How I Know

His eyes are so hard. His features always seem to be pulled slightly towards his hairline. Tight. Wax figure-like. Starring at nothing and the nothing starring back. He's just skeptical. He won't be made fool. Face never cracked. Cool, calm, and collected, this guy. Nonchalant. Easy breathing.  I'm talking, wondering if I'm making any dent at all. And this is how I know he loves me. 

I'm a few sentences in and things start to curve up and down. It's his lips that relent first -- the smallest of all submissions. His mouth twists crooked, there's a slight purse to his lips, and the corners turn slightly up. As his shoulders relax (this movement is small, almost not at all), his hands fall further down his legs and a little towards mine tucked under my own knees. This movement brings his head marginally closer to mine as if intrigued but, per routine, yields just before crossing the line that will signal a final relinquish. Again, these changes are minuscule. You wouldn't notice unless you had been waiting for them all night.

I'm indulging in each submission, checking them off like a shopping list. It feels like burglary. Or when you keep the leftover change when your parents send you for groceries. I really don't think he has any idea, the slightest clue, how I treat myself with these. It's like each submission of his is a single finger. 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... until a full hand is raised and he swears off everything he's ever known and everything he's ever trusted because his eyes, his eyes are the last and final abandonment. They are the truce of this civil war. The waving of the white flag. The "give me liberty or give me death". The blue, always glowing against his black hair, turning into a warm pool of bath water. There's this somehow transparent but very evident thickness that forms atop the surface of his eyes as he's looking at me that's going to brim over and fill the apartment with his ardent admiration he's reserved only for me. There's so much -- he's held this back for 24 years -- it's starting to pour out the windows and flood the streets. Ignorant and unknowing people slosh through his admiration and kids are splashing in his wonderment of me. All for me. Everything is for me. It is always for me. The tight jaw. The hard stares. The rebuttals rebounding inside his head all day. It's all for this release of me in this moment on this couch under this blanket searing though all the metaphorical beauties that poets like to think are keeping lovers apart. I've froze mid-sentence because I know that it's here, right here, that he's uncrossed his heart, un-hoped to die. 

I'm telling you, it's his eyes. They are blue and they are thick. They are not mine. Yet I still feel I am under them. He nods, realizing too that I've picked his lock, and says, "go on, love".