Coffee and Croissants

We enter the cafe and the steam fogs my glasses.  For a moment the clean lines of you, are soft again, hazy as memory.  Lovers once, we meet as friends,  knees touching,  your hand warm on my back, between my shoulder blades.  Partners resuming a dance,  taking tentative bittersweet sips of the past when my lips knew the taste of every part of you, warm breath on my skin, soft underside of elbows, breathing your air in my mouth, tracing skin, tracing stories.  All I know of bodies and pleasure, how to ask, give,receive,  I learned from your lips and sometimes licking the spaces between your toes.  All those other boys, fumbling in the dark, sometimes their exclamations,  coincided with my questions, but I never knew how to ask with them,  how to articulate my wants with gestures and words and they didn't take what I never gave.  You and I, drunken nights and dove grey mornings turned lazy afternoons and your spine, fine silhouette, as you tapped out a poem in the night taught me the ask of love, the give, the why, the beauty and the heartache that I still trace from your fingertips to the silk that wraps the hollow of your neck in grey moons.  The ache of consent.  When I gave my consent did I know that a piece of my soul would forever be tied to your being.  Ask me for my consent,  I give it now as I did then as I do with every breath I take every moment we are alone in a sparse bedroom, or in the solitude of sitting together in a cozy nook of a quiet cafe.  The winter air is cold,  pushes through my coat, but between my shoulder blades I feel the warmth of your hand still pressing a memory against my spine.