The Distance Between Hands

By Salem River Cooper

It wasn’t distance.

It was divinity.

That narrow, aching space

between your hand and mine—

no more than a breath,

a heartbeat stretched thin—

and yet it held the weight

of a lifetime.

I could feel you in the air.

Not your skin,

but your heat—

a low, steady radiance

humming along the edge of my body

like a fever with no name.

Your fingers rested beside mine

on the cracked leather of a couch

that witnessed everything.

And in that impossible closeness,

I learned what restraint feels like

when it starts to rot.

I did not touch you.

But I wanted—

not in the way mouths want,

but in the way the tide wants the moon:

endlessly,

without claim,

pulling,

pulling,

pulling

from beneath the surface.

I imagined reaching—

not with hands,

but with everything else.

With the pulse behind my teeth.

With the wet breath behind my ribs.

With the invisible ache

stitched between each vertebrae.

I wanted you to move.

To close the inch.

To make the air between us collapse.

But you stayed still—

a statue of mercy,

a god carved from no.

The couch creaked like it was mourning for us.

The light flickered against your wrist,

and I wanted to kiss the vein

just to see if it sang.

I watched the tendons shift

as you flexed your hand,

watched the shadow it cast

over my thigh—

so near it felt like a threat.

You looked straight ahead.

I looked at you

like I was trying to remember

a dream I wasn’t allowed to keep.

Desire pooled in the silence.

Thick.

Viscous.

Alive.

It pressed against my skin from the inside—

a pressure that had nowhere to go,

so it bloomed instead.

In my fingertips.

Behind my knees.

In the small of my back

where your absence curled

like smoke.

I did not reach.

Not because I didn’t want to—

but because I wanted too much.

Because I knew

that if I touched you,

I would shatter

into something

that could never go back

to being only mine.

So I worshipped the space instead.

That terrible, holy inch.

The altar of unspent touch.

The temple of maybe.

And when I left,

my hands were still trembling—

not from lack,

but from reverence.

Because there is a kind of longing

that becomes architecture.

And we built a cathedral

from restraint.

By Salem River Cooper