gone

The smile spread across her pursed red lips reveals

vulnerability, expectation, passion, ecstasy

Her searching hands find a pillar of strength,

between the arms that ease her descent to desire

The eyes she wades into, invite her to stay

but overstaying a welcome is beyond her capabilities

Thoughts abounding in a boundless ambition

paint her cheeks scarlet with secret lust

Whilst the warmth of his trembling fingers

is finely imprinted in her worrisome memory

Yet she is somehow left alone to watch her pillar make his way

back to self-restraint and responsibility

"Please," she bites her lip and pleads.

"Think," he replies as he prepares to leave.

This is the moment that she knows

it's bigger than them both,

as she peeks over the edge of desire,

and into a dark crater of still-unknown sin and joy

She considers the fall and calculates the risk

and decides he deserves not to be dragged along the jagged rock

But then he grasps her head, her neck in his calloused hands

and she realizes he's more ready than she

Staring fear in its face,

she finds security in the strings of a joint fate written long ago,

mulls over the recent past and present, forgetting the future

Giving in to him and happiness as she leaps into uncertainty.