In the City

Black suited buttoned up over creamy soft gray silk with two black pearl kissed earlobes and another one golden hung at your throat and crossed shiny stockinged legs ending in supple buttery leather and you're proof of the power of elegance. Window seated with late afternoon light bounced and diffused through glass to round your edges and glittery glisten your dark eyes and soften your smile. Taut is gone, replaced by relaxed and confident from a day well done and the knowledge that the night and this city are ours for the taking and take we will. From wound up to winding down nudged along by the clear frozen kiss in a crystal glass that seems to have been formed to your long white tipped fingers the way it nestles there elbow bent and it clicks on marble and swirls some when you set it down and when I see the print of your lips rose smudged at the rim I take the leap from need to have to have. I stand and drop a bill on the table in one motion and your eyes lift from your reverie and we look the look no one else gets to see and just like that we've exchanged a thrumming bass and tinkling piano for street bustle and a barely organized but rhythmic honking chaos and your heels sidewalk clack and you know from the way I'm holding your arm at the elbow guiding our slightly rushed pace that there is a madness to our destination, your hair bouncing off your shoulders falling across one eye as you look up and over at me and if you weren't sure you are now.

Tightened elbow gripped steering and weaving around and by those who may be hurrying to get somewhere but not to this urgent place that I'll find, I swear I'll find. Another block barely beating the palm up wait, clack, clack across a street of no elegance dodging ragged rhumy eyed stares and cheap empties and cups, butts, yesterdays fixes, to duck into a dank dingy doored relic of ten thousand other days and a thousand lives come and gone all taking something with them and leaving something behind. Kissing is not a good way to catch your breath but it makes us laugh, for awhile, then it just makes our eyes dart for someplace to go. Around this corner past buzzers that won't buzz and yellowed names that aren't home and an elevator that won't elevate to a steel doored fire stairway that creaks open and clanks shut. Our heels echo to the first landing which is far enough for you to grab a peeled paint rail with both hands and plant one pump one step above the other. Street noise silenced now but our breathing isn't and lifting your skirt does make a sound whispering up past silky stockings, the rustle of fine fabric against finer skin, rich on richer. Buckle clinks and zipper sounds and then satiny shiny softness slipped aside so easily to reach the place I have to live; let me live here, and stay, never leave. I slip and slide, stroke and tangle a knot of fingers in your hair and tell you that, it's here, right here, here where I belong and need to be, here, here at the hilt of you. Here with you, right here inside you, here baby and you draw me in and take me further and make me stay and my very existence is there in you and you take everything I have and own it as I own you.

My hand rests on a tattered tear of ripped stocking and my fingers trace your slightly skinned knee. I ruined your stockings I say and you tell me we'll buy more and maybe find another use for these. We rise from a crumpled heap and tug, straighten and brush and you say let's go somewhere wicked sinful for dinner and I say we do elegant so well.