Petunia

You bring the wagon to a stop off to the side of the crescent of clear sod along the lake’s edge. At the jostle of the full stop, Arthur rustles awake, just as you’re dipping a shoulder to lower the looped reins to the buckboard. He unfolds his arms and lifts the brim of his hat with a single finger.

From where you sit, for a moment all you can see beneath his brim is the slow spread of his lips into a smile.

“Wow,” he groggily muses in a light tone as he starts to sit up.

It’s then that you catch a glimpse of his eyes and are gifted with the illumination of one iris, quickened like the rarest of turquoise in the sun, along with those metallic lashes of gold you’d earlier mused about. The one shimmering iris is so vividly blue that for a moment you almost have the childhood urge to pop it into your mouth like a glassy, perfectly round marble.

“You did good, baby,” he says. “Real good.”

“I know I did,” you respond with a prim lift of your chin and a little grin, deciding to let your voice facetiously meander as you give your shoulders a single wiggly tip.

When he looks your direction, you dare to flash a silent, seamless wink at him.

His smile spreads wider into a full grin. “All right…so you drove the team fine,” he playfully grumbles.

“Better than fine.”

“Better than fine,” he immediately agrees. He pushes up to right himself in the seat. “I just like…handlin’ how we go along, where we end up—”

“Bein’ in control,” you lightly chuckle.

After pausing, he closes his eyes and sighs out, “Sure,” with a loose nod. “Helps me feel I…” he lifts his eyes to chance a glance at you, “can take care a’ you.”

Your facetious expression relaxes at the knowledge of the hand of cards he holds, that he deigns to tip: his fear.

“We’ll be okay, Arthur. Look, we’re okay,” you gently point out, looking around, holding out a hand and letting it drop.

“‘Course we are, darlin’. ‘Course we are,” he says very quietly and dodges your eyes, though he tries to nod eagerly.

Your brows come together for a few flickered moments. Feeling strangely as though he’s attempting to rush through the discussion, you intentionally sit in it for a moment. And as you prolong the silence just a bit, you try to work out all his thoughts and feelings that he isn’t really telling you, as well as how you should respond.

“I only…wanted to give you some rest, Arthur; you were wearier than you realize. If it’ll help ease your mind, I won’t ask for the reins aga—”

“Nah, nah. ‘S not a problem at all,” he briefly shakes his head at the notion with a choppy wave of his hand. “I was just…explainin’ myself is all, for earlier, when I was so reluctant. Was nice to get a little shut-eye, actually.” He smiles over at you. “And you handled yourself just like a regular champ.”

You allow yourself to smile again. “Glad to have your faith in me.”

“You’ve always got it,” he says, using your name as he meets your gaze and holds it. “Ain’t you I don’t trust.”

For a fractioned moment, your expression hitches again with renewed understanding, in addition to more questions, somehow. But he leans to his side to press a simple kiss to your lips before you can think on it more and fully frown.

“I’ll build a fire, we’ll have a little bite to eat and get settled for the night,” he says quietly as he draws away. “Sound good?”

Your genuine smile returns, and you nod in response.

“We’re just in time for second fishin’ hour,” he tips his head towards the lake with a smirk before turning and quickly hopping down from the buckboard.

Your smile blooms further. “What’re you gonna use for bait?” you call after him, hopping down from your side.

It’s just a few minutes later, after you’ve unhitched the horses to let them graze, that sees you hunched down on your bare feet at the lakebed, knuckle-deep in the cool, dark, crumbly earth.

When you feel the slippery, rippled skin of a night crawler brushing your finger as it slithers through the soil, you quickly curl a hand around it. After bracing it with both cupped hands, you very gently pull it up and brush the bits of soil away to get a better look.

If any other soul were there at the lakeside that evening, all they’d hear would be the very quiet trickle of lapping lake water—lazy in its endless cycle of fanning upon the shore and receding to be unfurled again—the glittery jingle of crickets, the raspy chatter of katydids, and the hissing rattle of cicadas in the trees.

But one might also hear your quiet remark of, “That’s a good one,” as you dip a few fingertips into the lake water, stand, and sprinkle the residue over the specimen draped across your fingers, avoiding drowning it as you wipe it clean. Then they’d hear Arthur’s faint chuckle of, “Nice an’ juicy,” as you hand it to him. Lighthearted murmurs between lovers, meant for no other ears.

He has his fishing pole resting in the crook of his left arm, hook unpinned from the nearest guide and dangling away from him.

You watch him hold the end of the worm steady between his thumb and first finger. It squirms and collapses itself inward to attempt escape. But after he successfully pricks it with the tip of his thin threader, he slides its body down the needle-like device, sending half-digested, ink black soil gushing across his fingertips.

He aligns the divot in the tip of the threader with the sharp tip of his hook and keeps their meeting firm by holding the line taut through the backs of the outstretched fingers of his left hand. You know even as you watch him make quick work of pushing the worm onto the hook with the fingers of his right hand that it had been the perfect length for hiding all shining traces of the metal hook—not so long that a bit would dangle off, giving any clever-enough fish a free meal.

After you watch him set a beautiful cast, you stoop and repeat the process for your own rig.

Fishing beneath the setting sun that evening, you each catch one small-mouth bass. Arthur’s, however, is slightly bigger, and he doesn’t let you off without hearing about it.

