DEVOTION by Hannah Horcha

There’s a dry patch behind our house, between the soft rush lawns and loam. Isaac leads me there in daylight, to lay supine beneath the atlas moth’s flightpath. We take off our shirts and let the sweat dry from our chests, naked with our backs on the grass. We turn towards each other with our eyes closed and squeeze our balmy faces close together. His skin looks like plasticine clay with pinprick needle pores, respirating over bones when I’m up close. I dig my fingers between his ribs and squeeze the flesh beneath.

Mosquitos flit around our arms. They’re spiteful, they suck on my delight. I slap one drinking from my shoulder. It bursts into a tiny red splat. He draws a finger through the smear and tastes my blood. “It’s better than water and redder than dusk,” he says, pulling me on top of him.

From my vantage point above him, I watch the kitchen window through the bramble. Our children reach around for plates and glasses, they don’t need us much at all. They gnaw at slices of bread and fight over a pastry I left on the counter. Isaac stares at me looking at our house and grabs my chin to guide my mouth to his.

He touches me all over. Wipes the grease from my cheeks and kisses my crown. The saliva between our lips turns thick like jelly, we’re two wet slugs out in the sun to burn. I lick his tongue and peek at him through my lids. The long horizon of his cheeks fills my view. He’s completely smooth and placid. In love, impassioned, in me. He presses one hand on each side of my face and brings me even closer.

We’re twisting in the dirt, laughing and squealing, clawing and cloying. “I love you, I love you,” he says through a laugh while we tangle. I respond with my hands, through his hands, woven together until I can’t pick apart his fingers from mine. Our toes leave lines in the earth, even and straight like the parquet of our bedroom floor. He’s alight with desire when dust coats our skin, alone, nothing to want more than this.

But I only fixate on the house’s yellow light, shining in a bright square through the dimming exterior. The boys’ small silhouettes move out of sight. I shift upright to try and see them clearly, but Isaac anchors me to the ground with his palms and forces me to focus only on him.

Our bodies cling together and unseal in a hot stripe when we move. The sun beams low on my neck, it burns me bare and red. A pool of sweat forms in my cleavage, drips down to my navel, farther, my body is melting like wax. “It’s so hot, I can’t even stand it,” I say into his neck.

He doesn’t respond. I stare down at him as he buries himself in my stomach, his hands the forerunner to his mouth. I tug on his hair, “Isaac? Did you hear me? Let’s go inside.”

He breathes, looks up at me, “Not now. We’re never alone like this,”

His hands feel like the gravel beneath my back, they feel like the greenery between my fingers. I sit up and lean on my arms while he continues to kiss my thighs, light like he’s hardly there.

The soft squelching sound of his tongue and lips nauseate me. He goes onward, on me, and consummates his pleasure while I wait. I close my eyes and feel him move around me, panting, then drooping, until we lay shoulder to shoulder.

He evens his breathing before pulling me upright with him. “Come on,” he says as he twists my limbs into clothes. The fabric soaks up the grime and becomes soggy with an odor. We wrinkle our noses at each other and laugh at the sorry state of our bodies. He grabs my hand and pulls me through the yard.

The mud encasing around his body cracks as it dries, it’s not durable enough to hold him all together. He sweats through the fissures and slumps his shoulders low. I feel how leaden he is in my hand, but I drag him through the doorway, nonetheless.

The house swallows him whole as he reenters, but I’m just fine and I’m intact. So I push him inward and press him down to kneel towards our children sleeping on the rug. I lean on his back while he smooths the hair back from their foreheads. He kisses their cheeks and whispers goodnight when I watch, so I never leave his side.