oranges in july
the french countryside burned golden beneath the july sun, an endless sprawl of sleepy hills and citrus groves, where the air was thick with heat and the scent of ripening fruit. i wandered, sticky with sunlight, skin kissed by salt and sugar. my dress clung to me like memory, and everything around me glistened — too hot to move quickly, too beautiful to mind.
🍋
lemons hung heavy like secrets. oranges split with ease beneath my fingertips, their juice slipping down my wrists like melted gold. and just as the heat began to smother me whole — a breeze, soft as breath, lifted my hair and cooled my spine. it smelled of something old and wild — like moss, like poetry, like him.
🍊
he came barefoot from the shade, a frenchman with dark blonde hair, dimples like fingerprints pressed into the face of the earth, and warm brown eyes that never looked away too long. his clothes were made of linen and light — white and beige, loose and lived in — the kind of man who belonged to the sun.
☀️
he didn’t speak much at first. just smiled, and offered me an orange, which he peeled so gently it made my chest ache. we found shade beneath a tree — gnarled, soft, generous — and there i lay, head in his lap, lulled by the rustle of leaves and the rise and fall of his chest.
🍯
he read to me in french, and i let the words blur into honey. i only needed the sound — smooth, melodic, like water running over warm stone. he said my name like it was something sacred.
📔
then i gave him my books, english novels full of love and longing, and he read them aloud, stumbling, frowning in the most adorable way — and i laughed, helplessly. he‘d grin, triumphant when he got a sentence right and kiss the corner of my mouth like punctuation.
🌳
he kissed me slowly first — reverent, like someone praying. then deeply. then desperately. like he was trying to memorize me with his tongue. he kissed me like he’d waited for lifetimes. he kissed me like the sun would never set again.
✨
and when his lips trailed to my collarbone, my shoulder, my throat — i forgot how to be a girl. i forgot my name. i became only sensation, ripe and open like the citrus we had eaten, devoured sweetly by a man who read poetry in a foreign tongue and made me believe in every line.
he ate me up — soul and body — and i let him.
because some summers are meant to be consumed.
— Lux