“With my worm,” you point out when you’re both sloughing away scales with short strokes of your blades, sitting cross-legged near the blazing campfire Arthur had built.

“Aw, sure, it was your worm, honey,” he drawls, lifting his brows and nodding his head to the side without a hint of a smirk. “But what was that, uh…observation you made now…?” he makes a demure show of peering up at the quickly dimming sky. “I think it was on our honeymoon… Aw, that’s right!” he gestures a moment with his knife out in front of him. “‘It’s called skill!’”

With your grinning jaw agape, you give a little indignant chuff and watch as he returns to scaling his fish without a single glance your way.

After scrunching your nose with a tight-lipped smile for a moment, you work to smooth your expression and look down to your own work again as you reply lightly, “Mr. Morgan, I fail to see how you can feel authorized to so freely alter the qualifiers of skill from number of fish caught, to size.”

At that, his head pops up to you. Finally forced to break his little act, he wears a bright smile. You lift your eyes and link your gaze with his, to which he shakes his head, looks back down, and laughs.

At the sound, you return a slowly brightening smile of your own.

It begins to occur to you what a miracle his laugh is. Something that should be so simple in its existence, from him, is a marvel. Such a hard man. Coarse and rugged in manner and way of living—out of necessity, out of survival. Scarred and tattered to prove it. Severe in bearing, cold and even exacting in certain circumstances—you have heard the accounts from the other gang members. Well-acquainted with grief and travail, pain and sorrow. Loneliness. Ache.

But as you watch him, your eyes trained on his brilliantly smiling face, ears tuned to the purest sound of his laughter, you can’t see a trace of any of it. Such a hard man—and he is laughing.

He is so deeply fetching when he smiles, his laughter so thoroughly unburdened, that the single instance of it is like sapphires and emeralds set in a frame of sparkling platinum to you.

You can’t understand how no one else can see it when they look at him. How can they not see it? How—

And then it hits you.

He shows it to no one, but you.

You think on it, all through Arthur broiling the fish over the flame, can hardly hear the sizzle of its flesh and the crackling drips of its runaway oil into the coals. And when he serves you, setting a plate of tanned leather reverently into your lap—supple suede side down and with a bed of luscious lake bass atop the crater of his hand—you almost forget to lasso your gaze from its spot on nothing in particular. You can only smile shyly up at him and vaguely shrug in absence of a verbal thank-you. And though the fire is warm, a nagging thought at the back of your mind tells you it can’t possibly be the only reason your neck slowly warms in an upward crawl.

Arthur returns to his spot around the fire, and the two of you eat with fingers. Picking the feathery white flesh from the belly and spine, he brings each tender chunk to his mouth and watches you do the same. He watches the glisten its oil leaves over your lip, watches the rhythmic tumble of your jaw, and listens to the listless, contented, politely faint plinking of your mouth as you chew.

“I was thinkin’ I’d take a bath,” you say. “Maybe in the morning, before we head out. So the sun can dry me better,” you add, looking over at him with a smile.

“Sure, sure,” he nods. “‘S a good idea.”

When the tanned leather plates are empty, he watches you gaze at the fire’s gyrating flames and spurting embers, their base like moving marbling of red and gold. Your eyes are soon arrested to a standstill by the concentrated flurry of light before you.

From the waist up, you begin to sway just a bit, and when you hum aloud, he recognizes the tune as one of the few that would play on the old bronze gramophone in camp, late at night. It’s a ballad—a waltz. Une chanson d’amour, Dutch had called it.

You hum it so precisely that he’s carried away in memory to one such night, when this very song was played.

…

Lifetimes ago, it seems certain now. It had been one of those moons of spontaneous celebration, when they’d had a decent score, or had discovered a promising lead, or Dutch had simply felt the itch to be unjustifiably laudatory or inordinately amorous or romantic. He couldn’t remember which the night in question had been.

The volume had been cranked to blaring, the hooch had been flowing, and those who chose to dance had secured themselves partners fairly quickly. Dutch had Molly, of course, and a few of the others paired themselves for flirting purposes or for the sake of a pleasant, enjoyable evening. Singing and laughter were everywhere, accompanied by the visuals of swishing skirts and flushed cheeks.

He remembers standing off to the side, watching the rest. Glancing to his right to find you swaying where you stood, just as you sway sitting now. Alone, with your hands clasped quaintly before you.

Your smile had started out so big, and you’d laughed at the way the dancers twirled and dipped each other so ostentatiously. As the song went on though, the dancers’ feet had slowed, and their holds on each other had grown gentler, more tender, more intimate. And your smile had slowly faded in time with the way your gaze took note, and the way your mind wandered someplace grave, forlorn. So very alone.

He can perceive now that you’d noticed the way a man’s hand could so easily rest on a woman’s waist, as if it were meant to be there—as simple and complex a thing as a warm palm on an intimate spot. That you, as a long grown woman, had thought on how you’d never felt such a thing, had yearned to feel it, had known with surety you never would.

He understands now that painful state of isolated ignorance you’d found yourself seemingly forever inhabiting, as if a life sentence—that of imagining and imagining, of being told and reading and more imagining, but never being granted the smallest knowledge. For there was a gulf you could not cross on your own—a gulf separating you from knowledge. What amount of deliberate imagining could ever get you to the other side?

All in the space of a few slowed moments, it had all played itself out, all over your face.

He’d seen it all. Only now does he understand it more fully, with the ways he knows you. And he knows how your chest had burned; for he feels the same sting of pain for you now, in remembering.

