learning from Venice

There was nothing more that could be said without strain or repetition. I had been with her more than five hours already and it was time to leave. As we stood up and she moved to get something I stretched out my arm, that was all, and she turned back into my arms so that my hands were on her shoulder blades and hers along my spine. We stayed thus for a few moments until I had courage enough to kiss her neck very lightly. She did not pull away. I grew bolder and kissed her mouth, biting at the lower lip.
She kissed me.
"I can't make love to you," she said.
Relief and despair.
"But I can kiss you."
And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angels to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is sweet and precise torture.

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion, p. 67.

When it is a day so cold my own words are hiding, it does less harm to learn.

somewhere between fear and sex passion is