Dinner with friends in Amsterdam.
Peter Solarz

Andulka
Sade Olutola
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oozey mess
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Janaina Medeiros
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Mike Driver
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@dewoestijnvos
Dinner with friends in Amsterdam.
Beauty is power. A smile is a sword.
The Emptiness You Leave Behind
Nine o’clock on Saturday morning. Light slants through the half-open curtains in dusty beams, exactly as it has done for all these years. You are still lying beside me, your eyes closed beneath a forehead that has finally smoothed out in sleep. Your breathing is deep and steady, a rhythm I thought I knew by heart, yet now it feels strangely foreign. The sheets wrap around us with the scent of last night: the heavy damp of sweat, the stale warmth of sleep, and the faint bitter aftertaste of our final conversation. My fingers hover a few centimeters above your shoulder. I want to feel the warmth of your skin one last time, the soft hairs on your chest, but I don’t touch you. I know this is the last image I will keep of you: vulnerable and still mine.
After today, you will wake up somewhere else. There is someone else for whom you now hold your breath, someone you give more to than to the remains of us. It can happen, you said last night, coolly. As if love were a weather condition that simply overtakes you, like an unexpected rain shower for which you could not find shelter.
I have to be strong now. I repeat it like a mantra, a prayer to a god I don’t believe in. I know it will be a long time before the echo of your voice fades from the walls of this house. But deep in my bones I hope that one day I will be free, just as indifferent and light-footed as you already are. I wait for love to burn itself out, while my chest tightens with every breath, as if the fabric has become too small for my heart.
Two o’clock in the afternoon. The living room, once our safe haven, has turned into a soulless battlefield of cardboard boxes and open suitcases. Your things are stacked neatly by the door, almost offensively efficient. I walk past the pile and let my fingertips glide over the handle of your largest suitcase. The leather feels cold and stiff. Nausea rises in me, a sick knot in my stomach that crawls toward my throat, but I swallow it down. I force myself to smile when you ask if I want more coffee. You look at me, but you no longer see me; you are already looking straight through me toward your new life. I am learning it already, this being strong. My body stands tall, my voice sounds steady, but inside every cell is screaming for mercy.
I stay strong. Just a little longer. Until I no longer love you.
Six o’clock in the evening. The air outside is heavy and golden, a dramatic glow spilling over the rooftops as if the day itself is taking one final bow. You stand in the hallway with your coat on, the collar still half-folded. Your keys jingle softly in your hand, a metallic sound that cuts the silence in two. Well, goodbye, you say. Your voice sounds almost casual, as if this is only a temporary departure, a quick errand to the supermarket. I only nod. We stand there, trapped in the narrow hallway, too close for strangers and too far apart for lovers. You lean forward and plant a kiss on my cheek. It is a dry, almost clinical touch that leaves me colder than the draft slipping under the front door. Then you turn around.
I watch you from the doorway. I follow the line of your back, the strength in your shoulders as you lift the last suitcase into the trunk. The engine starts with a dull rumble and the taillights glow bright red, like two warning signals in the twilight. You drive away without looking back. I remain standing as the cold evening air creeps under my sweater and turns my skin to goosebumps. Why don’t I scream? Why do my eyes stay dry and burning? Maybe this farewell has been rehearsed so many times in my head that the real performance leaves me numb. But this time there is no coming back.
Ten o’clock. The darkness is now complete. The house feels too big, the walls seem to recede while the silence presses toward me. It still smells too much of you here. I am choking on the memory. I grab my jacket from the coat rack and step out into the street, leaving the zipper open against the suffocating feeling. The city breathes a mixture of wet pavement, frying oil, and the sharp scent of cheap tobacco. I walk without purpose, my hands pushed deep into my pockets. All around me life is pulsing: laughing groups of people, the thumping bass from cafés, the carefree joy of a Saturday night. I don’t want to be alone with my own thoughts. Not yet.