He’d seen the way you’d gulped and started walking towards your tent, deciding to put yourself to bed, right in the middle of celebrations. And when you’d realized your path took you past him, you’d pieced together a pained though pleasant smile, beautiful in its struggle, and had quietly offered him a wobbled, delicately choked, yet simple, "Goodnight, Arthur." You’d ducked your gaze at the last moment in hopes of hiding the glistening rims below your eyes. But he’d seen it all.

"Goodnight," he’d replied, too late for you to hear as he’d turned to continue watching you.

…

Arthur’s mind returns to the present, to what his gaze rests on, where you sit with your own gaze become empty and mesmerized by the flitting, spitting cords of the fire’s flames.

“I never got to dance with ya,” he hears himself suddenly say.

“Hm?” you blink and look over at him.

He stands and steps toward you, feeling himself beginning to smirk as your back straightens, your elbows come off your knees, and you look up at him.

“I never got to dance with ya.”

You look back down to see his hand held out, waiting.

Instead of filling it, you curl your hand inward, and rest it on your chest below the hollow at your collarbone. “Oh, I don’t know how, Arthur.” You glance back up at his face. “I’ve...never...done it before.”

You watch his mouth spread into a grin and the white creases near his eyes disappear in favor of the tanned spaces between them.

“Think I’ve got a grasp on it?” A brief wheeze escapes him. “We’ll be quite the pair—figurin’ it out together, the way we do everything.” His grin smoothes again into a thoughtful smirk, and he more quietly adds, “You’ll be just fine, darlin’.”

As you look up at him, you slowly smile. You reach out and rest your hand in his as you stand and allow him to draw you close. When he places his hand to the side of your waist, you have to close your eyes just a moment at the feeling of the meeting. He slides his palm around to the small of your back, and presses you even closer. You take in a breath and open your eyes to see his mouth.

After taking your other hand in his, he gently steps and rocks side to side, and you try to follow along. A quiet hum begins in his throat—the tune you’d been humming a few minutes ago. And all at once you realize it as a tune you’d subconsciously recalled—one that the gang had danced to one night as it poured from the gramophone, several months ago now.

You’re surprised at the stinging in your eyes and the tightness that quickly grips your throat when you understand what Arthur’s doing.

“How’d it go?” you hear him whisper.

After clearing your throat, you pick up humming the tune. He supplies the vague movements, and you supply the music.

You’d seen him agree to dance with one of the young girls once; you can’t remember which it had been now. But he’d raucously dipped and tossed her like a boat, had allowed her to twirl to the upbeat melody and return to him. It’s nothing like what he does now, with you.

He speaks just as little. But he is slow. The locus of his body is held much, much closer to yours. The warm press of him brushes to you with each and every small sway. He is so close, that to turn your head, you nearly graze his jaw. And you feel the mist of his every breath near your face, upon your temple or along the top of your cheek.

Arthur feels your ribs expand under his hands, and all at once, he hears you sigh. A bright smile covertly overtakes his mouth, flashing his teeth to the thumbnail moon. For in this moment, there must be something he’s managing to do right.

“Thank you, Arthur.”

He considers the meekly quiet comment.

“’S my privilege, honey.” He pins his chin back to his throat to try to get a look at your face, with as close as you are. Then he returns his chin over your shoulder, near your ear. “To have you as a wife, and to hold you.”

Arthur feels your hands stretch over the plane of his back and try to press him closer. He hears the single tiny, almost silent whimper you emit, filled with strong emotions at such a simple reply. He notices the way wisps of hair near your face fly and drift slowly back down when he breathes. And he is so struck with such a violent bolt of sensual need, for you and only you, that it surprises him as it courses through him and almost blinds him.

But how to woo and deeply satiate his wife, this lovely, timid, and most precious creature already in his arms? On some days, it must be done with great care, skillful deftness, no small amount of artfulness, and even—though he’s never felt himself one to own it—intelligence. This he’s come to know.

As he takes a breath through his nose, he shuts his eyelids over rolled eyes. “God, you smell good.”

“Me?” you quaver a whisper. “It’s gotta be the sage.”

“No. It’s you.”

“What? Arthur, I haven’t fully bathed in days!”

A sinfully sublime idea occurs to him, and a clandestine, muted grin pricks up both corners of his mouth in tiny, staccato flickers.

Retreating a step and reaching up for the topmost buttons on his shirt, he says in a wry tone, “Who said we had to wait for the sun to have a bath?”

Your brows come together. “What do you mean? What are you...” Then your brows lift as your eyes widen a bit. “Arthur, what!” you rasp in a high whisper.

You watch as with his button down hanging half open, he quickly shrugs from his suspenders, slipping them off either shoulder and beginning to fully undress. “What are you doing!” you ask, this time already completely aware of the answer.

“What’s it look like?” he bluntly says, with a lovely slant in the playful twang of the last word and with a coil to one brow. “Havin’ myself a bath,” he lightly chuckles.

You stand dumbfounded, helplessly watching as he removes piece after blessed piece of his clothing. He yanks his shirt from his trousers, suspenders dangling from the waist of them now, and reaches back to pull his shirt in fistfuls up over his head. And before you can prepare yourself, the jingle of his belt buckle being unfastened rings out, a most heady and intoxicating sound.

You’d seen a group of boys strip for a lake bath once, when you were about fifteen.

