place. Everything is out of sorts and unclean. There are no clean lines. Annihilation. Converging. Plants have been given license to swallow old, rusted machinery. Toys are strewn about. Weather-worn stuffed animals and shaved baby doll heads with unblinking eyes propped upon the antennae of old television sets. Clock hands point to roman numbers upside down. Time is a suggestion. He reaches a shaking hand towards your groin. Up beneath the hem of your dress. His thick finger prods your swollen lips. He pulls it away and lifts it to his teeth, your wetness shimmering in the moonlight. This is the permission.
He drops his drink on the floor and lunges his tongue into your mouth, grasping the back of your head with one hand and the small of your back with the other. The mouth hunger expressed from both sides awakens the south hunger and you feel him grow hard as a crowbar against your pelvis. He reaches a hand behind and up under your dress and finds your wet slit. He presses into the hole knuckle deep and rather violently pushes in and out of the tight hole. You are amazed at the thickness of one finger. The strength of it. Just one of five. Of ten. And you fear and thirst for what is to come.