Trick of Light

He woke up to the American girl's foot nudging him gently. She looked down at him on the floor with a timid smile & asked if she could roll a cigarette. Next time, don't ask, he said. Just roll it. Shadows of the leaves still writhing across his sheets. She sat by the window smoking. Last night, she said, I noticed something on the ceiling in Stefan's room that I haven't seen before. I asked him about it & he said the only person who could give me the full story was you. He sat up on the floor & opened the refrigerator, hoping to find some champagne left over from a few nights back, but it was empty. It's gone, she said, we finished the bottle by the river last night. I'm the wrong person to ask, he said, if I told you, it would be a skewed version with details pulled out of my ass & an ending you wouldn't believe no matter the conviction in my voice. I've lain on my back in that foul room of his almost every night the last two weeks & I never saw it before, but when I saw it last night, I couldn't ignore it, it was always present, always waiting from above. In the early morning, after we had been asleep already a few hours, he was on top of me again, his wet raspy breath in my ear, on my neck, clenching his fingers around my waist, lunging into the faint light, waiting for me to moan so that he could cum again, but I held my breath, obsessed by the hole in the ceiling as the sun began to fill up the room & the light crawled through some of its cracks. He must've felt awkward fucking me & he asked what I was thinking about, but I didn't answer. The hole seemed to pulse by some trick of the light. The whole ceiling caving inward upon it. Spilling into it like a void in space. Maybe I was still drunk or something, but I felt everything in the room was somehow drawn into the hole, unable to rise toward it, but still attuned to its unshakable presence.