Memory has dark halls and maybe carpet.
It was dark. God, it was always so dark in here. I could hear him outside, walking down the hall. I could hear him moving things, shifting them around, pretending to be busy. I slouched, head in hands, just feeling my whole body sink into itself.
It was always like this. This huge, uncrossable silence with fragments of rebar and concrete and asphalt on either side. I created those explosions of silence. I demolished those bridges myself. And then I sat, collapsed, folded inward in the softness and the dark. I sat and waited for something to change, something to fall into me. I waited to suddenly expand and bloom and blossom into something complete and beautiful.
I was a fool.
I am a fool.
I felt that I should be crying. I felt that hot tears should burn their way down my muzzle and snot fill up my sinuses and emotion make a tight, sick ball in my throat, and that I should have to fight not to sob, and that I should not notice mucus drip down onto my shirt. I did not cry. There was no catch in my slow, steady breathing. I could not sob. I closed my eyes and just sat in the dark, and the warmth and the vast uncrossable desert of a few pitiful feet.
I heard the sound of claws clicking on the hardwood floor in the hallway. I heard the sound of those same claws padding across the carpet in the room. I just imagined him there, silhouetted in the yellow hallway light. I could see his muzzle turned to the side, his short tail hanging limply down, his ears back, embarrassed to be intruding. I imagined him walking to me. His demeanor would change. His face, his eyes would turn and focus on mine as he made his way ever so slowly, ever so gently to where I sat, fallen into myself completely. Then he would reach down to me, and run a claw lightly under my chin. I would feel the rough pads on his fingers as he moved his hand along my jawline, lifting my face, resting my chin in his palm, scratching in the thick fur on my cheeks. He would look down into my eyes, and even in the dark I would see his eyes brightly catching the light, shining vibrant, green in the dimness of the rough, charcoal sketch that made up the rest of him. I would shift, slowly propping myself against my own body, feeling internal supports slide into place, leaning up and forwards toward him. We would stop just inches away from each others' wet, black nose and sniff, uncertain in that moment while time would rotate madly around us, spinning out probabilities and futures until everything fell into place with a kiss.
It would be a small kiss, just a bare touching of lips, whiskers flat back against smudgy faces in the dark. That kiss would blossom, though, fiery petals slipping cautiously from a little ember at the core, and that flower would bloom in both of us, and we would be moved with its petals, and we would not be the ones who drew arms down each others' face or neck or reached and pulled each other tightly close. That moment would move them for us because we were not capable of creating moments so right on our own. And we would both have our eyes tightly closed, and we would both feel that passion move us, our tides, our moons revolving and bringing each one to the other as the waves of his lips would crash against the shores of my collarbone, would recede across the tender hills of my breast, and cast my nipple into the hot, wet sea of his mouth.
I would lean across him, cradling his head, moving one hand slowly, gently but forcefully against the back of his head while my other trailed down through the soft fur on his back, claws scraping lightly against his ribs. He would shift from breast to breast, his tongue rough and wet, burning, hot. I would feel a synergistic heat coil and mewl and smolder inside myself as my nipples grew quickly hard under the tender scrape of his teeth, the warm rasp of his tongue. Down, down deep in the core of my being it would twist around itself. My hands would move rhythmically over his body, one massaging and stroking the back of his ears, the other moving lower, past his ribs, scratching, working around the base of his tail, his hands moving up and down my back, then quickly to my chest, gently rolling the nub of my hard nipple between his fingers, grabbing the soft mass of my small breast easily in one hand and kneading.
We would feel the heat of each others' breath as we panted into fur, breathing deeply and smelling only the long-familiar, always exciting scents of one another, those old familiar scents of comfort, of belonging. I would gently move both my hands to his chest, push him away and pull him up and towards me, and our mouths would meet, and my legs would have been open, and wet, and hungry long before his tongue found its way past my teeth, and everything would be passion, and fire, and sweat and a deep, slow pulsing rhythm as we joined. It would be tides, and planets and slow, tectonic shifting as he moved inside me and I moved around him. We would be deeply, intimately, universally connected and I would feel that coiled, mewling heat begin to unwind, and reach and stretch itself across my nerves, down my spine, connecting me universally to its own hunger and lust and filling me with pleasure. I would lose all sens of time in those shifting, organic pulses and its mewls would come faster and more forcefully as it stoked itself on our quickening, panting rhythm until it burst, sizzled across my neurons, and howled. And we, we would howl with it.
But what I imagine is not reality.
I opened my eyes and he was not standing there in the doorway. There was no silhouette, no kiss. I stood, feeling stiff, and cold, and I could not hear the sound of feet padding on carpet, and there was no sound of claws clicking on a hardwood floor. I walked out of that dark room, into the yellow hallway light. He was not there. He was not pretending to put things away. I felt dazed. The light was too bright and it burned my eyes and I felt my stiff, cold, thin body walking down that hallway towards the door even though I don't remember making myself move. I looked down at some hand on the end of my arm move up and take the note taped to the door. I looked out of the little window in the middle of the door, out past the bars into the cold moonlight and the lonely little puddles the streetlights made and I saw his car was gone.
And I saw that note in that hand attached to me. And it was yellow, and old and how long had it been since he had been here anyway? And how long had I sat there, letting years tick away, wondering at sounds that were only memories of sounds echoing out across the insurmountable silence of time. And then, like a peal of thunder, like a stab of lightning, it hurt. And even though it hurt, I nurtured it in my dark interior, among my gently pulsing veins and wet muscles and slick nerves, and it was a part of me. As much as I should, I was never going to give him up.