We lied, oh how we lied, in your truck and my small bed, in the tent and the porch swing, in restaurants and bars and once right in the middle of the road, we lied and cried and swore that we loved each other. Our skin slippery, our legs twined, our mouths so hungry and greedy that every word became a betrayal.

"I've never done this before," I said, was always saying, and how you laughed, how smug and full and satisfied we felt. You smelled like pine trees, and wind, and the dark, deep fragrance of cigarettes, and beneath that, something lingering and old, like an animal who has slept in the woods and suddenly, miraculously creeps into your bed one night.
  
But you were older, you had been married, you knew things I didn't, though I swore, I insisted I did. I was living with someone else, had been living with him for months. He pretended he didn't know, all those nights I snuck out, my mouth raw in the morning from your kisses. All those nights hanging around coffee shops and gas stations, waiting for the moment when your truck would pull up and you'd swing down, your white shirt swirling against your hips.

I was still young when I took off, running away one night, just packing up and leaving you both, not knowing which one of you would follow. He did; you didn't. I don't know if you even tried. Maybe you knew what I didn't learn until later, that it wasn't love, that it had never been love. That it was something else, something so strong and binding and awful that I couldn't resist running through the pine-smelling nights to meet you. It was always windy, those nights, the wind blowing through my hair, swaying your shirt. Maybe it was the wind that infected us, made us so crazy that you often bit down until you drew blood. For years I carried the memory of your teeth in the small, almost invisible scars over my body.

Then I moved away and my life changed, and when you called last summer, after almost ten years, I didn't recognize your voice. But I was touching myself, oh, I was sitting on the kitchen floor touching myself. A few weeks later, I was on a plane, flying down to see you. I don't know what I expected, that you hadn't changed, that time had stood still. But when I saw you standing there, dressed like a country-western singer, I felt nothing but shame. Your hands were just hands, your lips just lips, though chapped now, and thinner, paler. You had diminished, in the years we had been apart, and I hated you for this betrayal, for how stale your tongue tasted, and the way your hands felt, so cold and foreign as they snaked their way between my legs.

The next morning I changed flights and you drove me back to the airport. You stood there in the parking lot, the rain against your face, and for a moment, oh, for a moment I would have given anything to be in bed with you again, the way it used to be, both of us lying and crying and swearing, swearing that we loved each other. 

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