Swear
I’m in the car with my childhood sweetheart. We’re lost on hometown streets, houses lined up like headstones.
Mike sings with the radio. I consider the icicles that hug bare branches and also, my own frozen limbs. The sun, the drink, do nothing to warm them. I am naked beneath my dress.
“He didn’t look like him,” Mike says, enamored of his thoughts. Can he remember himself as a young man, enamored of me?
This day brought sun when it should have brought rain, and we passed a secret bottle beside our sweet friend’s grave until the handshakes were easy.
“I hate your car,” I say, because I’m looking deliberately, again, at that open pack of Parliaments in the my-side door. The plastic is gnarled, bitten. I imagine Mike’s girl going at it with sharp animal teeth, insatiable, like I used to be.
I reach for Mike’s Camel and take a drag, our spittle like accidental kisses. I feel that familiar wet between my legs. My body warms to it.
We pull onto a snaking, gravel path. We used to play here, and lay here, once we got older.
We are out of the car and Mike grabs me close. I thrill at the touch of our skins. He caresses my breast and then we are kissing. It is poison rather than spit we swap.
“Will you write this?” Mike asks.
“No,” I say, because I cannot summon the feel of a pen between my fingers, cannot imagine anything but this.
Mike spreads my legs. His touches are rough. He lays me flat, on my stomach, not my back.
“Will you write it?”
“I won’t,” I say.
Cold hearts crossed, there’ve been so many promises between us.