In a dark corner of a bar I order a double whisky. The bartender nods at me with a look that sits somewhere between pity and recognition. I drink too fast. The alcohol burns in my throat and spreads an aggressive warmth through my chest, but it doesn’t drive you out. On the contrary. The harder I try to erase your face, the sharper your body forces itself upon my memory. The curve of your back beneath my palms. The way you tilted your hips when I took you from behind, my fingers pressed firmly into your sides, as we moved together in that slow, insistent rhythm. I hear again how you whispered my name, a hoarse sound caught somewhere between pleasure and pain. Your scent, that intoxicating mix of soap and aroused skin, seems to creep back into my nose. I almost feel again how your skin grew damp and electric under my mouth, how your breath caught the moment I found the right spot and you lost yourself to me.
I squeeze my eyes shut and take another sip. Be strong, I command myself. Though the hope is small, I pray that this fierce longing will one day die out. That I will once again be able to look at someone without searching for your mouth, without feeling your hands in every touch. Without thinking about how you laughed when you came: half surprised, drawing deep breaths of air, as if surfacing for the first time.
I am waiting for the day when I no longer love you. Or for the day when I can fill this emptiness with someone else.
Outside, the drizzle has turned into a steady downpour. I walk back through the wet streets, my hair sticking to my forehead and my jacket hanging heavy on my shoulders. The cold water runs down the back of my neck and the drops feel like your fingers: cool, stroking, almost tender. I let it happen. I let the rain touch me in the places where you no longer do. For tonight I surrender. Tomorrow I will pull myself together. Tomorrow I will start building the wall again.
But tonight, in this indifferent city full of strangers, I allow myself to feel how broken I am. How painful and how terribly beautiful it was. How wet and warm and alive you felt in my arms. How deafening is the emptiness you leave behind.
And I keep walking, into the night, until I no longer feel myself.
Under the Light of the Window Frames
The phone call came very early for a Saturday. The light was still thin, barely more than a gray suggestion along the edges of the curtains, and the city lay far away, muffled, as if Amsterdam were sleeping at the bottom of a lake. I had not heard his name in so long that for a moment I thought I had misunderstood. But it was his sister, her voice too small for what it carried, and she said my name as if she didn’t need to say anything else afterward.
She was right. She didn’t need to say anything else.
I stayed lying there. The sheet felt cool against my skin. Outside, a tram leaned into the bend of the Prinsengracht, that familiar metallic hum I had always heard without really listening, and now I could think of nothing else. The city that kept going. The wheels on the rails. The impossible ordinary.
Floriaan. I spoke his name out loud, softly, in the empty apartment. To feel whether he still existed somewhere. Whether there was still a place where the sound of him could live.
I had known him for almost ten years. We had found each other the way men like us usually do: carefully, sideways, through a friend who meant well and pushed too hard. I remember the first evening, a terrace in the Jordaan, the late September light orange and black in the windows across the street. He sat diagonally opposite me and listened more than he spoke, which was rare, and I felt his attention like something solid. A hand that did not touch me but was still there.
After that we spent a lot of time together in the city. That is perhaps the simplest way to say it, but it is not entirely accurate. We walked through the Jordaan on evenings when the cobblestones still held the warmth of the day beneath our feet. We stood on little bridges and looked at the water without saying anything that mattered. We drank beer on the sidewalk with friends and he would laugh then, his head slightly tilted, as if he were observing the conversation from a distance, as if he always stood just outside the center and wanted it exactly that way.
I learned his body without ever fully understanding it. The width of his shoulders. The way he used his hands when he explained something. A scar on his forearm that he never explained, and I never asked, because there were things we both guarded with silence.
That first week after the phone call, I walked. Not to get anywhere, but to escape the stillness. I followed the canals without a plan, looked at my reflection in the water that was always moving, never giving me back completely. The city was brutal in its indifference. Bicycles whizzed past my elbow. People carried flowers, groceries, children on their shoulders. A drunk Englishman laughed so loudly he had to hold on to a lamppost. I stood there like someone looking into a shop window from the street.
