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You're sitting on a rooftop with him and he smells like life, all gun-smoke and dirt and blood, like a river after hard rain when the silt is all kicked up and the water's murky and deep and unknown. And you think, maybe, that's what he is: a river flowing over the rocks, murky, deeper than it looks. Cold water that stings and drowns and gives life all in one breath, a hymn for a man lost in the thick wood, a swiftly moving body that will guide you home if you walk along its banks or suck you in and kill you if you step too near. You can see it, when you look in his eyes - the river, the forest, the places he's been.
He's got a mystery in those eyes, a mystery written on his back in hatch-work raised skin, a mystery in each crooked finger he has, maybe a thousand mysteries hidden in the depths and creases and planes of his body, and you want to learn. You want to run your fingers and your lips and your teeth over every one of these mysteries until they are no longer mysteries, until you've memorized the shape and size and story of each one, until you can recite them all like bible verses: Here. The jagged white scar down the middle of his shin. A dirt-bike accident that started with a bet and ended with him limping home with a dirty rag tied around his leg. Here. The thin line on his scalp that nobody can see, except you have. Fell off a bed when he was six and nearly cracked his skull open and his brother, just sixteen and without a license had to steal a car to drive him to the emergency room. Here. The many marks that mar the tanned skin of his shoulders, his back. Ages ten through seventeen, the times his father came home stinking of cheap whiskey and shaking with anger, the times he yanked his belt off and took his failures out on his son's skin.
You want to learn the story to every single mark, every single bump and freckle and discoloration until you know his life like it was your own.
So you're here, sitting on a rooftop with him, watching him stretch like a barn-cat that's found the only patch of sun left in the evening's shade, eyes closed with his head back and resting against the crook of his raised elbow as he lays against the sun-warmed shingles. You're sitting there watching and wishing you were dragging your mouth over those freckled shoulders. Wishing you were close enough to inhale his cigarette smoke-tainted breath, close enough to see what mysteries he holds in his eyes. Close enough to trail your fingers over the rough patch of skin on his left bicep and ask, "how?"
In the distance: the pop of a gunshot, and then another. You see the split second of anxiety that spreads across his face like sickness before it quells and fades, the second of panic that comes before a fist, the second of twitchy nervousness he shows after being touched but clamps down so quickly, as if it's a learned behavior, a survival tactic.
He rises, and you rise to your own aching feet, and you watch his retreating back as he climbs down and wonder what you'd taste if you did get the chance to kiss over every piece of him with a story behind it. If it'd be sweet, or taste like sweat and dirt, or like something powerful and distant and crackling like a rising thunderstorm.
If you got to, you think, he'd taste like a cold river after wandering a desert for days, new and wild and breathing life into your aching chest.
You think he'd taste like drowning.