She reaches her fingers toward my face, drawing lines only she can see, or maybe just smudging them some. I thought this would be a morning full of words, but I’m wrong. She’s not a woman who looks in the mirror and backs away. She saw truth last night, the one where she knows, right down to her sweat and tears, that I won’t make her smaller.
More importantly, she caught a glimpse of who she might get to be if she stops prowling the bars of that particular cage and just jumps over them instead. It’s one of the hardest things, growing out of boundaries we no longer need. I saw one of my own disappear last night. The one where magnificent love only shows up once a lifetime.
I cover her hand on my cheek with my own, a little overwhelmed by this new chance I have, and a lot grateful. I know it might be far too much to have riding in my eyes, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Nothing I would want to do.
Sometimes, truth comes quickly.
She lifts her other hand, threading it through my hair. “I remember the first time I picked up really good charcoals after my marriage ended.”
I’ve heard some of this story, but I clearly haven’t heard all of it. I rock gently inside her. My version of charcoals.
Her eyes glint with something halfway between amusement and mischief, not missing any of my meanings. “I don’t remember what I drew, but I remember how it felt.” She sucks in a breath, and I can hear it shaking. “I knew they were going to be the rest of my life.”
My breath isn’t any steadier than hers. “There are very few of those moments.”
Her smile wavers, crooked and unsteady, but her eyes never leave mine. “This isn’t one I can have alone.”
Wild, brave, fierce woman. “It’s a good thing we’re both in it, then.”
Relief—and bubbly, gravity-defiant delight. She arches up against me, her hips asking me to sign the promise of this morning with something more than blueberries and quiche.
It takes effort to slide my hips a fraction away from hers, the elastic band of what’s just been said tugging me sharply back in. I resist its pull long enough to find a little leverage. Some signatures need to be memorable.
She gasps as I repeat the motion, her arms and legs wrapping around me tight. Reinforcing the elastic band. I grin and move in for a kiss. Some joinings are about bells and whistles and skills. This one is about soaking in the brilliance of a chance encounter in a small gallery that has somehow connected to a rainbow via a faery treehouse in the woods.
Her lips meet mine, warm and questing and tasting of blueberries, and it’s all I can do not to fall right in. Her hips find the kind of tiny, persistent rocking motion that shifts tectonic plates and heads me straight for a kind of embarrassment I haven’t dealt with for decades. I back up far enough to give her a stern look. “You’re coming with me, woman.”
Her grin is more than a little loopy. “Bacon as foreplay?”
I find a stitch of room to thrust and give her a taste of her own medicine. “It seems to have worked.”
She groans into my shoulder and rocks again, but her rhythm is starting to shred.
I find her hands with mine and lace them all together over her head. I can feel my heart in my chest, beating against hers. The tight, needy friction as our hips try to meld. The incoming laughter as berries spill and start running downhill on the bed toward us.
I’m no artist—but if I were, this is the way I would draw joy.