It was the fragments that haunted me. Not the great loss, that was too big to grasp, but the loose pieces that suddenly surfaced without warning. The smell of stagnant water and the memory of a bridge where we had stood waiting in the rain, his shoulder against mine. His voice when he explained something he wasn’t sure about himself, that hesitation in it, that willingness not to know. His hand on my shoulder the evening I told him I also fell for men, and how he said nothing, only nodded, and how that nod was worth more than all the words.
But I kept returning to one evening. Over and over, like a record needle falling back into the same groove.
It had been late summer. One of those nights when the heat only loosens after midnight, slow and reluctant, and the city smells of warm brick. We sat on the flat roof of his apartment, reached through a trapdoor he had secretly opened, not officially allowed but never checked. Amsterdam lay stretched out beneath us like a body at rest. The canals glittered. Somewhere in the Pijp a man was singing a drunkard’s song, faint and too far away to make out the words.
He had pulled off his T-shirt and laid it beside him. That was all: a gesture without meaning, just the heat, just comfort. But I saw the line of his back, the hollow above his hip, the play of light and shadow on his skin as he breathed slowly, and something in me grew quiet.
I had seen him without a shirt before. This was different.
We lay next to each other on the warm roofing, my arm almost against his, the heat of his skin noticeable without touch. There was a kind of tension in the air that had nothing to do with a storm, though the sky in the south bulged heavy and dark. I smelled his sweat, his skin, something warm and real that almost broke me in a certain way.
“Do you think it ever gets easier?” he asked.
His voice was low, on the border between sleepiness and seriousness. I turned my head toward him. He was staring up at a plane drifting slowly across the sky, its red light blinking like a question.
“What do you mean?”
“This.” He shrugged, but there was a tension in the movement that said the opposite. “Saying who you are. Without it immediately changing everything.”
I wanted to say something reassuring. But I didn’t know that certainty. “Maybe,” I said finally. “Or maybe it becomes less important.”
He laughed softly, a sound that stayed low, almost to himself. “That sounds like someone who has already accepted it a little.”
I didn’t know if that was true. I only knew that in the warmth of that night, with the city beneath us and his body next to mine, there was no place on earth I would rather be.
My hand moved. So simple, so inevitable. My fingers touched his, a barely noticeable contact, and he didn’t pull away. His hand turned over and his fingers closed around mine, firm, without hesitation, as if he had been waiting. I felt the pressure of his palm, its warmth, the small imperfections of his skin.
We said nothing more. His thumb moved over my knuckles, back and forth, slowly and without hurry, an endless repetition that loosened something in my chest. The city breathed beneath us. Somewhere a boat engine, far away. The blinking light of the plane disappeared behind a cloud.
I could have kissed him. It would have been so simple. Turning my head toward him, bridging the distance that wasn’t large. I felt in everything that he would have allowed it. Maybe more than that. But I lay still, caught in my own hesitation, afraid to change the quality of this moment, to disturb this balance that was so fragile and so exactly right.
And so we stayed lying there, until the night cooled and we went inside without many words.
His sister called a week later. My name was in his phone, she said, and she thought I might want to pick up some things. She barely knew me. The fact that he had kept my name, somewhere in the small memory of his life, was already more than I had expected.
The stairwell smelled of cleaning product. The smell did something to my knees. I took the steps slowly, my hand on the railing, and tried not to think about how many times I had climbed this staircase without thinking about it.
His door stood ajar.
Inside was the silence of someone who was no longer there. Not the silence of absence, but the silence of a presence that had stopped. His coat still hung on the hook. A glass on the table, with a thin line of dust along the rim. A book on the couch, open and spine up, like a bird with broken wings.
I walked around without touching anything. My eyes moved over his belongings, looking for something I couldn’t name. A letter, an explanation, a sign. The room was smaller than I remembered, or maybe the emptiness made it smaller.
Under his bed, not hidden but casually placed, I found a box.
Photos. Loose papers. Concert tickets. My hands moved slowly through the contents, as if every movement could disturb something. And then: a photo of the two of us on that roof.
