My fingertips are the filaments of a paintbrush, and you pant like a dog as I stroke you. I wonder what it feels like when I trace my fingertips across your collarbone. You ask me to touch you there only when we are alone. I grin, watching you close your eyes, before I kiss the stretched skin and feel the resistance underneath. In these moments I wonder if you tell your other lovers about this special spot, or if only I am privy to your secret.

—

It's often clearly visible, though more often ignored, and juts out under the skin, like a tiny shelf for lost things. It's a building bone, reinforced with calcium and marrow and who knows what else. Peeping above your neckline, strong and silent, and always at the base of your throat. It only takes seven pounds of pressure to break.

—

There are women you commit to, and there are men I use in the absence of you. After you break up with the fifth girl—an older woman with snakebite piercings and a punk-band haircut—I re-enter your orbit. In the darkness, I trace your hard lines, connecting constellations. Your mom becomes hopeful and pretends she doesn't see us having sex in her living room.

But my gravitational pull is weak. You are able to set yourself free. Again we are two bodies separated ever more by space.

—

In your thirties you move to China. You stay in your cramped apartment and special order Irish whiskey, which you use to marinate your organs. It's your mom who calls and tells me your liver has finally drowned. Nothing is left but saliva on bottle collars and the realization that I will never again seduce the gatekeepers of the cage that surrounds your heart.