…

One summer afternoon, you’d been reading beneath a tree at the lakeside—a pastime you’d become well-accustomed to, being a youth alone. You’d been enjoying the balmy air, the way the mist of day hovered like fog over the firmaments of earth and water, the way the noonday insects swirled themselves into devils above the lake’s surface, catching the sunlight in their teal wings.

You’d been turning the page when the boys had emerged from among the abundant trees and greenery at the far shore of the little lake, to the east of you. Fellow students from the schoolhouse, some your age, some a couple years older. Ruddy with heat and sticky with perspiration after a day of fun, but still riddled with excess energy.

With a hoopla that made reading any further impossible, and to your amazement, they’d quickly disrobed and flung their summer zephyr cottons onto the nearby boughs and foliage, your presence clearly unnoticed. Thankful you’d been sitting on the opposite side of the tree, you’d made the smallest adjustment of dipping back to hide at least your upper half from view.

But with a heat in your cheeks and without a single thought in your head, you’d slowly sat forward again, just enough to see them.

The mere situation, you knew, made you the pitiable, laughable archetype of a peeping pariah—despised and only clandestinely able to catch a glimpse of those you longed to be close to. But you’d been glued to your spot, unable to move out of a strange and terrible mixture of fear and curiosity. Though from a distance, it had been and would be the only moments you’d ever seen a bare member of the opposite sex.

They were straight as arrows up and down, hairless skin as even as glass and white as the fish you’ve just eaten tonight around the campfire, rears jiggling as they whooped and ran and jumped into the water. And when you’d caught the faintest glimpse of their sex beneath the little bundle of hair, you’d taken in a little gasp past your lips and sat back again, only to return forward several moments later.

They didn’t seem to harbor inhibitions, the way ladies did, you’d thought. As they laughed and splashed and hollered, you’d realized their only concerns in the world were fun and relief from the heat. You admired the ease of their smiles, wishing you could know what it felt like—simplicities of camaraderie and innocently enjoying nature in such a carefree way.

Then the first one saw you. And his smile tugged and morphed into something altogether different. Something menacing and almost frightening. Repugnance, derision, hatred.

He shouted at you, horrible names.

“Not her!” the others joined, with dread and loathing in their voices.

Stuttering and hiccuping, you wanted to explain that you had already been sitting there. It had all happened so fast, and you had been embarrassed and hadn’t meant to violate their privacy. But that was all you could do—stutter and hiccup in place of your excuses.

They made you out to be in every inch a pervert, an unwanted outsider, and insisted that you leave. And just as you stood, clammy hands clinging to your book and your linen skirt, one of the boys that had been lingering on the shore tromped over, dropped his shoulder, scooped up a handful of sod, and forcefully threw the whole of it in your stunned face.

On your way scurrying out of the forest, you’d crossed paths with more boys intending to bathe in the lake, bringing pretty, giggling girls with them—other fellow students.

You didn’t—couldn’t give it much thought until you arrived home, sniffling as you wiped the spray of caked dirt and tears from your face. And you realized more and more as you looked back, that they hadn’t cared who saw or joined them. They only cared that it wasn’t you.

You understood, more clearly than you’d ever been made to understand in your girlhood life, that you were a plague. A certain virus, but no less deserving of the utmost avoidance, disgust, and disdain. And the years passing on the calendar taught you it was fact. It was one of many reasons that when Dutch had called you refuse, you’d already known it to be true. Undesired, leftover, dropped by the way.

By that day at the lake, you hadn’t had your mother for years, to pair and temper the pain and loneliness with solace and wisdom. Maybe for most, it wouldn’t normally hurt so much and so deeply. But when you had no one, it wasn’t only excruciating; it was everything.

…

The memory casts over you in half a second. And in the same span, you’ve returned your mind to your husband as you gaze at him before you.

Your husband. He bends at the waist, stooping to slip off his boots one at a time. He straightens and pushes down his breeches, leaving only his red union suit remaining.

“Arthur, you... You—”

But he’s already unbuttoning it and shirking out of it, the fabric falling away to reveal the hair-coated planes of his smooth, firm chest, softly scored belly, and angular body. You notice the delineations of the sun’s marks upon his skin, notice the tantalizingly dulcet rim of his navel, and the sprinkling of wiry hair that trails around it and darkens as it ventures lower, thickening about his manhood. You notice how resiliently plump and healthy the surface of his skin looks as he bends and moves, and the equal mixture of elegance and power in the curves and dips of each muscle that ripples just beneath. And you know it all to be like a blanket of warmest velvet when he’s wrapped around you.

A heated yearning jumps into your body, pulsating from low in your belly, down to your sex with a sweetly sparkling, faintly thumping ache, and up to your throat and behind your eyes. Your lids drape low as you try hard to gulp.

“Oh, god...” you whine, as your gaze travels up the length of his tall body. “Arthur...” you slowly, lustfully wag your head, your weak voice swooping low and incredulous, “you are no boy…”

When your gaze reaches his face, you find a lazy smirk that all but transforms your legs to water.

“Naw. Ain’t been one a’ them in years.” His eyes are on you as he rolls one pant leg of his union suit down his lifted calf.

You bite your lip and labor to breathe where you stand with a full view of his large, half-flaccid manhood where it jostles amidst a tumble of dark hair, beneath the chiseled edge of his hip and between his strong, thickly muscular thighs.