We lay next to each other, our faces half-squinting in the light, our heads close together. Our hands intertwined, clearly visible, captured by someone who had seen it and said nothing about it. I had not known that anyone had photographed us. I had thought that night belonged only to us.
I sat down on the floor.
My fingers traced the contours of our bodies on the glossy paper. His arm. My hand. What lay between us, visible and real.
Under the photo, folded once, lay a note. Small handwriting, hurried, slanting slightly to the right.
Paul
I don’t know how to say this without ruining everything. Maybe that’s also why I never said it out loud. With you it feels different. Calmer. As if for a moment I don’t have to fight.
I’m afraid that if I speak it, it will disappear. Or that you will disappear.
But it’s already there. You know that too.
I’m sorry that I’m always quiet.
Floriaan.
I read it several times. Each time again, as if the words might shift, might have a different meaning if I read them from another angle. But they stayed the same. So simple and so irreparable.
My throat was dry. My chest felt tight, full, as if something were pushing against the inside that was too big to contain. I thought of that night on the roof. Of his hand around mine. Of the space I had left between what I felt and what I did.
I could have turned around. I could have said his name. I could have begun.
The anger came first, fast and hot. At him, because he had waited. At myself, because I had done the same. But the anger had no foundation. Beneath it lay something else, softer and much heavier. Something that had no name but had always been there, in the way I had looked at him when he wasn’t looking, in the way I had remembered his voice while pretending I wasn’t.
I sat down on his bed. The sheet was cool, smooth, without imprints. I laid my hand flat on the fabric and thought of nothing, or of everything at once; it is hard to say where the difference lay.
The sun had climbed higher and now fell in slanted beams through the window. Dust particles danced in the light, visible and ungraspable, present and already vanishing. I held the note in my hand and felt how something in me shifted irrevocably. Not like a break. More like a settling, deep and slow, the way the ground of this city has always moved.
At the window I stood still for a long time.
Outside, a tourist boat glided through the canal, people on board with beer cans in their hands, laughter carrying over the water. Life, untouchable in its ordinary progression, without pause, without mercy.
I pressed my forehead against the glass. Cooler than I had expected.
“It was already there,” I said. Not to him, because he could not answer. More to the room, the dust particles, the light. To the space he had left behind and that I now filled for a moment with my presence.
My hand closed around the note. Not to hold it. To be carried by it. The tear that rolled down my cheek I only noticed later.
Outside the sky had cleared. The city lay sharp in the afternoon light, every detail clear: the facades, the bicycles, the trees already beginning to shed their leaves. I walked without hurry, my pace even, along the canal. An old man with a small dog nodded to me. I nodded back.
Floriaan is no longer here. That does not change.
But sometimes, when the light falls through a window in a certain way and the city briefly holds its breath between two sounds, I still feel the pressure of his hand around mine. His thumb moving slowly over my skin. The warmth of a summer night above the city.
Not as something that wants to return. As something that was always there. As something that truly happened, in a world that continued without knowing what was being held on that roof.
There, exactly in that space between what was said and what was not, he still lies next to me. And I hold his hand. And this time I do not let go.
Like Warmth That Has Nowhere to Go
The warmth was still rising from the asphalt when I first really saw him. Not the way you see someone when you pass by, but truly: as a figure that took up space, that had weight. The day refused to disappear. Behind the sports hall hung a silence that was not empty, but full of everything that remained unsaid. The air was thick with the smell of cut grass and a scent I couldn’t name.
I was already sitting on the bench.
He walked up with his bag slung over one shoulder. His eyes scanned the surroundings and then found mine. Not long enough to call it a choice. Just long enough to shift a boundary that I could no longer push back.
He sat down next to me without saying anything. There was exactly enough space between us to make it seem like coincidence. I felt that emptiness as a physical pressure that slowed and grew denser. His knee moved a fraction, as if he wanted to turn toward me and then didn’t. I stared straight ahead at the field where no one was playing anymore and tried to follow my own breathing, as if it were the last thing I still had control over.
I knew his name. Adam. I had once heard someone else say it in a tone that made him smaller than he was. Since then I had followed him in the hallways from the corner of my eye, the way you follow a fire you know is dangerous to look at directly.
