She fingered herself roughly, her own harsh breath in her ears, came without release, the post-orgasmic throbbing an ache that reached her heart.  Hope fell out of her in a single long sigh that seemed to wither in the morning air. 

She sat up, dangled long legs over the side of the bed, and looked for something to look forward to in this long day that spread out before her like a prisoner’s final walk to the chair of executions.  Perhaps the open house at CAC would be a distraction.  She could only hope.

*~*~*~*~*

Am I really? Am I your man?”

The question lingered on her skin, like the scent of his cologne.  Giorgio. 

“Yes.”  The only certainty she knew.  One word of truth.  “Yes.”  One word to set off a pebblefall of other questions, deeper questions for herself.

If you are my man, what am I?”  She could reclaim no clear answer from among the things she knew to be true for herself.  Surely, among all the words for woman, there must be one for herself.

She sifted through them, one at a time, while the coffee perked and the whisk in her hand, a tattoo against stainless steel, beat six eggs to a yellow froth while thick strips of bacon, crackled, a staccato Morse code of fat melting in the flame.

She set the bowl of beaten eggs beside the cutting board, heaped with its crop of sliced mushrooms (startling in their whiteness), bits of onion still milky now with the promise of turning translucent in the heat of the fire, a rainbow of chopped peppers…red, yellow, green…and small chunks of tomato.  A stick of butter softened on the countertop of the kitchen island.  The perked coffee hissed to a sigh.  The bacon crisped on the cooling burner.

None of this brought an answer any nearer the surface.  If you are my man, what am I?” she asked herself again, no answer from the recesses of her mind.

A warm whisper in her ear, the comfort of his bare muscled arms wrapping round her waist:  "You are my woman," he answered her as if having been privy to the one sided conversation.