After 11 months of waiting and what-ifs and maybes,
11 months of knowing you and not knowing you,
of missing someone not mine to miss,
of careful avoidance and skilled restraint,

in a borrowed spare room,
under circumstances we had not planned,
the pretence stopped,
and the clothes came off.

Our bodies' starved response
- after almost a year's denial -
was probably inevitable.
But the feel of you suddenly in me
still took me by surprise,
as I went nuclear under you
again and again,
and I answered your unspoken question
with a thousand breathless affirmatives.
Yours.

Afterwards,
we sat together
in the early morning still-dark
of late summer in a friend's garden
and shared my last cigarette.
We talked about everything
except what we'd just done,
because some things don't fit easily into words.
I was shaking,
but not through the cold.
And,
as you held me
and pre-dawn light
scraped at the sky
and the stars blinked out,
as though realising they could not outshine you,
I nearly told you that I loved you,

but I didn't want to spoil the moment.

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