Dreams of 18

So I kiss him harder.

I know it’s a grocery store aisle and I know people are around but I’m feeling wild. I’m feeling like his beauty.

And I want my beast.

He comes for me. He does. The man who’s kissing me back becomes the beast for me. He shoves his tongue in my mouth and grabs the back of my neck. He presses our bodies together and I whimper, urging him on.

My husband has this thing about kissing me in public. He takes his cues from me.

When I have bad days and my anxiety is roaring in my ears, it’s hard for me to be his beauty. So he holds my hand and walks with me side by side, like my protector.

But on good days, like today, when I feel confident and happy and a little wild, he changes from my man to my beast. He gathers me in his arms and he kisses the fuck out of me.

Because I want him to.

When we come up for air, he rumbles, “Okay, Mrs. Edwards, I’ll take you home.”

And that’s what he does.

He takes me home. He takes me to the cabin that’s been my home ever since I came to find him there a little over two years ago.

In those years, it’s changed a lot, the cabin.

Even though we only spend a few weeks here, Graham has completely renovated it. Moreover, he’s done it with his own hands.

It took him two summers – the summer he sent me away before coming back for me, and the summer after that – to renovate the whole place.

But he did it.

He did it all by himself and I know why.

The night he came back for me in Connecticut, he told me he wanted to live in my world. He told me that he was tired of living in a lonely world and he wanted to live in a place where colors were brighter.

Later when he brought me back to the cabin, I told him something else.

I told him that my world had been lonely too. Sure, the colors were bright and dreams were abundant but they didn’t have any meaning. They weren’t complete. Not until him.

“We should make our own world,” I said, kissing him, tangled up in our sheets.

“Yeah?”

“Yup. We should make a place for ourselves. That belongs to just you and me.”

“Okay.”

I beamed. “And I want a reading nook in that. You have to build me a reading nook where I can read and write in my journal. Oh and also like, a way to get up to the roof so we can watch the moon together.”

He grazed his thumb on the corner of my mouth, mapping out my smile. “I’ll keep that in mind, Jailbait.”

“You do that, Strawberry Man.”

And like all his other promises, he kept that one too.

He made me a new world, our world.

This shiny, new cabin, in the middle of the woods, with a reading nook in our bedroom and a ladder that goes up to the roof.

But mostly, we have a huge rose garden, and that’s where I find him hours later.

After that kiss at the grocery store, he brought me back home in record time. By then, our desire was so palpable and strong that he fucked me in the truck. He told me to dance on his cock and I did. I writhed and rocked and kissed him, giving him a lap dance while he rode my pussy from below.

When we finally made it inside the cabin, he took my ass in the shower. It was slow and intense like all things with him. Once my beast is satiated for a bit, he goes all lazy and cuddly, and I can’t stop playing with his beard.

He fed me after that and ever since then, I’ve been sleeping. Until I woke up a minute ago to find that his side of the bed is empty and the moon is lit up in the sky like a light bulb.

A bulb that’s illuminating the contours of my husband’s bent body.

He’s got his usual t-shirt on – I stole his plaid shirt after the shower – and his plaid pajamas and he’s gathering roses from his garden.

His garden.

Something he told me that he started doing because he could use it as an excuse to watch me.

It’s not an excuse anymore though.

It’s his dream.

Yeah, this. Roses.

Just like it took me months to calm my anxiety down to a level that I could get out of the house, it took him months to remember his dream.

“Roses,” he whispered one night after we’d just made love.

He was over me, all sweaty and hot when he lifted himself up on his elbows and said, “I’ve been having this… recurring dream. About my mother. I’m about five or something and my father and me, we’re picking roses for her. And when I give them to her, she smiles.”