My dear what long arms you have, all the better to...

I was considering the other day the dissolution of relationships and the hazards with which they are fraught. This is the essence of what came out:

Unknowingly he had never touched her when he spoke. She had wanted him to, inside at times she had begged him to. And maybe that's what had finally committed the shipwreck to cold, lost depths; they were both afraid to bridge the distance between, not for the other's sake but afraid of what it would do to them. Too many arguments lost power in a gently gripped neck, in a shared breath; nothing betrays worse than a lover's skin...