"On my Body is a Story you can Read"

You, with your strong fingers and their butter-soft touch, crawl beneath the hem of my top. The tan-lines there that you're looking for talk shyly of our summer. They tell tales on us - reveal the gradual unpeeling of the layers of my clothes in the cover of the long grasses and wildflowers of the meadows that form the half-way point between our houses.

My arms are dark with the markings of the summer-hours of my resistance. But there is a caramel tint to my stomach, with its soft skin that you said begged to be kissed. You nudged up the fabric of my t-shirt with your red-blushed nose and left my chest freckled. Then you joked that one day you'd bring a pen and draw out the dot-to-dot picture that I kept secret on my skin. You said that the joining of my freckles would show my true self. And you wanted to tease out more of the orange-brown dots on my pure, white flesh. But I held firm, kept my zippers zipped and my hooks fastened. Until today.

Those fingers of yours find their way under everything, and they draw new battle lines with the sun's browning marker. And today you have exposed the bright white, the wedding white, of my uncovered breasts.

They don't show it now, but later I will notice their slight deepening in colour. And you will have won them over to your side in the war. I will concede defeat and withdraw my forces - note the lines drawn for our next battle.