Three in the Morning 

His eyes fly open and he’s suspended somewhere he can’t quite place. The room is completely silent. Disoriented, he could be anywhere. Maybe he’s dreaming.

In that nebulous space between sleep and consciousness, images and sensations ricochet around his mind, tweak his body. They may be memories, or they may be wishful thinking. He’s falling backwards. Rolling. Warm moist breath, soft soft soft skin, a hand, her hand and then oh god, oh god, yeah. Her neck, highlighted in dim pinkish lamplight, a glint like a flickering star at her ear as her head falls back.  Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim dissolving into a moan, a vibration he feels deep in her throat when he drops his face there in the final swell of it.

If this were just a dream, he’d rather not wake up. But, he knows that never works. He’d spent years trying. He’d spent years failing.

The sheet, pushed down and tangled around his legs, shifts slightly as she stirs against him. She sighs. Materializes. It’s not the if only dream after all, but flashes of the previous night. He’s still not sure which of their bedrooms he’s in, but it doesn’t matter. He knows exactly where he is. She’s a place.

He turns towards her. Her hair smells like coconuts and exotic and familiar and Pam. He instantly imagines them somewhere tropical. Maybe Hawaii. She’s always wanted to go there. They can go anywhere now. Just being here proves that.

She moves again and her tiny diamond studs refract the scant light from the quarter-moon.

*******

‘I’m never taking these off,’ she’d beamed when he’d given them to her, fastening them behind her ears.

‘Never?’ he’d smiled. 

‘Nope, gonna be buried in them.’ 

'Wow. That’s either really romantic or really morbid.’ 

‘It’s just the truth,’ she’d replied, pulling her hair back to show him. 

*********

She looks impossibly white, all diffuse velvety curves in the dark, like an old black and white movie still. He hears the wind throttle the windowpane and shivers a little, suddenly aware that there’s nothing between the chilly night air and their exposed skin.  He pushes himself up enough to reach down and untangle them from the bedding. Before pulling the blanket up, he lowers his head to kiss the spot at the small of her back, just above the two tiny dimples that are his undoing. He lets his lips linger there for just a fraction of a second.

‘Jim…is that you?’ she murmurs drowsy, confused, barely emerging from somewhere far away.

‘Why, were you expecting someone else?’ he whisper-laughs, as he tucks the covers snuggly around them.

She doesn’t even open her eyes, just smiles faintly as she moves her cheek back to his chest, into the indelible impression it’s formed there over the last few months. Her small smooth leg slides between his big ungainly ones. She feels so warm and the ache starts to build where her inner thigh has settled against him. In the brief pause while he contemplates whether keeping her awake a little longer would be inconsiderate, she yawns and wraps her arm around his waist. Almost immediately, he hears her lightly snoring again. Too late.

‘Yeah,' he sighs into her coconut hair, closing his arms around her. ‘It’s just me.’