“You think I’m being funny?” He leaned over me, between my legs, his fingers digging into my thighs. “I don’t joke around.”
“I know.” I gasped as his nails dug into my bum cheeks. I loved it when he got so worked up that it felt like he wanted to get right under my skin. Between soft muscle and supple flesh. The thing was he was way deeper. He was at my core. In my heart and in my soul.
“So this celebrating…” He murmured huskily into the valley of my breasts as he pulled me onto my back under him. His tongue licking up my neck and jaw and then into my already open and waiting mouth.
“What about my wine?” I teased as he made his way back down my body, his hands popping the buttons of the shirt covering me. His favourite shirt.
“It needs to breathe.” He replied a big smile stretching across his face as his tongue licked across his bottom lip.
Shit, breathe Quincy.
I chanted to myself as his lips brushed my skin.
It didn’t matter how many times he touched me and loved me, every time felt better. Each time felt like more, and I never ever wanted it to end.
I never wanted a day to come where I grew used to it because with him every day was a new day.
People say that love comes and goes. People say that you can love time and again. But for me, there had only ever really been one love. People came and went, life changed and my one love only ever grew.
And I only hoped that it would continue to renew and grow with every rising and setting sun, with every phase of the moon.
Jamie
Eighteen months later…
* * *
She’s standing in the darkened room. Her small body bowed over the cot bed, as she fusses with the pale blue sheets and soft white blankets. The dimming evening light permeating the room with a soft grey blue glow. She’s tired, I can tell by the slope of her shoulders as I stand in the doorway watching her.
Her favourite shirt of mine is a little snug around her hips and as she moves it pulls up revealing the junction of her bottom and thighs. Her bare feet are lost in the plush sheepskin rug and her normally neat wavy hair is a little all over the shop.
I wished for this. I hoped and prayed that we’d have this, but I never actually dreamed that it would happen. Yet, as I watch her trying to gently rouse our son for his evening feed I can’t imagine life being any different.
I can’t imagine a life without her. A life without our girls or our son.
A life without them isn’t a life I want.
My mother once told me that there are many different ways of loving someone. She said that love evolves and changes with life. She said that love knows no bounds. It doesn’t see faults or mistakes…it sees through them like air particles.
She told me to never let go, to hold on tighter when the winds blew harder and the waves tugged us in opposite directions.
She was right.
I changed and she changed. We both changed.
I wish I could say that life has been perfectly kind to us and easy, but it hasn’t. We’ve had our losses, but our love never faltered. It adapted to our circumstances. There’s no such thing as a happy ending, I’ve learned along the way that happiness is something you make for yourself. And loving her openly and freely is a happiness all of its own.
I’ve loved Quincy up close and from afar. I’ve loved her when I should and when I shouldn’t.
I’ve loved her since the first moment I held her when I was almost four years old, too young for romance, too young to understand what love was.
Our love grew and strung us together. It meshed our souls in a way that made it impossible for us to remain apart.
It made it impossible to live in the same world, at the same time, and not be together.
I’m not proud of all my failures and the hurt that I caused. But I am proud to love her, this beautifully talented and brave woman.
The girl.