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The Scent of Desire

Is it palpable, the scent?

Is it almost physical sometimes, desire? Can you reach out and touch it, curve your fingers around it, make it soft between your fingers, melt out through the gaps of your knuckles? If you hold it in your hand, does it heat up and become incandescent?

There are some instigators that light me up, that make the tiny fine hairs on the back of my neck twitch and make my neck curve around on my spine. They are finite and little things, small moments that send me alight and make me tactile, that make me long to run my fingers and hands over supple woods, soft satins, and sweaty skin. I can't state all of them, they hit me at different times, often catching my by surprise. Candles and champagne, the standard cliche. Watching Mr. Y as he talks to a kitten, a baby, a puppy, nurturing a small being in his enormous and calloused hands. Some music by Enigma or the Vangelis love theme from Blade Runner. A flirty eye candy exchange with Mr. Y from across a dinner table or crowded room.

It makes me lurch around in my seat just thinking about it.

Not for one second do I take it for granted that I have Mr. Y, and that he has me. I have a most incredible relationship, complete with the dizzying highs and tar-pit lows. But I have a lover that will let me do anything, that will touch me and let me touch him anywhere, a lover that has woken something up in me that I didn't know existed.

In the past, drunken fumbles and patient acceptance was my routine. Exes would be going at it while I would make a grocery list in my head, wondering when I should pick up the dry cleaning and what would be on TV tomorrow night. I faked it every time, I gave them nothing but my acquiescence, and in that I cheated both them and myself.

I knew it was reaching the end with X Partner Unit when I not only dreaded the bedroom routine, but I wanted it over quickly. No kissing, it just felt so wrong, it felt like I was cheating on someone with my heart, only I never knew whom. No looking at each other, that was too intimate and too close. Just fuck me and get it over with, I would think. Take me from behind, make it as animal and distant as possible. Leave me alone.

And now I have this man that I would drink in bed if I could. I can't get enough of looking at him during the bedroom tango, meeting his gaze. I could kiss him for hours, feeling him on me, in me, around me. There's nothing that we can't do in the bedroom, nothing is taboo, and there isn't a grocery list in sight.

This morning I shower off, letting the soap run down my legs, feeling on. As I take the thick foaming sponge and run it over my thighs, I catch sight of a perfect purple line ridged into my flesh on the top of the back of my thigh. I trace it with my sudsy finger, leaving a trail of tiny lavender scented bubbles that pop and drip down my leg. It's a belt-mark, perfectly engrained in my flesh, complete with the tiny punctured holes for the belt tooth.

Mr. Y had tied me up, squriming and excited, and then spanked me, telling me to tell him to stop. I refused, absorbing the white heat of the belt strap, letting the molten pain drift around my lower body and spread among me. When at last I told him to stop, he immediately untied me and smothered me with apologetic kisses, even though in my mind he'd done nothing wrong, there was nothing to apologize for.

It was a fabulous evening.

I understand that the world thinks passion fades. Read a chick magazine, glance at the web, hear long-married couples say with a knowing one-sided dissatisfaction, and realize that life thinks the romance dies. It peters out, it gives up, the passion candle dies and is replaced by a solid puddle of firm and reliable friendship wax.

To which I say to life....Fuck you. I've had enough of compromising in my life. I've had enough of getting close to the dream but letting it slip through my fingers. I'm going to have both. I'm going to have the wax and the candle. This is my world, this is my heart, and this is my chance to finally see the dream come true. The friendship and the passion-they're both mine. Try to take them from me, and I wil fight to the death.

I'm not saying every moment is filled with hearts and flowers. I don't think passion needs to come out of the pores of your skin every moment of every day. Passion and romance are treats and splenidid pleasures that shouldn't be taken for granted-always have them around and the lustre will fade, the sparkle dim perhaps, as the rarity of it retreats. But I do think that-with the right person-it lingers there beneath the surface, coming up to haunt you from time to time when you're alone-thinking how someone makes you think or feel or act. Or when you're together and the heat is omnipresent. And I do think it means that grocery list sex is gone for good, relegated to my past.

I simply believe that passion doesn't have to die, if you don't want it to. The lows may be low, but the highs are like a drug that erases and eases the synapsing corners of the brain. They say a woman forgets the pain of having a baby is forgotten over time, that it's nature's way of easing the path again. Maybe so. But maybe you can never forget the pain of going back to the faking relationship when you've have the real thing.

There are a lot of things in my life that I am done with, that I will never accept again. A passionless existence. Faking orgasms, love and lust. Not being able to talk. Not being able to squirm about in sweat and lust and heat. Not being able to feel again some of the things that I have felt in the past few months.

And with being life's bitch.

I am so done with that.

And now if you'll excuse me...I have an ass to kick at work today.

-H.