“You were sitting here yesterday too,” he said. “And the day before.”
His voice was lower than I had expected. Not heavy, but carried, as if every word had to come from somewhere deep before he released it. I nodded. My throat was bone dry, even though I wasn’t thirsty.
“It’s quieter here,” I said.
He smiled at the field, not at me. “I thought so too.”
We were silent, but it wasn’t emptiness. It was a waiting that had direction, that was moving toward something without knowing what. I felt my hands resting on my knees; they were too still, too aware of themselves. Every movement I didn’t make seemed to scream.
He told me about a math test he had messed up. His words came in short sentences, sometimes interrupted by a hesitation, as if he first listened to how they sounded. I watched him nervously rub his thumb over a blue ink stain on his index finger. I heard his voice, but what I really registered was how it softened at the end of a sentence, how he let silences fall like carefully placed pawns.
“You get it, right?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said.
He laughed softly, a sound that stayed more in his chest than came out. I felt the vibration in my stomach.
Then he leaned forward to kick away a small stone with the toe of his sneaker. The movement brought his shoulder against mine for a moment. Just short enough not to call it a touch, but long enough to know that the space between us had shrunk. And he didn’t pull away.
I stared hard at the chalk lines on the field. My heart was beating so hard against my ribs that I was afraid it was visible, that he could hear it if he stopped breathing.
“It’s strange,” he said suddenly.
I turned my head. “What?”
“That sometimes you sit somewhere and think you’re not there by accident.”
I looked at him then. His eyes were lighter than I had thought, gray-green, or maybe more green-gray, with golden flecks around the pupil. I couldn’t tell exactly because he was too close for me to stay objective. There was an expression in them that wasn’t immediately readable, a look that forced me to keep watching longer than felt safe.
“Like you were supposed to be here,” he continued, his voice even softer.
“Yes,” I said.
A door slammed shut somewhere farther away, the sound slowed by distance. The wind brushed through the dry grass along the stands. I heard his breathing next to mine; not in the same rhythm, not matching, but not entirely separate either. Two metronomes slowly moving toward each other.
His hand shifted on the wooden bench. First a few centimeters, then back, then a centimeter farther than before. I followed the movement against my will. My hand lay open on my knee and I was aware of every pore, of the simmering warmth of my skin. The distance between us was now so small that something could tip with every heartbeat.
I thought: if I do something now, everything changes.
And at the same time: if I do nothing, it changes too.
“Peter,” he said.
My name sounded different in his mouth than in anyone else’s. Fuller. As if he held onto the letters longer.
“Yes?”
He didn’t look at me. “Do you ever think about it? That things can happen without anyone planning them.”
I knew it had stopped being about math a long time ago. I turned my hand very slowly so my palm faced upward, open. An invitation he could ignore if he wanted.
He didn’t want to.
His fingers touched the edge of my hand. At first only the side, so lightly it could have been a mistake, a trick of the wind. I didn’t pull back. I left my hand there as if I expected nothing and allowed everything. Then his fingers closed around mine. Not possessive, but questioning, as if he was checking whether I was real.
I was.
His shoulder rested against mine and stayed there. Through the fabric of his T-shirt I felt the heat of his body; not the dry asphalt warmth, but something that came from within, something alive. My breathing became slower but deeper, as if my lungs were claiming more space than I usually gave them.
I could smell him now. The sharp scent of deodorant from the locker room, mixed with the warm, honest smell of sun on his skin. It pulled me toward him without me moving.
“It’s actually pretty quiet here,” he said.
His voice was barely more than breath.
“Yes,” I said.
I carefully shifted my fingers and let them slide along his. Not to grab him, but to explore. His hand responded immediately: a subtle adjustment, an agreement. A conversation without words, one that didn’t need any. I felt the light pressure of his knuckles against mine, the rough warmth of his palm, and the tension in his grip that betrayed: I’m not letting you go just like that.
