Choice

Orange lights glow, barely illuminating the dark booths which embrace our bodies and hide our thoughts from outside observation. We are a tedious mistake in the making, formulating excuses in advance to mask this complication which is smoldering more intensely with every drop we swallow.

I recline and make a routine show of affection for the boy beside me, never taking my eyes off your face and the black frames that were the window to my initial attraction. Viewing you through golden wheat poison and heavy coffeehouse beat I could care less about what we are on a road rage drunken mission to destroy. What is comradery in comparison with the heat induced intoxicating question our meeting is posing?

I close my eyes and drift to the pulse of the music, a curious smile plays with the corner of your mouth, head nodding in agreement to my energy. There’s nothing to do but to dance, so we stumble from the cave, and I pause to kiss your friend in assurance of loyalty he’s done nothing to earn.

The question hangs in the air, even weeks later, as springtime evenings chase the breeze into summer nights and mornings full of awkward silences…..

….A question, doomed to be unanswered, when honor, such a forgotten quality, emerges in us both during a stolen moment of complete solitude.

We sleep alone that night, sighing in expectation for the day our integrity will reward us with someone new, unspoken for, requiring little self control and even less restraint. Honor, such a forgotten quality, battles my desire to forgo discretion and attempt another meeting. Long hot nights seem unbearable alone, but disloyalty is an even worse bed companion, so away I drift into dreamless sleep, and wake up to a new day, unsatisfied, alone, still searching, but exhaustibly respectable.