This intimacy will never be love, never pretend to be. The way you touch is animal but not fierce. The way you touch is tender. Beside each other on this cold park bench just after midnight your cigarettes smoke themselves out beneath your first kiss. And later, fingers smell of nicotine, while lips taste of alcohol and a stranger’s tongue.
The sound is the sound of footsteps. Your footsteps as you pass a chain link fence, fingers trembling across the metal as you walk. The black pond at the bottom of the hill, and a fence that you aren’t desperate enough to climb.
We’ll go tomorrow, she says, when the park is open.
Sure, you say, tomorrow.
Then, up the street to the small hotel. Someone calls out behind you, calls out to stop, to wait. You walk faster, pulling the girl with you, the voice is too far away. If caught, you can say that you never heard, or that you don’t speak the language. At the door you stop and use the old-fashioned skeleton key to open the lock. A concierge, bored and dressed in red, watches you. Something like jealousy in his eyes. You let the girl in and close the door behind her. Safe from the cries of beggars, watched by suspicious eyes, she follows you up the stairs then loses her nerve. At the top of the stairs she turns, leans towards you. Her hands are on your chest, your hands on her hips, but she won’t look at you.
I should go, she says.
Stay.
I shouldn’t.
Then inside your room her hands are under your clothes, your hands are under hers. Lamp light and clammy skin. The alcohol and heat. The sound is the sound of her breath. The sound of the door closing behind you.
Her fingertips trail white lines across your stomach. Those thin hands you first noticed in the café. The backs of her hands networks of raised purple scratches, telling you she must own a cat. Unpainted fingernails, no rings, only metal bracelets. Now is not the time for you to notice these things.
In that dark room you find her skin beneath her thin tank top, unbuttoning her jeans you trace the outline of her hips. Tongues speak lust against each other. Familiarity of a stranger’s body. With one hand she holds your jaw, while with the other she unbuckles your belt.
You aren’t sure how you found your way to sleep, but wake up to the sound of morning traffic. Dull headache, dry mouth. Heat already pushing in on the day, melting the tar along the edges of the road. Naked strangers sleeping off a drunk in a small Paris hotel.
The city streets are as anonymous and gray as any other. The words painted on the walls are in languages which you do not speak. Heat comes on in layers reflected off of sandstone, cement, and brick. You follow this girl, your map, as you cross streets and pass down water edged alleys that smell like centuries of urine and trash. The scratched lenses of your sunglasses are smudged with sweat. There is a cool breeze off of the river and the smell of pastry, coffee, and cheap cigarettes.
You kiss her, here on the street. Pulling her back by the hand. Running your hand along her neck, fingers pulling at her long brown hair, pulling it back from her face. Strangers passing.
There are gelato stands on every corner. Canals and bridges. There are green metal chairs along the sidewalk, she sets down her backpack beside the table and runs a finger under the elastic of her blue underwear.
Coffee? She asks.
Yes, please.
Right back. Stay here.
You set down your bag beside hers, pull out a chair and sit down. You light a cigarette, and she comes back carrying two cups of coffee, pocketing a hand-full of coins. She puts her feet on your thigh, crossing her legs at the ankle. You talk and she shows you the scar on her knee, white and wide, from where she fell off of a horse when she was twelve. She speaks of wounds in languages you are just now learning.
Where’s your cat? You ask.
Munich. She says, not looking at you. A friend is watching her.
The scratches on your hands.
She’s a tough cat.
You finish your coffee and she leads you to the train station. Waiting on the platform she leans against you, the way lovers do. She smells of sweat and hotel soap. The sound is the sound of metal against metal, and loud speaker announcements in three different languages. She reads the signs above the track aloud in Italian, then translates them into English. On the train she leans against you and whispers translations of eavesdropped conversations. You make it to the next city by late afternoon and check into a new hotel. That night, as you sit at a café, she looks at you with her dark green eyes.
Here in the cities she knows, there are places that she has been. Places you may never see again. The cities, like their languages, transpose themselves over each other, one becoming the next. You wake up in Milan, and she, the one who speaks Italian, says goodbye in English.
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Michael Overa owns and operates www.thelocalwriter.com, a website which promotes, well, local writers. His work has been featured in Letter X, the Denver Syntax, and Cafe Irreal. He’s a bartender. You don’t have to read his work, but he’d like it if you did.
