Traveler's Vows

 by Kit Scanlan

I want to travel with you.

I want you to gently bite my nipple as the sweat from the tropical sun drips down between my breasts and slides onto the thin hotel sheets.  I want the cries from our love to echo through the thin walls and startle the monkeys.  I want to laugh with you inside me.

I want to fall asleep with my head on your shoulder as the crowded bus takes us through little desert towns, amidst the crowing of chickens and loud, unintelligible chatter.  We will get disapproving stares from wrinkled old women and smile softly to ourselves in a silent apology for a breach of local culture.  We won’t feel that bad.

Our schedule stays the same: arrive at a new place, the next stop, another hotel.  Naked, we would caress and cuddle, staring out the window at the ocean, the sky, the stars, the uncrowded beach; our clothes reeking from one too many days without laundry, the hotel room nothing but a bed and a dresser and maybe a mirror.  I want to have you in a tent by ourselves, separated from the universe by a thin layer of high-tech plastic.  An echo from a wild predator and a cool breeze make me shiver, and I snuggle closer, deeper into you.

I long to feel your touch, light, between my shoulder-blades as we stare at some relic in a museum.  Through it I would feel your need for me, ever-present, ever-burning, even though we would spend every hour together, sleeping and snoring and eating and shitting and arguing through the stress of travel until we fall into bed to work out our restless hormones.  Even then I would pull your hair just a little harder than usual, but I would write it off as the heat of passion.  You, being you, would pretend to believe me.

I want to fall asleep still angry with you about the missed train or an improper tip, and I want to wake up to you gazing down at me in an unfamiliar light, in an unfamiliar bed. 

That bed would still be ours, though, since you would be there.

Kit Scanlan works day jobs to make money, but has a professional career in hopeless romanticism.  One of her least favorite words is "babe" if it is used to refer to her by someone she doesn't know, and one of her favorites if used to refer to her by her lover.