Proposition:

If she would only touch him at night. If she would only let him smell her skin, get close enough for lust, he feels his luck burned out long ago but if. If she would wake him up at night, embrace him, trace the outline of his shape in the dark, through sleep. If she would let him help her with what is inside, if he could open up her heart, her legs, her mind without a crank, a jack.

 

Then. He would. Be good to her. He would offer her his math. Then he would litter then bathe her in it, in the language of number and bracket, equation and stat. He would un-numb her with number forever, forever, 4 all.

 

They started the end in autumn, number pulling them apart. They launched the end in plural ways, a matrixed dénouement. A ray extends one way. He was the ray. And she the endpoint, dead-end point, and she was done. 

 

Soon it settled in her mouth, her pores. Soon she was making him measure each night the arch of her belly, where A is the cove between her breasts and B that twilight space where stomach ends, her privacy begins.

 

He’ll come to miss the way she used to trace his scars, so that he almost felt the skin again, her touch reviving nerve. The way at night she’d use the tip of nail, connect the freckles on his back like graph, each mark on skin a coordinate. What he’ll come to miss most about her, his cage and his key, is the beautifully maddening digits.

 

Proposition:

If he had cracked her open. If he had split her like a fruit, if he had reached inside her, touched her blood, that muddy ointment of thick slope. If he had found her formula, if he had solved her X.

 

Then. She may have stayed. They might have built a better braid.