Cecil spoke with his hands, and when he did, it looked like magic. I was always stumbling for words while he made them out of thin air, shaping molecules into sounds so quiet they could only be seen. I wanted my fingers to dance like his, but they felt clumsy and heavy. But he always smiled when I tried, and his hands smiled back.

There were nights when the only way I could speak was in sideways glances, and his fingertips would whisper secrets across my collarbone, always slow and soft and quiet.

On the beach, he presses his palm to mine in a classic and immediately intimate gesture. I use my hands to sculpt sandcastles while his knuckles crack poetry into their foundations. I let my body heat up as much as it can in the sunlight, my hair running down my back and keeping it warm like a solar-powered blanket.

Cecil keeps looking up at me, inviting me to watch his dance, to share it, but I don’t feel like stumbling, so I look down. The words I can’t say have been twisting in my stomach, making me nauseous and uneasy so that when the time comes to speak I can only cough up etcetera after etcetera etcetera. But all Cecil does is smile and take my nothing and make it into something. He makes his magic again.