A Rule To Live By.

I wanted to kiss her.

Her lips loomed just beyond reach as she writhed and moaned; her back twisting atop the blanket as her body glowed pale and bare beneath the swaths of moonlight bleeding in through the blinds. I wanted to kiss her with everything I had – to steal some of that life that rampaged through her body so chaotically I could feel it through her skin. The hunger to taste some of that roared so loudly in my ears I could barely make out the whispered way she told me to move. So I watched her face. Went by the way her eyebrows quirked when I touched in the right way, her mouth slackened and her eyes fluttered. I wanted with everything to have her whimpers drone out the heat pushing up through me to steal a kiss away and taste the air that spilled from her lips.

She was alive in a way I’d never seen before.

To say I had been fascinated with her from the moment I met her would be underselling it, criminally. I was intrigued in the way that a scholar becomes intrigued by a new theorem – I picked at every new bit of knowledge subconsciously and realized that with everything I learned about her, it just proved how useless it was to think I had a grasp on what it was that she was. So I threw all of it out and simply reveled in the way she said my name. The way her voice sounded when she was happy; a drug if there ever was one.

She twitched and sighed, and it pulled all of my senses back to the little space she occupied on my bed. She was a small thing, and the flow of her body from head to shoulder to breast to hip to leg was rapid and exhilarating to trail with my eyes, and though the pads of my fingers seemed too clumsy and stupid to take the bends and navigate the turns, I guided them slowly, tracing the shadows and toying the lines drawn as the moonlight and the darkness of the room battled for possession of her body.

There's this saying; 'never meet your heroes.'

Fuck that. It's imperative we see them for what they are; their flaws, their weakness, their humanity. Deifying them is wrong. It's what makes them human - and therefore, broken - that should make them worth adoration. It shows us our potential, and that is a far greater thing to behold than someone standing; larger than life itself, doing great things beyond the mortal trappings of temptation, desire, selfishness or all of the other glorious things that pollute us with every breath and poison us with every beat of our hearts. Meet your heroes – it’s the only way they can be heroes.

Conversely, you should never, ever, fuck your dream girl.

Something about seeing her body laying there on the bed I slept on every night seemed surreal in a way so intense it warped all of my perception of what was really happening. It was heady; a high that I didn’t want, but that grabbed me by the collar and dragged me along through twisting pathways of possibility long since dismissed as impossibility, tearing open new wounds and burrowing into them to see just how deep down the rabbit hole things go before I was too far lost in my own mind to manage to get out.

I still watched her face, through that murky fog of thought, and adjusted my touch as she urged, but the movements were lagged and I caught more and more of the color of her eyes as her lashes came apart and she looked at me.

I’ve wanted very few things in the last few years. A system of conditioning, perhaps, but there is an ambivalence to most of the things I interact with regularly that sprouted out of the ashes of apathy long-since crushed because it came too easy and I seem to only want to deal with the things that are hard and hurt and destroy parts of me in my pursuit of them.

I’d wanted to kiss her, earlier. But not then. Right then, I wanted her to not look at me.

I felt like she’d see through me just as clearly as if everything I was feeling was written in script across my face, because she was brilliant like that. A quiet, unassuming but always assured genius lurked around behind her eyes and I was just sure that she would peer deep within me and then pull her body away from my hands and press her back to the wall, eyes alight like a caged animal as she slipped away from the predator.

I shuddered at that.

And then I held her gaze.

A primal part of me clawed up through my stomach and ripped at my throat. I croaked out words to her that were guttural and thick – I don’t know what I said, even now – but in that moment I stared at her and hoped she saw into me. Begged her in to see all that I was. Her eyes fluttered shut and that primal, animalistic thing bellowed in outrage.

There is something arousing about being a hunter. Not sexually – at least, not for me – but far deeper than that. There’s this bone-deep fire to it. I don’t know when it started but it was about at this point that I realized I had stopped being dragged along by that high that rode the scent of her through the scant space from where my fingers played to my mouth that had previously longed to kiss her. I needed no urging to go deeper and deeper down into the depths of that itching need to hold her down and possess her; that was a path I traipsed merrily down, every step nearing the drop-off. The decline to desire so great it was consuming; I could feel it rolling around inside of me, pulsing with every passing moment and every curl of my finger and every quiet exhalation from her mouth, growing larger and larger and wanting only to break free and course through me until the only escape from the heat was feeling her around me. Clutching her hair between my fingers and hearing my name run free and ecstatic from her mouth.

But at that precipice I fought with myself, inside myself, when I realized that how much I wanted her couldn’t compare with how much I wanted her.

Dream girl though she was, she was also a smiling face that bled off the energy I needed to get through more than a few rough days, listening to her bounce from topic to topic with an undeniable brightness to her that attacked the gloom I wrapped myself in to keep it from smothering me. A bent but never broken beauty made of velvet skin, steel bones and a diamond spirit; she was strong and real and there.

That’s the conflict though, isn’t it? The fact that someone cannot be both a dream and a reality. A vision of unattainability that gets turned into some kind of extrahuman vision of perfection… and yet still be so very – beautifully – flawed.

Which is why you should never fuck your dream girl.

Because you can’t.

As soon as you have her, she isn’t a dream anymore. She’s real. And, as she moved beneath me again – as my body reacted to her and I shifted to keep that hidden from her gaze and hopefully safe from my insistent need to be even further a part of her – I realized that her reality was somehow more otherworldly than any fantasy I’d had of her.

Yes.

I am aware of how cheesy this all sounds.

But as I looked at her there on my bed, her eyes half-closed and a heat so intensely hers that I knew it would stay seared into my memory seeping into my skin… I knew I couldn’t – shouldn’t – have her. I wanted her. I wanted her more than I wanted anything in recent memory, in part because it was her, but also because she said she wanted me… But I laid next to her, my arms burning from holding myself up… holding me back from her. And I took the assumed defeat on the chin, because it was better than the alternative.

If discretion is the better part of valor… then sometimes, failure is the only way to succeed.

I couldn’t have her because she had stopped being my dream girl. And she had become something else. Something infinitely more amazing, but inconceivably more frightening. She’d become real in a way that made everything else around her seem somehow fake by comparison, and that itched at something inside of me. As my friend she had always been a real, true thing that could be touched and felt and picked up and spun around in my arms because I was happy to see her. But as a woman, she’d always been just beyond reach.

And there she had to stay. Maybe I’d get another chance at it, maybe I wouldn’t, but better not and still have her there to chase away gloom with her rapid-fire theory of everything, than risk it with that fire roaring inside me and possibly not have her to hug when I need it.

So, in summation, I say all of the above to say this:

I want a cookie.

That’s not a euphemism. This whole thing has been to tell the story of how I now work up after the fantastic pseudo-strikeout with legit the girl I’ve wanted but resigned to never have for months now… really fucking wanting a white chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookie. Just one.

Come on, universe. Karma. Whatever. After me doing the exact thing I didn’t want to do for all of the right reasons, you kinda owe me a spawned-in cookie on my desk when I wake up from my nap.