Audemus Dawnspark

Riptide

I imagine that, given enough time, I could catalogue the ridges of your callused fingertips, charting a topographical map using only my tongue as a surveying instrument.

Further, still, the intricacies and abrasive origins of each individual groove, revealed by taste alone: rope, braiding and cording innumerable hewn hemp knots until scraped raw; wind, dry desert air wicking away the moisture until splitted and scabbed and balmy tradewinds infusing so much that they swelled, macerated; salt, powder-dry remnants of the sea marking every crevice, the taste of which never has (and I’m sure never will) quite left (leave) you.

“Nasty,” You say, fingers hooked into my mouth as I tongue them in a perfect parody of oral sex. It is rather — the calcite cream transferred from your hands to the carnation pink tips of my sunburnt shoulders is bitter and chalky and likely not meant for consumption, the sand lining my gums a reminder that your limbs had been buried in the shifting surf up until the moment of my cartography-inspired impulse.

I don’t care.

I’m not sure that you really do, either, as I slip between the channel of your thighs. A spiny piece of coral pierces my knee, red leaking into the ooid sand and streaking outward like the branching tributaries of a river map until they are swept away by the sea’s insistent kiss to shore. I submerge in the foam to my belly, here, where the strand is pillowy, made unstable by the tide.

Perhaps I hinge too much on the capabilities of my mouth in that regard, but there are no complaints about the heuristic techniques I employ elsewhere.

I wonder if this place, this islet with sugar-white sand that is laden with citrus pregnant trees bearing twisted, arthritic roots, is somewhere that you’ve taken others. Having tromped over a sandbar and past a pair of round, brine-glistening skerries you dubbed Neptulon’s Balls, was the discovery of this secret cay a fortuitous gift given by low tide or one of calculated design?

I care a little.

I suppose it doesn’t matter.

As we share in a touch that’s sticky with hog plum and gritted with salt, I steal a honeysuckle kiss. It’s redolent of summer, our heliacal sojourn, and as the light dips low over the gnarled mangroves, we intertwine just like their roots in the gentle current, awash in our unspoken revelations.