“Naw, I’m a man…in love with a fine woman,” he says, his steely tone now low and rumbly as he looks down to finish the job of removing his long johns. “Just a man, wantin’ a bath.” Having finished, he stands plainly before you and looks up at you. “‘At all right with you?”

Divested of all his clothes, Arthur is nothing short of stunning in the flickering light of your lakeside fire. After a split moment of remembering he’s speaking to you, you release your glistening lip from between your teeth and offer a hurried, broken nod. “Mm..m-hm.”

“Good,” he smirks with eyes that slide to remain on you as he walks past. And you’re at his mercy.

You slowly reach your hands up and slide them over your hot cheeks as you turn and watch him walk towards the lake’s edge. You eagerly take note of the scrumptious dimples at the base of his back, right above his deliciously, perfectly round backside that jiggles with each step. You watch him wade deep into the sooty black lake. The wakened water’s ripples flash silvery white with the light of the moon and radiate from the hub of his movement.

“So unlike you!” you weakly muse above the sound of his splashing as you gently brace your own face.

He plunges fully beneath the water. When he bobs up again, he turns to face you, cavalierly runs his hands back over his wet hair, and briefly spits. “Guess not,” he says flatly.

Jaw agape, you stand smiling and huffing incredulously, fully dressed on the shore.

“You gonna get in here?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Come on…” he laughs with a playful growl, tossing his head back.

“Arthur, there’s no way!”

“Don’t make me come get you.”

You gasp and almost squeal. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh yes I would,” he says, maintaining a straight face, though one dark brow arches.

You hear the tinkle of crystalline water droplets as he wipes his hand down over his face and pinches his nose a moment.

“Ohh…” You rub your neck. “It’s cold, ain’t it? Arthur, I know it’s cold!” you lift a hand and let it fall.

“It won’t be after you’re in a while.”

Blowing through pursed lips and puffed cheeks, you notice the few softly blinking lightning bugs dangling at varying heights above the water’s surface from invisible threads in the night air. You look down at the dark lake water and rub your neck again.

He invokes your name. You lift your eyes to him.

The calm, steady sound of your name spoken again at the end of an imperative request is almost to sweet to bear. “Come here.”

Your eyelids flutter. You can hardly make out his eyes in the dark and distance from where you stand, but you are no less weak for him: the whole of your heart’s love, your precious husband, his sweet mouth caressing your name and beckoning you close.

Unable to refuse him, you finally reach to your collar and begin unbuttoning your frock’s bodice. Instinctively, you turn as the corners of the tapered fabric hang open and you begin to undress. You push the drab frock down your waist and hips, revealing your very unfashionable lack of corset. Stepping out of it, you loosely fold it and cast it off onto a nearby fallen tree trunk.

Left in nothing but the snowy cloak of your chemise and drawers, you unknowingly gleam in the raw moonlight, enthralling Arthur where he relaxedly drifts with the slight sway of the cool lake water. And when the thin veil is suddenly loosed and slips from your shoulder, revealing the beauty of your bare skin, his breath freezes solid within him. The swath of your chemise falls away into a bundle at your ankles. He admires the soft shadow in the shallow valley at the center of your back. It isn’t until you shimmy from your drawers and drop them that he breathes again.

You’re suddenly alerted by a loud, low, swooping whistle.

“My god…” you hear Arthur muse, his voice stunted.

Now realizing what the whistle had meant, you quickly turn to look over your shoulder at him with a bright smile and a quiet chuff, a mixture of astounded incredulity and abashment.

Arthur releases a groan that rattles low in his throat as he slowly shakes his head. To your amazement, he almost giggles through his speech. “You’d put a sinner in church, woman.”

For a moment you smile beneath knitted brows and almost giggle yourself, at a loss to know what he could possibly mean. Then you realize whatever it is must be very good, for him to groan and wag his head so.

“Not me,” you say quietly, turning and trying to hold your folded arms over your breasts.

You can tell his gaze is arrested by the whole of you, though it ends by lingering on your face. “Yes,” he says, pausing. “You.”

Stepping towards the water, you slowly wade in up to your calves, cringing and squeaking when the cold reaches your thighs and laps over your torso. “How did I let you talk me into this?” you hiss, huddling within the cradle of your own arms and pinched shoulders.

“Naw, it ain’t all that bad…” he teases when you’re still at a distance.

“Arthur, yes, it is!”

“Well, I can recommend a surefire way to warm up.”

Mumbling a little giggle behind closed lips, you slowly venture deeper into the water towards him.

When you’re a couple arms length’s away, Arthur flicks his wrist, sending a sudden shock of frigid water up into your face. You shut your eyes, ducking and turning with upheld hands and a sputtered squeal.

Arthur is already snickering low and bubbly as he sinks into the water.

“You’re wicked!” you laugh, still spitting and trying to recover.

“Well get over here, and I’ll make it up to you.”

Instead of moving any closer, you dip yourself below the water, smoothing your hands back over your silken hair when you resurface.

“Get over here!” Arthur insists again.

“You’ll splash me again! Think I’m that stupid?”

“Course not!” he scoffs. “I won’t! I won’t! Just come here!”

But you’re content to stay where you are, toes barely touching the lake bottom.

“Come here!” he repeats, starting to take a step towards you.

You quickly swim backwards until you’re a couple more paces away. Stifling a giggle, you simply look at him with a knowing smile and slowly shake your head.