He turned his body toward me until our knees touched. The bench felt narrower, or we felt bigger. The world outside us shrank until it was nothing but scenery.
I looked at him. He looked back now, finally, and there was a recognition in his gaze I had never seen anywhere before. It made me completely calm and put everything inside me on edge at the same time.
“Is this okay with you?” he asked.
His voice was pure whisper.
I nodded. My throat wouldn’t allow words; any sound would damage this moment.
I don’t know who moved closer. Maybe both of us. Maybe it was the space itself that closed. Our faces were so close that I could see the micro-movements of his lips, the tension around his mouth, the way his gaze softened right before our lips met.
It wasn’t a kiss that searched. It was a kiss that confirmed what had already been decided before we knew it ourselves. His lips were warm and determined. My hand tightened around his and I felt my whole body turn toward him. Shoulder, knee, and breathing found each other in a rhythm we didn’t need to agree on.
When we pulled apart, it wasn’t because we wanted to. We simply needed air.
We stayed sitting close together, our foreheads almost touching, his breath warm on my skin, our hands still intertwined. He smiled briefly, as if asking permission to be happy. I felt something deep inside me tear open, a shield I had unconsciously kept closed for years.
“So this,” he said, “is what happens.”
“Yes,” I said.
We stayed there until the sky turned purple and the warmth finally left the asphalt. When we stood up there was no hurry. His shoulder brushed mine one last time, a final check that it had all been real.
“See you tomorrow?” he asked.
The question hung between us, heavy with meaning now that everything was different.
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded. No big gestures, no solemn promises. Just that one nod. It was enough.
We walked off in different directions. After a few steps I looked back. He did too. For a second we stood still at a distance, but the invisible thread between us stayed taut.
I didn’t know what this would become. Whether it would last, or evaporate like so many things do.
But I knew it had settled inside me. In my flesh, deeper than a memory.
Like warmth that has nowhere to go.
A story about the presence of someone who is actually no longer here.
Mountain Echo
I call. You drift. Each day a fraction deeper into the mist.
I read your eyes the spark has moved to an address I do not know. Where does your heart sleep now?
I do not say it aloud, but it lives in the white space: I love you with a weight that breaks words.
You inhabit a room in my soul. The door stands ajar. Always.
And yet I hear the sigh of a draft announcing a gentle close.
Stay. Become a rhythm in my breath, a shadow that does not leave my light.
There was a moment when you chose me. It stands still. It does not age.
I have been blessed. I know the colour of happiness.
But fear grows slowly, like moss on a cold wall.
I reach for you as if distance were a substance I could push away with my hands.
The distance between us is not a road we can walk, but a landscape in which I lose my way while sitting beside you.
Come closer. Become solid again.
Without you I slip free from my own anchor.
The night already knows: I clutch a pillow as if it were an answer, as if it still breathed your name.
My hands search the air that refuses to take shape.
I gather the crumbs of your gaze. I save them for the winter already lodged in my bones.
If this is the edge of what we were, let me feel your nearness one more time, as if time itself has erred.
The silence where your heart now rests is a language I do not speak.
I bow. Not from weakness, but because I do not know how to carry the sky without you.
Stay. Or do not vanish completely. Leave a trace of light behind for without you I am not gone, but a sentence halfway.
(Translate from Dutch.)
Drops
I am sitting on the couch when he comes out of the bathroom.
The light of the late afternoon falls softly over his wet skin, golden and slow, as if the day itself hesitates for a moment before giving way. Drops still slide over his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, and disappear into the blond hair below his navel. He walks slowly, unselfconsciously, as though nakedness is the most natural state of his body. And from now on, it will be the most natural state of our days as well. Days filled with lust, with hunger, with that soft, persistent longing that never fully fades.
He hums an old song, low and warm, as he moves through the room. I vaguely recognize the melody, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the sound itself: that voice, that tone, that carefree ease. My heart beats harder. I am infinitely awake. Every cell in my body seems to lean toward him, as if he generates a field that pulls me in and arranges me. He is still warm from the shower, his skin lightly pink, his muscles smooth beneath that glow. Proud yet soft. Masculine and vulnerable at the same time.
