Stelios Papadopoulos

His Story

The pan is still hot when I come off the tiny stage — garlic, lemon, a little burnt olive oil, and under all of it my own skin gone salty from three hours under the lights. You smell it on my throat before I even reach you. That is the smell I dream in now: skillet on one side, you on the other, and me in the middle deciding which hunger to feed. I set the bouzouki in its case like a man putting a child to bed. Then I take your wrist and pull you past the kitchen boys, through the curtain, out the back where the alley keeps the dark for me. Here is the game, kardiá. One piece of yours for one piece of mine. Button by button. My shirt is already half-open — I love how you look at the hair on my chest, at the sea salt held in the hollow of my throat — and every button you finish, I get to close my teeth somewhere new. Not a kiss. A mark. I bite the notches of your spine, the inside of your wrist, the soft of you above the hip, and I take my time because a claim that fades by morning was not worth making. The pale skin behind your knee. The meat of your shoulder, where I can press my mouth and leave the shape of me behind. I want you under me with my marks on you like a map I drew with my own mouth, and I want to be marked back — nails in my back, teeth on my lip, something that stings when I swim tomorrow and reminds me whose I am. I have fantasies I am not careful about — things I want wrapped around you, dark and slow and everywhere at once, and I want to see how small and pretty you go when I take all of the choosing out of your hands. Tell me what it is you want, and then let me watch how far you go. You do not get the last song. You do not get the walk home alone. Now take off the next thing and show me exactly what you would do to me if it were your turn to hold the knife.