“Aw, come on back, hun. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Come on back,” he reaches out a hand to you in gesture.

“No!” you laugh, wearing a coy grin beneath your heated gaze. “You’re lucky I’d rather protect myself than get you back.”

“Well you won’t come to me?”

“We’ll see,” you sing coolly, busying yourself with looking at the nearby fireflies floating in the air.

Arthur watches as a fringed tail of water trickles from your wrist down your smooth forearm when you reach up to one. He watches you cup your hand beneath the firefly, creating a buttercup glow that shines over your face when its light finally flickers to life.

How in love he is with you, how entranced just watching you. But how bereft without your nearness, your touch.

It’s only the moment before you speak that he realizes you’ve noticed him watching you, and probably whatever dopey look he’d been inadvertently flaunting while doing it.

“Won’t do it again?” you gently smirk.

In place of straightening his back, he adopts a smooth expression and lifts his chin just slightly from the water. “Outlaw’s honor.”

You promptly snort through your nose, and your smile widens.

His smile grows to match as you swim towards him. When you’re finally close enough, he reaches for you and wraps his arms around your waist beneath the water.

“I like the idea of scandalizin’ a few fish,” he says in an intentionally facetious, weaselly tone.

Your mouth immediately pops open, and you laugh outright, boisterous and genuine.

When he draws you in, close and tight to him, he looks down over your face, his voice now quiet. “I hope I never stop bein’ able to make you laugh.”

Your smile sweetens. “I feel just the same way.”

A tiny breath of laughed air escapes his nose. You draw close and press a kiss to his mouth.

“You my baby?” he says so quietly and warmly, for only you to hear, his mouth a slice as bright as the shining wedge of moon overhead.

With your own bright smile, you nod grandly and eagerly, throwing your arms over his shoulders and wrapping them around his neck. He chuckles as he receives your gleeful embrace, leaning in and pressing his mouth into the crook of your shoulder. When you draw back enough to meet his mouth, you hang on him as you kiss him, now completely unable to touch the lake floor where Arthur stands.

Letting your eyes drift closed, you easily melt into his kiss, your body sagging with the weight of rested pleasure. With the feeling of his large hands stretching and gliding over your back under the water and the sounds of his soft moans of satisfaction, he’s become exactly right—you hardly register the cold any longer.

You draw back just enough to glance at him a moment through your intoxicated haze. With lips still so close to his, your giddy, meandering mumble is almost unintelligible. “Your mouth is like honey.”

“Hmm-hmmm?” he chuckles. His tone his husky when he adds, chin eagerly hitching forward for you, “Yours is like whiskey.”

You smile and stumble through a murmured giggle as you meet him for another kiss. This time, you bring your forearm up and rest your hand over the crown of his head, plowing rows with your fingers through his wet hair. You loosely rest your other hand on his cheek, letting your fingertips dance along the top of his cheekbone.

As you cling to him, you feel both his large hands slide lower over your skin until he can brace and grasp your rear. Just as he emits a quiet little moan of appreciation, you break from his mouth with the smallest gasp. When you glimpse his distracted, half-lidded eyes, you smile wide as you return for his kiss, feeling his hands fondling and roaming.

Your stiffened nipples graze the hard angles of his chest, resounding with a deep ache for contact with him. He seems to recognize the need unfolding all over your body. One of his eager hands trails upward, crossing to your belly and up further, his fingers seeking out the crest of one breast. Upon finding it, he masterfully brushes his fingertips over you, drawing a long sigh from your throat that seeps into a weak moan. He pulls away from you, enough to savor the breathy sound from your mouth and the sight of blissful abandon on your face as your head slightly lolls.

Peppering small kisses to the corner of your open mouth, he steals a glance down between you as he cups and gently kneads you, and finds himself caught in wonderment and delight at the indescribable delicacy of something as simple as your breast in his palm.

“Like... It’s like...” he’s whispering before he’s even had a chance to reel his thoughts in.

Absurdly, laughably infantile. Outrageously rudimentary. To pause lovemaking while his lover is entering the throes of pleasure, for any length of time, simply to attempt a description—and an audible one, it seems it must be, no less—of any isolated part of her body.

But here he is. And what has he ever known like it? What as supple and pliable, yet springy and slightly weighted in his hand? What as deeply warm and comforting, as familiar, yet thrillingly foreign and new each time? What as plump and invitingly delectable, what nearly quite as silken and velvety to his touch?

Perhaps the few mink furs he’s brushed a few fingers to at trading posts. But no, they have none of your buoyancy and fountaining warmth. Maybe the wobbly, frothy foam crowning a stein. Not that either—too intangible, with none of your sweetness.

None of the words he knows seem to quite capture you, and nothing he’s ever encountered seems to compare.

“Flapjack dough?” he mutters, his jaw sliding. “Naw…”

After glancing at Arthur, you quickly look at him again. You follow his enthralled gaze to your breast, and your amusement grows in time with your realization—his absurd excitement is over nothing more than the existence of your breast resting in the cup of his palm.

You squint with a tickled grin. “Arthur, what…? It’s just a strange…floppy bit of flesh!” you laugh with a shrug. “Nothingness, really!”

His eyes flash to you in a moment, two shadowed pins that belie total disbelief and thorough consternation.

