La Vie

Agatha Vega sits on the hotel balcony overlooking Paris rooftops. She writes home. Her boyfriend believes she is just soaking up French culture. She describes the food, the light on the Seine, the way the locals move through their afternoons slow and certain. She leaves out Manuel. Leaves out the way he answered the door with just a towel, the wet heat that rose off his skin when she pressed her mouth to his stomach. Leaves out how she took him between her lips while he stood over her, how his fingers slid down the cleft of her ass and pressed in slow circles until her knees gave. The letter stays clean. The truth lives in the way her thighs still tremble hours later, in the taste she keeps swallowing every time she licks her lips. She signs the postcard with a heart, folds it, and sets it on the nightstand beside the half-empty bottle of oil Manuel left behind.