God, he is beautiful.
I can’t find words big enough. Everything I have ever looked for in a body is standing here in front of me: the broad line of his shoulders, the deep groove of his back, the powerful thighs, the heavy, calm dong that sways gently with every step. His mouth, full and well-shaped, made for kissing, biting, whispering, and licking. I look and cannot stop looking. There is something almost unbearable about so much beauty that has no idea of itself.
He is naked. And he is mine.
The room still seems to be breathing from what we did earlier. The sheets lie crumpled on the floor. The air is thick and heavy with scent: sweat, sex, soap, and something animal that only the two of us create together, a smell I could never describe to someone who has never breathed it. My own body reacts instantly. A warm wave moves through my lower belly, my nipples tighten, and between my legs I grow wet and heavy with pure desire.
He looks up, catches my gaze, and smiles slowly.
That smile. That one smile is enough to melt me, to make everything outside this room fade away. Without saying a word, he comes closer. I part my legs just a little, an unconscious invitation, and I see his gaze slide there, dark and attentive.
"Come," I say softly. My voice is already hoarse.
He lowers himself beside me, too close for any pretense of distance. The heat of his skin radiates through my clothes as if fabric is no obstacle, only a formality. His hand slides over my thigh, moving upward, possessive but tender. With his other hand he lifts my chin. His eyes are dark, full of lust and something deeper, something that goes far beyond mere desire, something I have suspected for a while but have not yet wanted to name out loud.
His mouth finds mine. At first soft, tasting, as if he wants to remember how I taste. Then deeper. His tongue slips inside and I moan softly against his lips. He tastes of toothpaste and of himself. My hands move over his still-damp back, feeling the muscles shift under my fingers, the warmth that radiates from him like stone that has lain in the sun all day. I pull him closer. I want to feel his weight on me, his hardness against my soft skin.
"Touch me," I whisper between two kisses. "Make love to me. Love my body the way only you can."
He groans softly, deep from his chest, a sound that is more answer than words could ever be. His hand slips under my shirt, finds my breast, squeezes gently, strokes my hard nipple with his thumb until I gasp and my head falls back. His mouth moves down to my neck, sucking, licking, biting softly. Every touch sends sparks through my body, straight to the pulsing need between my legs. I hear myself breathing and barely recognize the sound as my own.
His arousal is already growing against my hip, warm and heavy. I feel him throb, ready for me, and a fresh wave of desire washes through me, deeper than the last.
This is it. This is what I have always wanted.
Not just a body. Not just the heat and the hunger, although those are there too, full and without shame. I want all of him. This man, naked and open, who desires me with his entire being. Who kisses me as if he will never get enough. Who touches me as if my skin is the most sacred thing he has ever felt.
And as his fingers slide further down, under the waistband of my pants, and I arch my back against his hand, I know it for certain.
This is love. This is lust. This is us, inseparable and complete.
Outside, evening is beginning to fall. The light in the room shifts, growing warmer, pinker, drawing itself around the two of us as if the day too does not want to let go. I hear him say my name, soft and low, and there is something in the way he does it that tears me open from the inside in the most beautiful way I know.
I surrender.
The days to come will smell of his skin and taste of his mouth. They will sound like the soft, sensual noise of two bodies that no longer want to come apart, and like the quiet, complete silence afterward, when we lie against each other and the world outside simply continues, unaware of what has begun here, in this room, between us.
I can't stop fantasizing.
How I would love to be sitting between them.
Short story about Max.
There goes Maxmillian
How I would have loved to be a beautiful boy. The kind people pause for, who can never pass unnoticed because the world follows him with its eyes as if by instinct. Someone who fills a space without saying a word, while soft whispers rise: there he goes. There goes Maxmillian. A boy one might have wished to be, a promise on the verge of being fulfilled.
I imagined how the light would fall on me. How glances would gather like sunrays on my shoulders, my face, the cadence of my stride. Not to possess me, but to share for a moment in something that seemed almost self-evident. Something you could not quite name, yet recognized at once, like the scent of first rain on a warm afternoon of sun-heated stone.
