The veins in her chest reach out like the branches of a tree. She has a fever, not to mention a sore throat and a bottle of Benylin in her bag filled with brandy. It makes her burp, like a tiny fish. There’s a comet somewhere. As it passes, it shakes the building housing the room that cradles our throbbing bodies. Spunk leaks from my cock. The tiny mes that will never be drip onto her finger. She brings the finger to her lips. There are scenes missing, scattered to the floor like old photographs. Her eyes are smoky. Her smile like the tail end of an afternoon in July, slowly drifting into evening as the stars mirror the scars on my pockmarked cheeks. She stretches, yawns then taps the side of her neck as we slip through the layers of time, the noise her grinding teeth make the same as bones being crushed with a mortar and pestle. In the garden, dead cigarettes linger outside the shed with the leaking roof engulfed with invasive vines. The cigarettes have been there for years, and yet, somehow, time hasn’t got round to erasing them, so they continue to linger. Like the memory of a kiss, or the touch of fingers when there shouldn’t be a touch of fingers. When my cock glides between her legs, the universe is alive, and when I pull out, the seconds cease to be as all the black holes that ever were implode like burst eardrums beneath the fist of a vengeful dad. In my mind, I picture the grave of Nick Drake. It’s blanketed in thick, crunchy snow on a Monday morning before the call of dawn. Squeezing shut my eyes, I travel away from the snow to the English countryside on a Sunday afternoon, with the smell of roast dinner billowing out of wooden windows along with the sound of Bullseye coming from a black and white TV. Between shallow breaths and kisses on foreheads, the sun is golden, like a bowl of porridge covered in honey or the fields of corn that populate my dreams with the fevered certainty of a drunken fight on a Saturday night in a town where there’s nothing else to do.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US