Intrusion by Charlotte Stein

sure I should run now.
    His bed is just so narrow . Surely he knows that this is the narrowest thing in the history of sizes? I’ve seen needles fatter than his supposed sleeping apparatus, and yet there he is sitting on it all casually as though this is really what we’re going to do.
    Unless he expects me to sit somewhere else? I glance around hopefully, but I get no relief there. He barely has any other items of furniture in here, never mind something that could be used as a chair. If I clamber onto his clearly handmade wardrobe he’s going to think I’m very weird. For a start, I’d need a stool to get up there.
    And then there’s the fact that he just patted the space next to him.
    He has to know that our bodies will touch when I occupy that space, but he does it anyway. So what should I allow myself to think here? That he wants our bodies to touch in this way? Maybe he wants to keep pushing up against some raw, red edge inside himself, to see how much it stings. He might think that this time will be different—that this will be the moment when everything turns out okay and we just melt into each other’s arms.
    But if he does, he makes no real sign. He simply waits for me to join him, and once I do, he turns on the documentary. We watch penguins chirp and peep with a line of fire burning between our bodies, each glancing touch a new kind of agony. Both of us intently staring at the screen so we don’t have to see all the things we might want.
    Not that we really have to see.
    I could be across the street and still know what was going on. You could put me in a burlap sack and stuff me in an abandoned mine three thousand miles from where he is, and I would know. My mouth desires his mouth, and my hands desire his hands, and my body desires his body—and apparently, he feels the same way about me.
    How else to explain the hand he suddenly puts on my thigh? He must know that the particular spot he chooses is way too high for casual contact. And if he somehow doesn’t, then at the very least the nakedness of my thigh should raise some questions in his mind. Somehow my dress is far higher than I remember it being when I last checked, but he isn’t shying away from that.
    He’s moving toward it.
    He’s moving underneath it.
    And he does it so casually , too—just like in the cinema, with his eyes on something else and his every movement so carefully constructed. Anyone would believe he wasn’t touching me at all. I hardly believe he’s touching me at all.
    Even though his hand is an inch from my panties now. I know it is, because my body is so suddenly charged it has the ability to measure distance without tools or even a glance in that general direction. I’m holding my breath, and I hold it harder when I feel him go higher.
    Is there even higher to go to?
    He must be at the place I want him most now. He must be, he must be—there isn’t anywhere else for him to be. From here on in there is only my swollen sex, but somehow that distance is never closed. It keeps on being that single inch. It might as well be a mile. He will never do it completely, I think. He’s incapable of going any further than this. He said in the kitchen that a kiss was too much. The chances of him closing that gap are next to none.
    So when he actually does, I think my reaction is warranted. My teeth clack together around my tongue—the pain like a beautiful and awful backdrop to the sudden glut of pleasure that bolts through me. And though I immediately want to open my legs as wide as they will go, my thighs completely disobey me. They snap together like the jaws of some frightened animal, muscles so suddenly tense I don’t think I’ll ever be able to release him.
    But maybe that’s for the best.
    Now he can’t get away from this. There’s no sense in him trying to pretend it never happened, or that he did it just by accident. His hand is too deep