Port A, Never Blue

Seahorses climbed the walls faded and looping, like they’d been swimming there for years without ever touching water. The carpet smelled faintly of salt and bleach, a ghost of summers we didn’t belong to, while the window blurred itself into nothing glass humming soft with something steady, something we let fade into background. We dropped our bags and never really unpacked— just kicked off shoes, set the cooler sweating onto tile, beer caps scattered like loose change across the nightstand A bucket of chicken between us, grease on our fingers, your laugh low and easy like we had nowhere else to be and no reason to leave. The storm kept trying to say something a constant rush just out of sight but we answered it with our own rhythm, quieter, closer, built in the space between skin and breath. The sheets turned to sand beneath us, warm and shifting, gathering in soft drifts around our legs as we sank into them again and again burying, unburying, losing track of where one ended and the other began. The TV cast a golden flicker over you, light bending slow across your shoulders, your hips, like a sun that didn’t move just stayed fixed on us, endless and watchful. We didn’t need directions. Our bodies fell into each other like they’d been here before like tide finding its pattern, pull and return, again, again, again. we built a version of the ocean no one else ever saw. Your mouth tasted like beer and heat, like something just shy of reckless, and I drank it down like it might run out. Time loosened its grip in that room. Hours slipping sideways, stretching thin and golden until there was nothing left to measure except the space between breaths. And outside, whatever kept rushing past the glass, whatever tried to remind us there was more than this never got in. By the end, the air clung to us, heavy with it, the floor littered with small, careless proof of how completely we disappeared. We made our own shoreline there no horizon, no leaving, just the illusion of something that could last if we never looked too far. We never stepped outside. But I swear, I still remember the sound of waves.