The Stranger You Know

The Stranger You Know

She walked into the room like she already owned it,
black dress, bare feet, eyes that said she’d been waiting,
I’d seen her three times and we’d barely said a word
but the way she looked at me was loud and unambiguous.
Said you want to come over and I said yes before
the sentence finished, didn’t even check the clock,
I was at her door in under twenty minutes flat
and she opened it already halfway out of that dress.
No preamble, no small talk, no pretending we were
there for any reason other than the obvious,
she kissed me hard enough to back me to the wall
and I grabbed her by the hips and answered back in kind,
we didn’t learn each other’s middle names that night
or where we went to school or what our parents do,
we learned the specific things that matter in the dark,
what works and what doesn’t and what makes you say it again.
The stranger you know is the best kind of night,
no history to carry, no reason to fight,
just bodies that agree on a singular aim,
you come there a stranger and you leave just the same,
but something happened in that bed, can’t call it nothing,
she was shaking when she came and I was right there with her,
the stranger you know, the night you won’t forget,
the best kind of transaction with no built-in regret.