It was New Year’s Eve, and we were drunk enough to slur our words. I sat in an enormous sofa chair while distant music played overhead. The room was dimly lit, but occasionally there was a crack, then a splash of neon colour on the white walls as the fireworks went off outside. Elsewhere in the house, faintly, there was the rattle of our friends, a shrill scream, a shout of laughter. She stood with her back to the sliding door. Light from the kitchen filtered in through the heritage-stained glass. Beams fell softly around her, fired up her edges, and touched them in strange colours. I didn’t notice right away, but she was looking at me. There was nothing else in the room as she walked towards me, her lone figure a flickering candle. Her delicate, socked feet made no noise on the hardwood floors. She walked until the tops of her thighs pressed into my knees. I breathed out for the last time, my chest depressed somehow deeper than it ever had before. I was sinking. 

I couldn’t look up at her, my eyes weighed down somewhere at her thighs. The hiss and deflated sigh of things rubbing together, things rubbing against air; she knelt in front of me. She put her chin in my lap. Without thinking, I drew a thumb across her eyebrow. The little hairs, rough under my finger, had come out of place somewhere in the night. I smoothed them back and kept my thumb on her forehead a while longer, pressing into her skin. If our friends had found us there that night, her lying in my lap and our noses pressed together, it would only have taken the innocent shrug of her shoulders. She hated it when people saw us together.

I enjoyed the weight of her head, the dull ache where her chin dug into the meat of my leg. Flattened clamour rose again when another firework fragmented in the street, the room suddenly doused in blues. We hadn't spoken a word yet. She exhaled quickly. Her breath on my thighs burned me through my clothes. I hummed a noise in the back of my throat, the first sound in so long. She rose to her knees. Her chest was in my lap then, eyes never leaving my face. I could feel her breath on my neck, making me jerk forward. I felt her stomach move against my legs, her ribcage pressed against my femur. I couldn’t hear the fireworks. I tried to remember a time when her name was just a sound. Instead, I felt one note of a song ringing through the whole house. I felt my eyelashes against my cheek, moving with the air she stirred against my skin. I let my mouth press against the round part of her head, where she pushed into me. Her hands slid to my thighs and tightened. She looked at me once, leaned in, and held herself there. Then it was over. She started laughing and fell over backwards onto the carpet. The sickening moment was excused; she was free, and I crushed my knuckles to my cheeks. I was suddenly cold. She sighed happily on her back, legs kicking in the air.

When we went outside before the countdown, we already knew how everything would happen. People walked connected by outstretched arms and hands. Everyone in attendance totalled an even number and already stood strategically as the countdown to midnight started in the street. The wind milled around us, pushing us all together and whipping our hair around our shoulders. I imagined the moment framed by a daguerreotype camera with a laughing man behind it, the count, a blinding flash of light. Fireworks poured into the sky, thunder overhead. Ribbons of purple-blue whistled, pink stars fell from heaven, and the whole world was counting. When I looked at her, she was already looking at me. I experienced the whole world’s delight in a shiver, a feeling drawn out– a great exclamation, screaming, my joy a high-pitched whine in my chest. We stumbled, clung, dug our nails in, and I oriented myself only by her breath. The brittle wind made my tired jaw shake against her lips. My New Year’s kiss was hungry, teeth, wide open; it was honest. When it was over, everyone looked around, embarrassed maybe, and staggered back inside the house. Shoes thrown in the entryway, bare feet shuffling to various corners.

In the early hours of New Year's Day, at the dining table, our chairs abandoned their direction and boldly faced each other. She pointed at a mole half-hidden in her eyebrow, “I’m always scared people notice this when they look at my face.” 

It was quiet until her voice came again. 

“Do you notice it when you look at me?” Her sweet face shone in the near dark. I couldn’t answer the question. There was no way to tell her what her face meant to me, that her mole was important. I let her wait for too long, shoulders drawn up.

Finally, I said, “Yeah, I’ve noticed it.”

My breath shuddered, and I coughed, “It never occurred to me that you might not like it.” Embarrassingly, it sounded like I was about to cry. I wanted more than anything for her to stay with me that night. I pointed at a freckle right above my lip.

“I’ve noticed that about you,” is what she said to me. We stared at each other for a long time. I wondered whether that’s what she meant to say. I smiled at her, both of us rid of those things precious and irretrievable. I set about convincing her not to go home.

***

Assigned a room with twin beds, we would be sleeping next to each other. Side by side on the smaller bed, she asked me to count her birthmarks for her. She turned away, and I put my palm against the skin of her bare back when she shivered against the cold. Heat rose from her skin as I watched strands of her hair quiver under my breath. My hands swept down her back and pulled her to me. I held my mouth to her shoulder and pressed my lips to the muscle that carried the weight of her body. I counted every birthmark. She was pliant, rolling around on the bed so I could reach every single one. We finished with her toes. It seemed then that nothing could take her from me and that she would never willingly part with me. I lay against her until she fell asleep. Only after I felt her breath change did I move to my own bed, but I hung my hand over the edge, allowing it to occasionally brush against her hair. I woke up the following morning, my hand pressed to her cheek. The whole room smelled like her. She had her back turned to me.

***

Sounds of knives on toast and spoons rattling around in cups carried through the walls and filled the house. I sat at the table with my fingers pressed to my mouth, the smell of her skin still thick on my hands. When she woke up that morning, she couldn't look at me. Her voice rang out in the kitchen, louder than all the others; she talked excitedly. I wished for things to be different this time. Coffee appeared, and some people sat down around me. Her walk to the other side of the table was brisk and practiced. She avoided looking in my direction, her chair sharply turned away. No accident could result in eye contact. The chatter from the surrounding table collapsed into a low grind somewhere behind me as I watched her jaw move in conversation with a boy next to her. Eyes opened wide, and with her best smile, she became a black-and-white photograph, all contrast and harsh lines; her softness was gone.