How I would have loved to be that well-formed boy, but without arrogance and without the burden of vanity. Someone who wore his body like a perfectly fitted coat, with a natural pride that did not need to be spoken. Someone who was enough, simply by being there. A body that could entice without asking, that could be gentle and tender, and at the same time stand proud and unyielding when desire arose. When I longed for you and did not even need to speak your name aloud for the air to tremble. That silence alone, that eloquent silence between us, would have been enough to explain everything.
In that dream, the world understood. Everything finally fell into place, like a sentence that had long been searching for its final, redeeming word. People would smile, glance at one another, and without shame say: look, there walk two princes. They would bring fruit, incense, and precious myrrh, not out of duty, but out of pure wonder. Because it is so rare for love to reveal itself so freely. So unabashedly real and radiant.
How I would have loved to be that vision, dressed in light cotton trousers brushing softly along my legs in the summer wind. My skin warm from the sun, my body loose and free, as if I came from nowhere and had nowhere to go. As if the day itself had been made for this one, unhurried existence. For this single breath. This single, almost imperceptible now.
In my mind I saw how you looked at me. How your gaze lingered and how desire slowly took shape in the space between us. Not hurried, not greedy, but like water that patiently finds its way along worn, smooth stone. My movements would be enough: a slight turn of my head, a careless step in the sand, and you would be drawn toward me as if it could never have been otherwise. As if no other outcome were imaginable than the two of us, here and now.
I wanted to be that wondrously beautiful boy in whom everything seemed to align. For whom you would pick flowers along the edge of an overgrown field: elderflower, cornflowers, sweet peas, lilacs, and those heavy peonies that could hardly carry their own scent. I would accept them with a smile that asked nothing and understood everything. My body would move with ease, sitting, standing, bending, as if every posture were a quiet assurance that I was truly there, and that I would remain.
And you, you would come closer. So close that you could feel my breath on your skin. You would hide your face in the hollow of my neck, because there was a place there where you had always wanted to rest. You would finally come home to a place you had never visited before, yet recognized at once by the heartbeat beneath my skin.
For a long time I believed all of this lay far beyond my reach, on the other side of a boundary I did not know but could feel. A boundary I encountered each morning when I looked in the mirror and saw who I was instead of who I wanted to be. And yet the longing remained, quiet and stubborn, like a river that continues to flow even in the driest summer, somewhere deep underground, unseen but alive.
But then. Then comes the day when longing stops searching for another and begins to rest within itself.
There, in that high meadow where the grass brushes against our legs, the air smells of hay, warm and sweet. The sun sinks slowly lower, turning everything it touches to gold. Somewhere in the distance a bird calls, a brief sound that only deepens the silence that follows. Here I show you my love, not with grand gestures, but with touches that linger and a gaze that no longer needs to hide. I lie beside you, close enough to drink in your warmth, far enough to see you in your full beauty.
Sometimes people linger in the distance. They do not judge, they simply look at something rare. Something that moves them without their knowing why, like music they have long known but cannot quite place. And for a moment, as if it were happening to them, they sigh softly: ah, how beautiful love is.
Evening comes as evenings always do, gentle and irreversible. We stand within it, in that golden, fluid light. And as I take your hand and feel the wind move through my hair, I realize that longing has stopped searching. It has found. It has found me.
I look at my hands. I feel the strength in my legs, the calm in my breathing, the warmth of your fingers between mine. The light falls on my shoulders as I once dreamed, but now it feels different, more real, softer. Not as a reward I have earned, but as something that was always mine and only waited for me to dare to receive it.
I no longer have to chase the dream, because I have become the boy I once dreamed of. I am Maxmillian. I am here, I am beautiful, and I am finally exactly who I am meant to be. Not as a memory of what might have been, but as the beautiful, tangible reality of now. Of this moment. Of this breath, this skin, this life, this light.
“Fall seven times and stand up eight.” — Japanese proverb.