Extra Shot

The warmth in your cup and the warmth in your eyes come together as one. They swirl like caramel folding into steamed milk, slow golden ribbons that unravel my quiet Thursday afternoon and scatter it like loose change. Words cannot describe what you stir in me, the soft electric hum you pour into my steady, careful world the moment you sit down beside me.

I lean in close, and sip from the cup we share, letting the sweetness coat my tongue like melted silk, breathing deep the bittersweet steam that rises and goes straight to my head. Your teasing smile pulls me into your orbit, and wraps me in something softer than words. "So this is how we taste each other's lips," you laugh, and the joke hangs in the air between us, bright and trembling, until the laughter thins and the quiet moves in.

I stand before you, so close that the café dissolves at its edges, the hiss of the espresso machine, the clink of spoons, the ticking clock all blurring into a distant tide. I almost forget how to breathe. My pulse becomes a drumbeat against my ribs, and every second stretches thin as spun sugar, as if time were pouring itself slowly from a broken hourglass.

Then your lips meet mine, and the world tips. The kiss is caramel and warmth, sweet at first and then deeper, a slow current that pulls me under and carries me out where the light is soft and gold and nothing has edges. My hands find you. Your cold fingers trace a shiver along my spine that grows into a rumbling quake, leaving me befuddled and bemused and wholly, helplessly willing.

And just when I think we can't drift any higher, the floor falls away and I'm falling, arms spread wide, wind roaring past my ears, a soft and glorious fall into clouds that rush up to meet me. The kiss deepens. Your hands in my hair, your breath against my throat, my name sounding different in your mouth, softer, like a secret you've been saving. We move together the way the drink did, slow and golden and warm, until the afternoon melts into evening and the evening into something even softer, and the world beyond us becomes a rumor we no longer believe.

When we finally part, it's only by an inch. We breathe each other's air, foreheads touching, grinning like two people who have stolen something beautiful and have no intention of giving it back. The sweetness lingers on my tongue, and the hungry part of me, the part that never learns, already wants more. Promises meant to be broken are whispered and believed completely, for now.

You reach for the cup, lift it to my lips once more, and smile.

Of course, this is only a memory imagined, a fragment from a writer's wandering imagination, a daydream dressed up as a recollection, with a café that may never have existed and a Thursday that belongs entirely to fiction. 😉