After many nights together and a lot of shared moments, I have, I must admit somewhat fallen for my lover. Our dynamic is a curious and careful one - when we are together it is raw and honest, and when he looks at my naked body I have no desire to hide myself in any way, but the agreement has always been that we are not a couple. We are not exclusive, which I enjoy, and we do not own each other although we take one another into account in our actions.
I cannot call him any other word, and I haven't needed to. But I'm beginning to long for a language to describe the things we have and do, and it musn't carry the same connotations that ordinary word-strings does. The words I can't say get stuck in my body like pains and pleasures. These days I tell him that I have a bird beneath the skin of my chest. It is a bird made of a single word (or three) and sometimes it gets so heavy, that I feel like I will fall over. When he is hurting I can barely stand for the weight of that bird. I tell him that I think I want to let it out, but that I am afraid he will kill it or catch it with a movement so it shatters like thin clay.
He did say that he might like the bird, that it might be beautiful and he wouldn't want to break it. But I'm not sure he understood what I meant.