First Kiss

Afterwards you had that drunk, drugged look my daughter used to get, when she had let go of my nipple, her mouth gone slack and her eyes turned vague and filmy, as though behind them the milk was rising up to fill her whole head, that would loll on the small white stalk of her neck so I would have to hold her closer, amazed at the sheer power of satiety, which was nothing like the needing to be fed, the wild flailing and crying until she fastened herself to me and made the seal tight between us, and sucked, drawing the liquid down and out of my body; no,this was the crowning moment, this giving of herself, knowing she could show me how helpless she was—that’s what I saw, that night when you pulled your mouth from mine and leaned back against a chain-link fence, in front of a burned-out church: a man who was going to be that vulnerable, that easy and impossible to hurt.