Dark Art
We made it back to the house in the magical half an hour or so when it’s still night, but dawn is just about to burst through, teetering on the edge of night and day. Katya started to walk down the long drive, but something in me wasn’t ready to head back to normality yet.
“Wait,” I said gently, my breath misting in the chilly air. “I don’t wanna go in, yet. Can we go to our field?”
She turned to me with a soft smile, nodding wordlessly, and linked our frozen fingers together.
“Lead the way, sweetie,” she said softly, barely more than a whisper.
When we got to our field, dawn was breaking. The sky was streaked with a patchwork of pink, orange and red, set to a background of lilac. I had no words to describe it. It was, quite simply, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I felt Katya shift slightly beside me and tuck her head onto my shoulder. Glancing down at her, I saw her face was illuminated in the light of the sunrise, making her hair shine and her eyes literally glow. Her crimson lips were open slightly as she breathed deeply, exhales crystallising into mist in front of us.
“There’s a poem I love, by Philip Larkin,” I said.
“That glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchanging in order- “
“I’m in love with you.” she interrupted from beside me. I turned to look at her. She was still staring ahead at the sunset, head tucked into the crook of my shoulder.
“Katya,” I said.
“I’m in love with you. I’m in love with the way you’re so shy when you make jokes, as if you’re scared no one will laugh. I’m in love with they way you scream like some fucking terrifying bird when you laugh. I’m in love with the way you write songs, and the way you slip notes with god-awful puns under my door at midnight, and the way your eyes light up when you see something beautiful. I love when you rant to me about Dolly Parton, or this month’s fashion, or some TV show I’ve never heard of. And how you constantly interrupt me when I’m talking. And how you’re so endlessly fucking cheerful with every single thing that life has thrown your way, and I love walking with you and sneaking around with you and holding your hand.”
“Katya,” I said again.
“I love you, and I’m willing to risk everything for that.” She finally turned her head to look at me, staring me right in the eyes. She waited for a reply from me. For someone who never shut the fuck up, for once I had no words. So I did the only thing I could think of doing.
I kissed her.
~~~
Panting, tripping feet, clumsy hands gripping at each other. We raced up to my room faster than I’d ever ran before, then slammed the door shut, giggling breathlessly. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so just stared into her eyes. They had turned almost silver. Suddenly something turned inside me and I felt awkward and embarrassed. I searched for the first thing in my mind to fill the silence.
“Did you know,” I murmured. “That in 1969, the US Government switched off Niagara Falls, to clean it? They just switched the whole thing off. I heard that on the radio once,”
“Oh my God, fuck me,” Katya muttered, grabbing my face into hers and pulling me in for a kiss. I melted into it, feeling my momentary reservations slip away. A kiss, I thought, wasn’t really an action decided upon. It was more like a feeling that floated from somewhere – maybe through the window – and took over both parties. You may not know a kiss is about to happen, but once it has, you realise it was pre-destined the entire time. And there’s very little you can do to stop it.
Katya and I kissed the same way that we talked. She would take a trapeze-leap into faith, knowing that it could go either way, and I would catch her effortlessly out of the sky. We knew each other, we trusted each other. This was the best damn kiss I’d ever had. It maybe helped that it was the first kiss I’d ever had, but that somehow felt beside the point.
She pulled back, panting a little and grinning. She kept hold of my hand.
“Play me a song,” she said throatily, stoking my hair. I wordlessly grabbed my guitar, mentally searching for something to play. My catalogue of the women I admired – Dolly, Stevie – didn’t seem quite right here. The only woman I wanted to admire right now was Katya. So I started plucking out the music for a song I had written, one of the few Katya hadn’t heard yet. It was a little rough around the edges but I was pretty proud of it. In an emotional voice that croaked and cracked a little, I began:
“Judy never asked her for forever…”
Katya lay back on my bed, her silvery-blonde hair messily spread around her head, her hands splayed out, eyes closed, crimson lipstick smeared a little. She looked ethereal. She was so beautiful it almost pained me to look at her, but I was incapable of looking away. It was all I could do to stop my voice catching in my throat and choking me. When I reached the end of the song I put my guitar down again and watched her: half wanting to drink in her form and gaze at her forever, half gaging her reaction to the song. She stayed silent for a few moments, then reached out her hand and pulled me down to lie next to her.
“You’re a dumb bitch,” she said, gently pressing her lips to my cheeks, my nose, my forehead, “and I love you.” And then she climbed on top of me, and the rest of the world took a break from existing for a while.
~~~
We sat next to each other hours later, hands clasped. Katya was crisply blowing her cigarette smoke into the open window. I was naked, constantly waiting to start to feel shy around her and coyly wrap a sheet around myself, but that feeling never came. It felt a little futile to be shy of my body around someone who, half an hour ago, had their face stuck between my legs. I internally giggled, then gasped out loud as I realised something. Katya looked at me, raising one perfect eyebrow.
“What is it? You wanna go again? Because kudos to you if you do, I think I’m incapable of moving for the next twelve years.”
“No, it’s not that. I just realised: this is the happiest I’ve ever been.” I stated it simply, like it was an obvious fact to me. Because it was: the morning sun streaming through the window, Katya’s fingers intertwined through mine, the pure feeling of peace and satisfaction. All negative thoughts slunk out of my brain. I wasn’t worried about anything. This was the happiest I’d ever been.
~~~
There was a moment at the very beginning, before anything had really happened. Katya had taken off my shirt and was kissing me up and down, all over my shoulders and chest. I think I was nearly incapable of speech at that point.
"What do you like?" she had asked me, putting her hands up to stroke my face.
"I don't know yet," I said. "But: you."