"What if I fall and hurt myself?
Would you know how to fix me
What if I went and lost myself?
Would you know where to find me
If I forgot who I am,
Would you please remind me oh?
Cause without you things go hazy" Rosi Golan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You awake to darkness. The thickness of summer swirls around you and your eyes adjust to the night, searching across the bed.
She’s lying next to you on her side, her hair wild and untamed, splayed across her pillow. It’s gold in the moonlight and you ache to touch the curls. You don’t. Not yet.
Her eyes are closed, her lashes drifting across her cheeks, and you brush a thumb against her skin. It’s smooth and velvet, a bit warm in the heat of early summer. You shiver despite the hazy, humid air in her bedroom.
She inhales and exhales, her breath sluicing over your bicep and you can’t wait. You slide your palm over her hair, tangling your fingers in her hair, cupping her head with your palm.
You’ve felt her head in your hands before – just tonight, as you laid down together in this bed, bareness against bareness, hands exploring and mouths unbreakable, but right now? Right now she’s so vulnerable, so perfect, so achingly right.
You can’t pretend you’ve never held another woman. You can’t pretend you’ve never made love to another, cupped a chin in your hand as you’ve leaned in for a kiss.
But you can’t pretend that this isn’t different. That when you pull away from her lips, they spread across in a smile that you’ve spent many a night thinking about. You can’t pretend that this isn’t everything you’ve imagined – God, it’s so much better.
She hums a low moan and you kiss her cheek, brushing your lips against her skin, inhaling coconut shampoo and mint toothpaste and the distinctness of sex. You can imagine smelling this every night for the rest of your life.
You nuzzle her for a minute longer, then pull away. You don’t want to disturb her sleep. You know she’s spent many nights lately up and worried. You want to kick yourself for the drama, the yelling matches in work kitchens, the embarrassment of exchanging spare sets of clothing. But how could you ever change any of that, when it all led you to the bed of the beautiful woman next to you?
You roll to the left and slip out of the bed, decadent satin sheets sliding against the roughness of your legs. You want a drink to quench your parched throat, so you pad into the kitchen. You open the refrigerator, grabbing a bottle of cold water. But something catches your eye, and before closing the door, you open it wider.
There, on the bottom shelf next to a carton of eggs and a jug of pulpy orange juice, is a 6 pack of Sam Adams. Your favorite beer. You smile to yourself, knowing she bought it for you. You shut the door softly.
You pull open the top off of the water and guzzle more than half before you notice all of the stuff on the refrigerator door. It’s crowded with appointment papers and photos and silly magnets. It’s a far cry from a silver fridge in another apartment, stark and clean. It seems pretty true to character, now that you think about it. You can imagine your own appointment cards here, pictures of the two of you, a huge round Phillies car decal magnet. Homey. Real.
You step into her living room and run your hand along the thick mantle over her fireplace, and you think about her curled up here in the winter. You ache thinking about her on the couch, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, her feet tucked up under her, cupping a mug of steaming tea in front of a raging fire.
All alone.
You could have been here. Should have been here. Cuddling her, holding her against you as you read to her from a favorite novel, snow piling up outside.
You can’t even think about her shoveling. She’s so clumsy, she’s lucky she didn’t fall and break something. But then again, you ponder, maybe someone helped her. Someone definitely helped her. A friendly neighbor maybe. Someone whose wife had borrowed a cookbook a time or two and knew she lived alone. Or maybe her Dad, driving in from Dickson City. You try not to think maybe Roy helped. Being there when you weren’t.
You try not to think about how you’ve hurt each other, and you know there will be more discussions about it, because it’s still raw. Not all nighters, because the girl loves sleep, but honest talks about how you’ve broken and battered each other, one caress and joke at a time. One fiancé, one girlfriend at a time. One enthusiastic Dundies kiss, one coworker wedding at a time.
You slip across the room to stare at the paintings she’s hung by the door. Some with PMB written in white paint in the bottom right corner with a flourish. Some without. They’re done in acrylics, in charcoal, in watercolors. Shades of white and black, soft gray and warmth. They’re not what you’ve thought she’d have in her home, colorless. She’s so bright – you’d never figured her for anything besides bold reds and blues and greens and yellows. Primary hues dotting her walls like wildflowers in a meadow.
