Vulnerable

I have a thing for boys with shaved heads.

I stand in the doorway, hip resting against the doorframe, watching you watch yourself. It is only in this room of white on white on white that all the shades of your skin is visible; the pinks of the palms of your hands, the dusk-twilight-violet under your eyes, the faint blue lace of your eyelids, at your temple, running down the insides of your arms, your wrists, the stong cords holding your skull to the cage of your heart. The grey-blue-green underwater shadows beneath your shoulderblades, across the newly-naked curve of your head. I step forward, turn you away from the glass-version of yourself, run my hands over the soft fuzz of grey. Fingers across the high cheekbones, all the way to where they melt into the curve of the skull. The joint of the jaw. Pessing into the softly filled cavity of the eye sockets. Fingers dancing to hold all you know of the world in the palms of my hands, fingers feeling for the scars where once you were young and innocent and open to the world.
Your world is in the palms of my hand and pressed to my forehead and I whisper, You look so vulnerable like this. You start, jerk, angry; you didn't do this to be vulnerable, just like you didn't want to be memorable when you spent 14 hours under a needle covering the mantle of collarbones and shoulderblades in ink words that your lovers will never forget. But you are.
You look so vulnerable, like you'll bleed and break. But you look ready for it. You look ready to fall and bruise and crack your knees on cement and break the back of your skull on other people's hearts and hands. And you look ready to stand up again.
You reply, I never wanted enough.
I know, and I wanted too much, and that kept you a shell (all pale and porcelain and strewn across the sand in pieces) and kept me a storm.
I feel that precious skull in the palms of my hands and I know you'll be broken back to innocence.
I feel your heart trembling all the way to your fingertips poised on the points of my hips, all the way to the breaths we are sharing. I know you'll find the flow of a sea without storm.
I kiss the blue lace covering the green of your eyes.
I let you go, and you not only stand, you walk.
Framed in darkness, you look bone white.