“Would you—” He reaches to the back of his neck, scrambling for your wrist. He frames your hand carefully within the concave vessel of his own large, calloused hand as he pulls it down to your chest. And there you are, one hand slung around his neck, the other drawn by your husband beneath the water. He presses the pocket of your palm to the lower curvature of your breast, guiding your fingers to gently heft and knead and brush yourself.

Nibbling at your lip, you fight a smile as you look up from your chest into his eyes. “Like a pillow.”

“Naw.” He wheezes with a shake of his head. “Better.”

“Merengue maybe?”

“Huh?”

You stifle a cackle at his half-pinched expression, concluding with certainty he’s never tasted such a thing.

“Cake,” he says, a lazy smile beginning to stretch at the corners of his mouth. “Sweetcake. With buttercream.”

Your eyes widen and twinkle as you grin wide. “Arthur Morgan…!” you coyly tease, your voice pinched high as you slink your hand back around his neck. “When did you ever taste sweetcake with buttercream?”

He immediately nods and laughs. Before he even answers, you’re wholly elated and adoringly enamored with the idea—your dearest love, a man who’s always had to eke out every crag and crevice of his life’s very steps upon the earth, enjoying for a few moments the indulgent delicacy of sugar spun into a sweet and spongey confection.

“Hosea—” he wheezes hard, for a moment almost unable to continue. “Hosea conned this baker for it. Real ritzy little shop too, in Chicago. He noticed me starin’ through the window, knew I’d never tasted anything remotely like that. So he conned the baker. Just so I could have a bite a’ cake. Bonbon too.”

You gasp and laugh, “No!”

“Yes. Conned ‘em so good we didn’t even have to run while we ate. Hosea for ya. That was before the early days.” He smiles fondly as he runs a hand back over his hair. “God, I haven’t thought a’ that in years.”

Drawn to his smiling mouth, you quietly ask, “What flavor was the cake?”

“Cinnamon.”

“Mmmm!” you tease again, pressing little smacked kisses to his lips.

“What I’m tellin’ you…” he murmurs between your kisses, then pulls back and looks warmly over your face, down at your mouth, and back up into your eyes, “is you’re better.”

As you meekly smile with your chin tucked, he lowers his smiling mouth towards yours. His chin staggers and swoops as he tips his head, his lips hovering near your own for a split moment as he seeks the quickest path to your mouth. When he achieves his mark, you both close your eyes and breathe each other in, and he gently lifts his chin in a smooth motion, forcing you to follow him, for your form to release and open to him.

Arthur keeps one hand to your back and trails the other down between your thighs. Then his hand merely grazes you, stroking your hair and fondling your flesh, almost petting your sex.

You giggle through every word of, “What’re you doing?”

“I like it,” he mumbles against the corner of your mouth with a cheeky grin. “So soft.”

A little laugh stutters behind your nose, and you release a contented, sighed moan as you kiss him.

He tilts his head to kiss you more deeply, himself quickly being swept away with dizzying fervor. All you hear are his little rumbled moans of delight and the occasional clink of water droplets as he wraps both arms around you again, and you both move to enfold each other deeper and closer into your embrace.

With your arms wrapped around his neck there in the lake, you feel it. The coolness of the water. The warm slip of your bodies against each other. You find the deepest comfort in such simple things.

When his mouth leaves yours to drag wet kisses along the buoyant skin on the underside of your jaw, you lift your head and sigh. His languid kisses are tender. As his lips blaze a downward path, he reaches his hand past the curtain of your hair and rests the tips of his fanned fingers to the back of the side of your neck, as if cautiously appreciating something made of crystal.

“So sweet,” he mutters amidst a moan he prints upon your slick skin. “How can you taste so fine?”

Immediately, you press in for a kiss; for how can you resist the one person who speaks to you so?

With this kiss, your dancing mouths and urgent breaths are more fevered and hungry and earnest. Arthur’s hands and forearms press you so tightly to him at your lower back, and he kisses you so deeply, that you begin to tilt slightly backward as his form leans against you in the water. You rest your hand to the side of his face, feeling for the outlines of his devilishly handsome temple, brow, and cheekbone that you know without sight. You float and drift with him, suspended not amid icy lake waters, but the searing, intoxicating umbrae of unrestrained ardor and desire.

With eyes still closed, you smile dimly against him at the thought—he was right; you are undoubtedly inebriated from his touch alone. You feel as though your head will spin right off your shoulders.

When his lips peel away from your own, you surprise yourself when you whine outright with a small pout, frowning brows, and half-mast eyes. Your attempt to lean forward for him proves unfruitful. When you hear his wobbly chuckle through his nearly delirious speech, you blink your eyes open a bit wider to find him smiling down at your swollen mouth with his own thoroughly inebriated expression.

“Wait,” he chuckles breathlessly. He holds up a finger. “Wait.”

Sucking in a lungful of air, he quickly disappears below the water’s surface. Still half-tipsy yourself, you think nothing of it. You simply wear a dopily giddy smile and heavily-lidded eyes, restfully tucking your bottom lip between your teeth as you await his return.

When you feel a slippery heat slide up the center of your sex, you gasp and shriek and squeal, your legs flailing and folding as you hurriedly swim and tumble slightly backwards through the water in raw shock.

By the time Arthur resurfaces, you’re heaving and cackling with jittery reserves of surprise and nerves as you repeatedly shake your head.

“You can’t do that, Arthur!” you huff for breath. Having been snapped awake from your love-drunken reverie in an instant, you watch as he swipes his hands back over his slick hair and pinches his nose. “You-you can’t do that! What were you doin’?”

