Anatomy of a Slow Dance

Your hand on the small of my back is a cartographer's first mark— here be tenderness, here be the edge of the known world. We move in three-quarter time, which is to say we are always slightly off-balance, which is to say we are always falling toward each other and catching ourselves just before the landing. The song is something old. Sinatra, maybe. Or Chet Baker. Someone who understood that the space between two bodies is not empty but full of weather— warm fronts, pressure systems, the gathering static before a storm that never quite arrives. Your breath on my neck is a kind of punctuation. A comma, not a period. A pause that promises continuation. The song ends. We don't stop. The DJ plays another. We pretend this is coincidence and not the universe conspiring to keep us exactly here.