And still he pounds into me and still I keep pouring my heart out to him.
In shallow gasps I share with him how much he means to me and it scares me that he does.
Happy and terrified. I’m sobbing about how much he means to me when Alaric suddenly stops, his eyes wide. Stops, scoops me up. Flat against him, every crevice, every space. Fine hairs and cool sweat.
His hands run through my hair. Kisses my cheeks, my lips, corners of my eyes, every part of my face as if I’ve been missing and he has just found me. He lowers us both back to the bed. Lips tease flesh inside of one of my elbows. He places it on his shoulders, wrapping around him, holding him. Encased. He resumes. Long, full.
Maybe only moments and I splinter. Fall. Tense and clench. Lungs tight with confessions and courage and cowardice. He seems near the brink. His muscles writhe and contract. His words like whispers, inaudible through my haze. Breathes more secrets into my skin, and I strain to hear the tale, and he throws his head back, shouts, pours. Heat. Spasm. Full.
He shudders and continues to spill. Runs open-mouth kisses wherever they land.
I stay silent, and he continues to whisper, to respond to the confessions I have been unable to hold back. I begin to hear and understand the hum decoded through dissipating fog. His voice a low thrum. “I do…so much already…” He kisses my eyes and smooths the dampened hair from my face. “Already and always.” He swallows thickly and runs his nose alongside my own. “Oh, God, Emma. You don’t know how much…I do.”
He wraps his arms around me and breathes his words into my hair. “I love you, too.”
Say who with the what now? Well, Merry Christmas and Ho Ho Holy Crap.
Just what the hell have I been yammering on about?
Christmas Morning
10:09 a.m.
WARM. EVERYTHING IS WARM, and I’m being jostled.
My eyes flutter open.
“Hey,” he says, kissing my bare shoulder. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”
His lips are wet, soft. I stretch and kiss his throat.
“There is something I have to tell you…that you should know,” he says against my skin. “I meant what I said earlier. It was not because of the heat of the moment or because I felt compelled to respond in kind. I want you to know that.”
“Hmm?” So sleepy. Content.
“I love you, Emma.” His lips brush the corner of my eye, my cheek, my own. “I love you and I know you. I know you in my soul. With everything I am, I love you for everything you are.”
In my waking haze, no act, no filter, I say the first thing that comes naturally to me.
“I probably love you, too.”
11:15 a.m.
*
Stockings
: Hung over the lampshade with care.
*
Coital
: Post.
*
Note to Self
: Find Cheesecake Factory suggestion box. Submit pineapple cheesecake.
*
Reindeer Games
: Is that what you kids are calling it these days?
SO MUCH SEX. I feel limp. Like I should move to a Boneless Chicken Ranch.
5:02 p.m.
*
Lather
: Rinse. Repeat.
*
Condoms
: Soon the way of the dodo.
AN ODD GRAY AREA now settles between us. Too intimate for small talk. Not intimate enough for talk of bigger concepts like relationships, futures, curtains.
How do you start a casual conversation after you’ve been fornicating like the survival of the species depended on your successful efforts?
Hey, hun, did you like the mount up I did on you last night?
Yes, yes. I’ve been stretching. Trying to keep limber.
Today is a holiday. Canon is wearing Baby Jesus’s birthday suit.
Well, at least he says it is. I recall some business about swaddling clothes and something else about men being wise. And we know that men are no such thing. But “holiday” with Alaric seems to translate to some variant of “wall sex,” so…well…who am I to quibble with trivial matters such as accuracy and facts?
We have been enjoying a little celebratory SOS—Shoes-On Sex.
They say practice makes perfect, but that doesn’t seem to apply. If so, I’d have a doctorate. An FMP PhD.
It isn’t Valentine’s Day for a couple more months, but that doesn’t stop my heels from piercing Alaric’s heart.
If by “heart,” one means “dick.”
“Are you prepping me for some sort of genital piercing? At least let’s discuss that sort of thing first.”
“Do you mean an apadravya?” I try not to snort at the idea of this stiff and proper man with such an ornamentation.
“Apadravya? Any intent to plunge a steel rod through…there…best begin with ‘Abracadabra.’” He exhales sharply, cupping himself like a baby bird fallen from the nest, and shudders.
I snicker. He looks nauseated. If I ever broached the subject again, I’d be better off to just go straight for Avada Kedavra.
A piercing like that isn’t anything I really want, but I can’t help myself when he’s like this.
“I hear it’s very pleasurable,” I say as innocently as possible, running two fingers over the sheet in slow, swirly patterns. His eyes follow their trek.
“It’s done in one quick session when they pierce the mea—”
“Emma, I swear on a stack of balanced portfolios, if you finish that sentence, we are never having intercourse again.”
Oh, dear. Instant mute. Just add threat of celibacy.
Hour: Late. Or early. A matter of perspective.
*
Snow
: Sheets.
*
Actual Sheets
: Mostly near the lamp base.
*
Condoms
: Completely exhausted.
*
Us
: See above, re: “Condoms.”
I AWAKE TO NEAR DARKNESS, the moon’s effects shy behind murky clouds. Fat snow obscures the silent cityscape. Norman Rockwell would be proud.
The only sounds I can discern are the soft, even breaths that accompany each rise and fall of his chest beneath my cheek. If there had been an actual zombie apocalypse and we were all that remained of humanity, I would still be content. Right up until the special of the day was my brains, anyway.
We’re wrapped up in one another…finally. Not only physically—with his strong arms encircling me and holding me to his chest and my legs warm underneath the one he has draped over me—but emotionally as well. He had let me know as much in no uncertain terms.
I love you, too.
When he said the words, the feeling that overtook me was indescribable. Like the physical answering of a prayer unfurled in my chest and rapidly seeped out to the farthest points of my body. An incorporeal warmth in places I hadn’t even known to exist within myself, as though my very soul heated and healed.
I’m still my whole person, but with this special new addition.
All that, but more, better. New and improved: Now with more sex.
At that time, for a split second, I had opened my mouth to tell him that I wasn’t sure how I felt, that I wasn’t sure I was ready to confess it was Real, True Love that had snuck up and came about when I was busy ogling his ass. But his phrase rang in my ears. “…too.”
He wasn’t waiting for a response; he responded to me.