Asleep in our separate beds for the first time ever on this, the third day of our honeymoon—until now all honey and nougat and sparkling rosé turned swollen noses and crusty eyes. must be jetlag, must be allergies, until the line arrived like a hot pink gatecrasher, a racing stripe hastily drawn in the sand:

                         I am positive.                                                        You are not. 

Yet.                              

No more kissing, I say, looking up from the test.

How could we have been so stupid? Over 100,000 people a day through Heathrow Airport, the virus we forgot about while satiated on so much skin, the truth now blowing our red Spanish curtains in the swelter of thick twilight.

We quietly separate the two twin beds.

And I have been exiled, ripped from our shared shelter—contagious, fatigue-shadowed, hot balloon headed, falling asleep to the cricket requiems of summer’s suicide while our two fingertips barely touch across a chasm        

of unfairness

in our separate twin beds on this, the third day of our honeymoon.

I awake at midnight shivering, sweat-dizzy in the darkness with a hallucination of you climbing onto my balcony, a pirate boarding my ship, pulling the plank across the moat, slipping a thin paper veil over my nose and mouth, and now we’re on one infected island together in a fever dream of scarlet skin, your face blurred into the black dahlia haze, my body held hostage just out of sight, a coup d’état on the hill of my calves, a scorched insurrection along the open desert of inner thigh, now surrendered—I love you whispered through the velvet delirium; I love you a cool rain sizzling between scorched cobblestones.

You press your lips against the moist paper heart of my mask. Then lift it. Our secret.

The crickets hold their breath. The red curtains barely move in the airless night.