Tiramisu by Kenji Jasper (published in 2013)

The hotel room was fashioned after a futuristic cockpit, like something out of Kubrick’s 2001. Her skin was a dark butter pecan in contrast to the white sheets fitted over the motorized futon that turned into a bed at the touch of a button. He hadn’t been with a woman since he went down for the four years. The smell of Flowerbomb and the depth of the orange on her fingers and toes made her seem like a ferocious feline from fantasy, except she was still sleeping.

Her breasts had been heavy in his hands as she straddled him. The champagne on her tongue gave their breath the taste of celebration. What had started as animal attraction on the floor at Apt had morphed into a slow dance from hotel elevator to slowly-reclined mattress.

He had entered her ocean hoping to quench his thirst for fire, but ended up trapped in a cube melting from recovered memory. Somewhere inside her he had found himself at 25, back when he had made he had made her thighs tremble on the other side of the kitchen wall from where her five year-old daughter slept.

Had it only been chance that brought them together, pelvis to pelvis, to Prince’s “Good Love”, a track he’d never heard a DJ play in a lounge before? He hadn’t tasted liquor in years, which made the buds on his tongue particularly ripe when it came to her tangy sweetness below. He had licked the line of scar tissue from where the little girl had once been pulled. It too reminded him of who he was before, before jail, before the starter marriage, before he stopped believing in fairy tales.

Had her lips been painted orange than he would have surely been trapped in an early Hype Williams clip or perhaps a deleted scene from The Fifth Element or Blade Runner. Instead they were her own natural pink, trapped in a pout with a hole in the middle, as he waited for her to exhale.

To think that it had first begun over tiramisu at that place off of Varick Street that hadn’t been open since Bush’s first term. There had been so much trouble pulling her panties over those thighs in the dark. But she had helped. Not long after the chief panel of wood underneath the mattress had split into two. And it was loud.

Now, all those years into the future, it was the quiet that made him fall in love with her all the more…again, once again knowing that it couldn’t be forever. But he was willing to play the game until the clock ran out.