Kismet

Five [The Appointment]

He had resolved not to sleep the following evening the moment that his fog cleared from the dream, deciding that the lingering taste in his mouth was too heavenly to risk destroying. He rolled onto his back with the image of you hanging heavily in his brain, weighing down his hair and shoulders, his chest and his heart. He slipped his fingertips into the elastic waistband of his joggers, his thumb brushing against his happy trail before traveling up his bare stomach and chest and into his hair. He stretched until he felt as though each of his tight muscles would snap, his kitten traipsing across his thighs in search of a thread or string to play with somewhere on his bedspread.

He rolled onto his side once more and wrapped his arms and legs around his pillow, trying to envision what it would feel like to hold someone while he sleeps. He tried to envision how your eyes when staring directly into the depths of his soul, what the ends of your hair might feel like against his knuckles or what fragrance your neck emits when he nudges his nose against it. He imagined that being directly addressed by you would be too overstimulating to bear, he wouldn't know where to look or what to say after all this time and the thought of it made each one of his nerve endings zap like a live wire.

He's so socially out of practice that witnessing your nose scrunch up when you laugh might send him into cardiac arrest, but he likes to pretend anyhow. When he awakens from one of your visits he often lays in bed for hours just watching the ceiling and imagining what you would say if you were laying in bed beside him, how your nails would scratch up the skin of his forearm to pluck a trail of goosebumps behind them, the pads of your fingers halting at his chin to turn his face toward you.

His fingertips traced circles into his pillowcase, his favorite two syllables looping in his mind like an angelic choir while stars formed together and exploded in a shock of electric blue, the light blinding before it was sucked back in on itself to leave a halo of stardust in its wake. His eyes slipped close as he ran through his dream once more before it flattened and turned to dust to get carried away in the tornado of his thoughts. He squeezed the pillow as tightly as possible, a soft groan quivering in his throat and wondering if he prayed hard enough if two arms would magically appear and lull him back to sleep with the promise of serenity.

His mum used to climb into bed and hug him when he woke up screaming from colored nightmares in the middle of the night; sometimes she would fall asleep beside him as she tried to mute the sound of her sniffles in an attempt to hide the fact that she was crying. He would never fall back to sleep after a premonition and still doesn't, but he would pretend for the sake of his mum's fragile compassionate attempts to comfort him.

He crushed his eyes shut and tried to remember how it felt for her to run her fingers through his hair, shushing him quietly while the burn of car crashes, ships sinking and assassinations dulled from his memory, the reverse trickle of blood and the vibration of victim's screams worming their way through his brain like maggots in a rotten apple. He never understood what was happening when he was young until he began to communicate what he was seeing with a bit more clarity, his parents turning white as bleached bed sheets the first time they saw one of his depictions on the news the following day, the newscaster recounting each detail as if Harry had memorized the TelePrompter word for word.

His foot lifts off of the pedal as he reaches for his cut-off wire, his fingers wrapping around the handles before guiding the wire underneath his completed vase. Tall with a slender neck, widening into a becoming hourglass figure towards the bottom. He doesn't consciously realize that your appearance is the muse for each piece he's made today; at least half a dozen ultra feminine designs that he plans to paint in varying shades of ruby and candy apple red once they're retrieved from the kiln.

He adds the vessel to his growing collection on a tall industrial shelf spattered with clay and paint, standing back to admire the contrasts and similarities of each design as he tilts his head left to right for a comprehensive view. He stands over the deep and wide stainless steel sink in the corner of the spacious room, running a stiff brush over his fingernails and wrists as if he were a surgeon preparing to operate, his gaze drawn to the massive window before him.