his forever eyes, I framed his large face with my hand and kissed him tenderly, kissing him tenderly for the first time as I brought my hands down around his throat and I squeezed.

The kiss became rough when his breathing became rough. I continued to squeeze, we continued to kiss. His arms were too weak to pull me off of him and they felt more like warm, damp, rags wrapped around my wrists. We continued to kiss, as I continued to deny him air, the same denial he gave me four months ago.

Memories like fat falling drops off the end of the thread splashed into that moment and I saw him as I saw myself; helpless, and dying on the floor. I felt the muscles in his neck, steel cables, and my hands were a steel cable squeezing, and when I felt his soul like the edge of a wet feather brush against my stomach, I let him go as he blacked out.

His life was still in him, and I continued to kiss him whispering in his ear,

“Remember this. Never forget.”

It took several minutes before he regained consciousness, his eyes searching for me. By that time I was behind him, and it was my cock full of blood that was pushing against his regretful desert. He tried to reach for me, to hold me, he tried to talk and I just spit on my hand and pushed into him.

I cannot express how much it hurts to know that I was hurting him, and I cannot express how much it hurts when he has done the same to me. Last night he had the benefit of the numb edges of semi-consciousness to take away his pain. Usually I just get a sharp knock to my head when it hits the wall or the floor.

This was not about that. This was about me giving him what he had given me.

He didn’t even get hard. He was only semi hard and I didn’t even care if he came as I fucked him. I fucked him until my own head threatened to float up into the vaulted ceiling and explode and so I exploded in him. When I pulled out I was raw, my foreskin swollen, just as he was raw and his neck swollen with my fingerprints.

I turned him over, framed my face with the same hands that choked him into unconscious and saw in his eyes what he could not say,

“Save me.”

And that’s where I fall, that’s where I crush, because he had been broken and brought to me. I had broken him more, and now he knew; now he could feel, and now he could empathize with my pain and my death.

We had both died now. We were given the chance to be reborn in each other. I poised my lips just above his bruised ones,

“I’ll never leave you.”

I kissed him, his eyes were closed and I felt his tears run down under my palms. I cried along with him, and then I became his silk cover, touching him, kissing him everywhere, a balm where he hurt, cool where he was hot, and calm where his pulse was an abandoned baby rabbit hiding underneath his skin.

I felt the heat in his neck growing and I kissed it. I kissed the already forming bruises. I kissed the red angry welts where my hands had squeezed.

Today his voice is almost gone.