When autumn burns, I burn autumn (Fire Walk With Me)

Autumn makes many people melancholy. For me, the season lights a fire inside.
I love how the days grow shorter and night falls early. It isn’t that I dislike daylight—closing the shutters at noon feels like sacrilege, even when the sun blazes and the temperature soars. Yet there is something profoundly joyous about night arriving before evening. I relish that twilight – not the deep darkness of late night, but the dimming that comes at the end of the day, when rehearsals finish and we head out for drinks. I enjoy my apartment bathed in the soft glow of lamps while it’s still early, slipping into long bubble baths scented with vanilla or tuberose. I savor hot meals and wrap myself in fluffy sweaters. I take the time to pull out my trench coat, long sleeved shirts, berets, boots, stockings, and suspenders beneath my dresses—just as I did as a child, delighted to rediscover my favorite, slightly forgotten clothes, my schoolbag, and my notebooks. The back to school rush promised new, unknown, and inevitably exhilarating possibilities.

There’s a feeling that everything slows a little, that everything becomes denser, thicker, perhaps a bit blurrier—but it’s not winter, not yet. The weather can still be mild, almost summery. The sun remains present despite gentle breezes. One morning I wake to gray skies and a city cloaked in fog; the next day the sun shines brightly, still summer, but a subtly different, a reddish summer. I add blankets to the bed yet leave the windows wide open. I slip on stockings to meet my lover at a hotel, then remove them on the way back, walking barefoot again in the warm air. Suddenly I quicken my pace home because the cold makes my skin prickle.

Days grow shorter while the future stretches ahead. We step back into the past and look toward tomorrow. A new season begins, full of promise.
And I cherish promises.

I receive a message from you: you want to whisk me away for a weekend far from the city. It’s only the second time we’ve met. The hotel you’ve chosen is charming, a touch old fashioned, with antique furniture, large windows, and a massive amber colored forest surrounding it. We wander through the flamboyant countryside, watching leaves turn yellow, pink, and red, bathing the tree trunks and the sky in incredible shades. The leaves carpet the ground, crunching under our feet as we walk arm in arm. High above, birds sing. We are far from everything, and the end feels far away.

It’s a little chilly on the hotel terrace, but the sun still shines, so we sip our first drink while the sky shifts from perfect blue to an almost unreal fuchsia pink before our eyes. Inside, dinner is simple and delicious—“the very definition of good taste without ostentation,” as you point out. “It’s unpretentious, and therefore priceless,” I add. We drink strong red wine, just the way I like it, sharing stories, memories, laughter, and flavors. At dessert our faces draw closer, our cheeks brush, our lips part, kiss me, kiss me again, keep kissing, lick my tongue and touch me lower—yes, there, exactly there, under the tablecloth, discreetly. Please don’t stop, I’m catching fire like the leaves of poplars, plane trees and maples, let’s leave the table and take me hard until we see red—please do it.

The bed is soft; the night wraps around us.

We have breakfast under the duvet—warm croissants, fragrant coffee. Through the window the world glows gold. I know that in the city, far away, it’s burning just the same. In the gardens of the Tuileries, Tiergarten, Hyde Park, the temperature has dropped; summer is truly over. I wish I could be there too. I want to be everywhere, to possess the gift of ubiquity. Life will never be large enough to contain the insatiability of my desires. My thirst for life is as great as the fever between my legs. I place your hand on my burning sex and we dive back under the sheets for another round of love.

We board a train, and you decide to keep me by your side for your last night in Paris before you leave, perhaps for a long time. You don’t want to go; you’re happy with me, and I feel the same. I reshuffle appointments, cancel a dinner, and we unpack our suitcases. “Let’s visit a place you love,” you say. “Anna, show me the city where you grew up.”

I’ll take you to New Athens. I went to high school nearby. We stroll through the Gustave Moreau Museum. “He was my favorite painter as a teenager,” I whisper in your ear. “I used to come here as if it were a sanctuary.” You smile and kiss my neck. “It’s beautiful, I love it—very French.” Then you brush my lips. Your scent, which I rediscovered just forty eight hours ago, fills me and sends chills down my spine, igniting me anew. How can a simple fragrance, tied to the contemplation of paintings, spark our bodies so intensely? I press against you, yearning to grab your cock through your pants and make love here, on the floor, in the middle of this empty room, under the frozen gazes of Salome, Salammbô, Phaëton—the one who died for daring to touch the sun.

“I want more,” I tell you. “More.”

You look at me intently; your eyes are slightly darker, dilated. Desire has taken hold of you too. Have I passed the flame to you? I take you by the neck, bringing our faces together until our eyelashes touch. I’m not wearing a bra, and my light cardigan reveals my breasts, barely visible. I feel a diffuse heat radiating from me; I crave your cock, your breath, you.

“Shall we go back to the hotel?”
“Is that really a question, Anna? Yes, of course—let’s do it now.”

We walk through the burning landscape that Paris has become, hurrying to our room, its walls violet, its immaculate sheets aflame. As soon as the door shuts, I throw myself onto you, unbutton your trousers, and want your cock in my mouth—first just the tip, then fully. Your moans excite me, feeding the fire within. I suck you, but I also want you to take me simultaneously—a paradox you remind me of, reasonably, before flipping me over with a playful slap on the buttocks.

Now on all fours on the large bed, my face buried in the pillows, I let you lick me. Under your tongue, under your fingers, I’m so aroused I arch my back like a Manara illustration—or perhaps the act of pretending to be a Manara drawing turns me on even more.

“I’m burning,” I whisper between moans, “like autumn, I’m burning—can you feel it? I am a Daughter of Fire.”

Outside, the storm rages. Without warning, waves crash in an operatic roar, a deluge sweeping us away—two small, ardent, insatiable beings caught in the tempest.