Instead, her walls are the color of a pale turquoise sky, her couch is the soft tan of sand, and her artwork is a showpiece. You wonder what else about her you don’t know yet. You’ve been friends for six years, but you’ve only been together for six days… Intimate for less than six hours. You wonder what the future holds for the two of you here.
You grin to yourself thinking seeing your shoes by the door. Size thirteens dwarfing her black shoes with the kitten heel, a pair of sensible flats, four pairs of Old Navy flip flops in a variety of colors. You made fun of her the first night you were here, standing by her door as she shoved keys and lip gloss and miscellaneous girly things into a black clutch nervously. She’d brushed her hair away from her face and she blushed as you stared at her, her face coloring pink when you quirked an eyebrow at her.
“It’s from Kelly,” she’d protested, gesturing to the clutch in her hand. “Oh my God, stop looking at me like that.”
Your first date. You might have looked calm, cool and collected on the outside, but if only she’d seen you standing in front of your mirror with six different shirts, trying to figure out the perfect outfit. You contemplated calling Mark, but figured you were embarrassing yourself alone, why add an ex-roommate’s judgment to the mix.
Not that Mark would judge. He’d probably pop a vein in his eyeball finding out that Pam - the Pam – was your date for the night. He’d heard you talk about her enough times. If you can call groaning her name as you shuffled around in a drunken stupor, or with laughter in your voice as you talked about a prank you played, or with desire as you mentioned how her lips felt on yours after the awards as “talking about her”.
You turn off the TV, the picture still rolling, but the sound off. You’d been watching the game, but when she sat next to you, you figured the game could wait. Making out with a girl you’d dreamed about kissing on a couch took over, teenage hormones racing through your veins. Twenty-seven years old, your ass. Taking her in your arms, her breath sweet on your tongue, her hands roaming over your jeans, you were suddenly sixteen again. You just hoped to God that you wouldn’t come in your pants when her teeth found your ear and her palm started stroking over your stiffness.
She’s incredibly sexy. You can’t help the fantasies that have run through your mind over the years, but many of them have been… Jesus, vanilla would probably be the right word. You start to get hard just thinking about how gorgeous she looked moving over you, her skin pale and silky smooth in the moonlight, her teeth pulling her bottom lip into her mouth, how your hands looked grasping her hips as the fire in your groin slid into exquisite pleasure. Sexual chemistry is something you definitely don’t need to work on.
You finish your water and toss it into the recycle can under the sink, and then tip toe back into the bedroom. You laugh quietly as you note that she’s moved into your spot, so you walk around the bed and slide into hers.
She purrs as you run your hand along the length of her bare back, tracing her spine. One eye slowly opens and she scrunches her face up in confusion.
“What time is it?” She asks, her voice husky with sleep.
“Three in the morning,” you respond softly, tapping your fingers in a staccato rhythm. There’s so much on your mind, and so much you’ll need to process separately and together. But together is the word you keep coming back to. Because now that you have her, you aren’t planning on letting her go.
You’ll poke fun at her in a few hours as you jump into her shower, counting the bottles of shampoo, conditioner, conditioning shampoo, body salts and shower gels in her tiny tub. You’ll laugh as she sticks her tongue out at you. You’ll stop laughing when she sinks to her knees in front of you and your hands try to find purchase against the slippery tile as she pleasures you with her mouth.
There’s still a lot you need to talk about. But you can talk tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. Because you know you’ll still be here, with her.
Author's Chapter Notes:
The Office isn't mine, and neither is "Hazy" by Rosi Golan. If you haven't listened to Rosi, go. Now. Youtube. She's phenomenal.
This song is achingly sweet and hauntingly somber. Gah. Brings tears to my eyes.
This song is achingly sweet and hauntingly somber. Gah. Brings tears to my eyes.
Chapter End Notes:
Much love, peeps
stjoespirit04 is the author of 25 other stories.
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