Home For The Holidays

She was still out when I went back to her and lifted her in my arms. She felt so light and precious and everything that was scaring the living shit out of me. It’s one thing to feel myself falling for her. But this shit is not the clinically detached emotion I was expecting. I thought being in love meant finding someone you didn’t mind spending time with, sharing what I have with them, and maybe someday having a kid or two to pass on our genes to.

I didn’t expect to feel like if I let her out of my sight after today, I’d go mad. I didn’t expect to feel like she was now a part of me, a very integral part, the one I can no longer live without. I’m glad she was still out when I stepped into the steaming water with her in my arms and sat with her held tenderly against my chest because it gave me time to think.

I feel blindsided like this love shit should’ve come with some kind of warning, at least. Why is it that the most important things in life come without a manual? Like the first time you take a kid home, I remember mom always saying they don’t come with instructions, and you pretty much just wing it. How can that be?

And now this, her; what am I supposed to do with these feelings she’s awakened in me? I looked down at her face as she slept against my chest in the warm water, and my heart lurched and rolled in my chest, at least that’s what it felt like. It was the same face I’d seen when she walked through the door a few hours ago. So why now does it seem so much more precious to me?

Why do I have all of these thoughts and feelings that have come seemingly out of nowhere? Why does the very thought of being separated from her leave me with dread when only the day before I’d put her in the back of my car and sent her off with my driver and the security detail I have following her behind them without a second thought?

I pulled her in closer as if that was going to keep her with me. I can’t fucking do it. No way am I sending her back to the dorms, out of my sight. I tried to calm myself down, to think rationally, but it wasn’t working, so I decided to give it some time. Maybe it was the newness of this whole thing that was getting to me. Maybe with time, it will ease, and I can go back to thinking like something more than the cave-dwelling ape I’d become in the last half an hour.

Knowing her, she’ll give me shit and refuse to fall in line anyway. And for some reason, that thought, instead of making me see reason, only upped the crazy another notch. Now I’m doubly sure that I’m not about to let her out of my sight. As a thinking meticulous being, someone who’d made his first billion through patience and the ability to read people and situations, I decided to look at this thing in the same light.

I’ve just realized that she’s the most important thing to me in this world, whether human or material. I don’t let others handle my shit; my business is overseen solely by me, with helpers who answer to me; my money is also handled only by myself, with others taking their cues from me as to what I want done. How then can I leave her, who is more important of all that out there without me? No fucking way!

She made a sighing sound in her sleep and rooted around on my chest, trying to make herself comfortable, I guess, before settling down again. I watched her every move with my heart swelling with joy and some other emotion I could not name. Even the innocent act of kissing the tip of her pert little nose made my heart happy. I thought when I got my first breakthrough and made a shitload of money that that was the happiest day of my life. I didn’t think anything could top it. I was wrong. It doesn’t even come close to what I feel now.

I guess I’ve made up my mind. Whether she agrees or not, she’s moving in here with me. I’ll let her go to school, of course, to finish what she started. But all of her nights from from now on will be mine. I have a lot of changes to make in the next few days, things I hadn’t exactly planned for, like having someone else in my space on a permanent basis. I can’t wait!

* * *

SAMANTHA

* * *

I wonder what he’s thinking about that has put that look on his face. I came awake slowly, first alerted to the sting deep inside me, and the feel of the soothing water between my thighs and then his hard chest beneath my cheek. It all came rushing back, in a flash in minute detail, I might add, and my heart began to race