Bel Canto

That kiss was like a lake, deep and clear and they swam into it, forgetting.

All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

He thought at once he had never been so alive and so much a ghost.

It was all the fault of hope. Hope was a murderer.

it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, as if you were a stranger seeing them for the first time.

He was a pianist now. He had rows of fine blue tendons in his fingers to prove it.

He feels her teeth, takes her tongue. Carmen, Carmen, Carmen, Carmen. In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.

Her skin, the night, the grass, to be outside and then to be inside Carmen. He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this.

that feeling, that first luxury of skin touching skin.

Carmen kisses him and he kisses her and from then on he will never be able to separate the smell of her from the smell of night.