Two Women of a Certain Age | by Lisa Fabish

            Your skin painted by the half light of the late morning sun through my shutters, you stand, obliquely aware of me, your arms lifted overhead. I nestle into my mattress, my body no longer alight. Sated. (Wasn't that the term that, when it came up in your word game last week, made you think of me?)
            You duck and twist your head into your sports bra - my favorite, the one with the hundreds of tiny blocks of color - awkwardly folding wrists and elbows, pulling the elastic down past your shoulders. Trapezius. Supraspinatus. Latissimus dorsi.
            I watch your hand rise again to lift your breast into the waiting elastic cup. Liquid skin cascading like a mountain stream, swirling and rising in your cupped hand, flowing into the bright elastic just as it poured over my tongue only moments ago.
            A light spreads from the center of my body with the memory: running the rapids of your body, tracing curves and folds, circling, lifting - the way I do when holding you against me is not enough, when I need to feel you surround me, allowing me between, beneath, within.
            Can you hear the slight gasp that moves my body at the sight of you? Do you hear my body asking? I want to play in the eddies of you once more - lifted, refreshed, renewed. 
            You turn away slightly, and the sun now catches your shoulder blade, the arc of your lower spine. You lift your foot to the waistband of your Lycra pants. Are you thinking ahead to the heft of a kettlebell, the give of the treadmill? To straining your knees and stressing your heart, and filling your skin with the flush of lately found strength?
            You look over your shoulder at me, eyes softly holding on. Delight rests easily in your lips and in the softness of your skin. Pulling the black Lycra up along your outstretched leg, your hands need only skim your own skin to delight me now.