He touched me, and I touched him. Our lips and noses bumped awkwardly against one another‘s, and our hands were lost within each other’s hair. It was scary, exciting, unknown. The ground we were covering was alien to our minds, yet we kept at it, slowly yet accurately satisfying our needs. He opened up, and I opened up. Our tongues fought for dominance over our mouths that were now connected. This was the closest we had ever been, the closest we would ever be, and I felt love, love pulsating through my veins, warming me, warming him. Our bare skin collided, and I shivered feeling his icy skin against my own. But my love warmed him too, I could feel it, I could see it, the sweat beads that dripped off of his stomach, the whimpers that fell from his mouth filling mine. I touched his shoulder, and he jumped as if I had scolded him, as if my love was burning him, burning a hole through his being.

I took my hand and pushed it into his long brown hair and he returned the gesture by allowing his hands to become lost in my own hair. Our lips were connected only parting slightly to allow ourselves to explore each other. It was out first, and it certainly wasn’t our last, and yet at that moment it felt like it could be our last. It felt like the next day, tomorrow we could die, we could be dead and all we truly had to connect each other was a kiss, one kiss that was a beginning and a parting gift. We walked down the stairs hand-in-hand. We had been upstairs for so long that it was night and everyone had followed suit and went to their own beds. Our bare feet hit the surface of the carpeted stairs while we held onto each other, clinging to each other, for that kiss, that one kiss had brought us closer, closer than we had ever been and we felt as if, the moment our hands left each others skin, we would lose the bond we had worked so hard to build.

the beauty crept in the darkness, her heart steadily beating as the darkness followed her down the stairs of her childhood home. the broken step creaked as her delicate feet hit the wood grain. the memory of summers past fled through her mind as her hand left the railing and slipped into her pocket. the door opened, allowing the sunlight to deposit itself on the dist ridden floors. her bare feet hit the cracked paint on the porch. an abandoned rocking chair swayed in the autumn breeze. the beauty crawled onto its prickly surface, picking away at the splinters she received in the process. the amber leaves had returned, sunshine was surely days, even months away. the fields were dead, empty. and all she could do was wait, wait for someone to come and rescue her. but the beauty knew that life was not a fairytale and that the seasons went in full circle again, and again. forever.