“Givin’ you a kiss,” he drawls, his roguish voice low and syrupy.

A nervous snicker spills from your nose as you continue shaking your head. “You can’t do that!”

“Oh, I can’t? Says who?”

After a sudden moment of pondering, you squirm and shrug in answer, your abashed, surprised smile lingering on your face. “I don’t know, you just, you— You can’t!”

“‘Cause if it’s you, that’s one thing. But if it’s your idea of what’s done and not done, or of some…societal…propriety…that’s another.”

Your smile slowly melts away, and you struggle to gulp. “Oh.”

Arthur watches your face as your eyes drift down in contemplation, clearly unable to fully decipher which it is for you. And he finds himself filled with a brief flash of despair that you’re so much farther away than you were a few moments ago.

Inclining his shoulder forward, he reaches out a hand to you, narrowly catching you by the wrist and gently pulling you back through the tranquil lakewater to him.

“‘Cause I… I really only thought to give you a little kiss, sweetheart,” he says quietly, his timbre almost sheepish in its calm. His eyes are intent on your downcast face and slack, contemplative gaze, looking for signs of your inner workings, as you continue to be unable to come up with anymore words for him. “I’d like to give you more,” he whispers near your hairline as he kisses your temple, “just like that, but better.”

What Arthur doesn’t know as he so intently watches your face is that within the flicker of a moment, you’re tugged even further backwards in time, to your twelfth year.

…

How on a warm summer morning, you would tromp through the tall grass in your black laced boots, enjoying the way you could lift your foot as high as you wanted, and bring it down with a measured balance of exuberance and precision, when no one was around to glimpse the frilled edges of your underskirts and bloomers.

It was how you’d always been—alone. Never quite allowed to fit into place with classmates, until they realized all efforts would be futile. Always made to know by every boy that your looks were all wrong—that, like a putrid stench in the nostrils of holy God, you were an intolerable offense to their eyes.

So there, at twelve, you’d lollop through the meadows, past the shadow of your special tree, and on to your secret hiding place, alone. With a book clasped in the crook of your arm and an apple swinging in the secret pocket of your skirt, singing and humming to yourself. Marveling at the sunlight and inspecting the plants and flowers. Wondering at the crickets and dragonflies, salamanders and frogs, caterpillars and butterflies and moths. Singing and humming to yourself as you went, making your own worlds.

An inverse chrysalis were you. Without knowing it, a thing snared between states. Not a child, not a woman. An awkward mass, a hideous clod.

One day, you made your way to that hiding place—a little storage room attached to the outside of an old, abandoned house. It had a squat metal door with an open, narrow, horizontal slot in it. You pulled the door closed behind you and nestled on the earthen floor with your book in your lap.

A world all your own, though small. One in which you could go anywhere and see anything, if only in the chamber of your mind; but one in which no one could make you feel so desperately unwanted.

Ignoring the dust particles that caught the sunlight filtering through the rectangular slot, you would prop the open book and continuously move it in such a way that the light would rest on the page’s next few lines. And as you read, you’d take a little bite of your apple now and then.

“I remembered that the real world was wide,” you heard your twelve-year-old self slowly read aloud, quietly and almost mumbling—when the narrative proved too imminently real to remain silent on the piths of the page—as you traced your finger beneath the words that clasped you in their enthralling clutch, your own voice slowing with them as you went. “…And that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek…real knowledge of life…amidst its…perils.”

When you felt a slight flicker of soreness in your belly and a strange stickiness under your bloomers, you tried to continue reading but couldn’t pull your thoughts away from the peculiar sensation. Finally, you stuffed a hand down under your skirts. You brought your fingertips up to the beam of light and mutedly gasped in alarm at the color you saw there: a muddy brown-red.

The next several minutes saw you sprinting home in a panicked flurry, bursting through the door and trying to explain to your father between huffs that you were ill and bleeding. But no matter how much he pressed you to inform him where you were bleeding, you clammed up and couldn’t seem to force yourself to say.

It was then that your mother’s quiet voice arose from her open bedroom door, instructing him to send you in to her, alone. You inched towards the door, rounding the threshold to see her sitting up in bed, a small blessing. She had been slowly dying for several months, and looking back, you know that that was why she had forgotten to talk with you and save you the shock.

With her crocheted blanket wrapped around her arms like a shawl, her wan, waxen face smiled at you. She simply patted the empty space in the bed beside her, the way she had done so often before, when she’d been healthy.

Your small, muddy boots stepped an inch forward, and you paused to unlace and slip them off. Free of them, you swiftly hopped up into the bed, crawled upon your knees, and turned to sit beside her, cuddling in so close to her warmth that your cheek slid upon the side of her shoulder as you slumped.

“Did you spot a snowy white egret today?” she asked, looking to her side at you.

“I saw one yesterday and one today,” you answered casually with a dimpled smirk.

She gasped and smiled. “A good week!”

She noticed the book that had plopped atop the cover from your loosened hand. “What’s this you’re reading, rosebud?” Taking it, she eyed the green cloth-bound novel, noting that it was clearly kept as pristine as an avidly-reading, wilderness-adventuring young lady could keep it. “Isn’t this something of an adult read?”

“I’ve read it thrice already,” you replied with contented familiarity in your small voice, cheek still resting against your mother’s upper arm, your fingertips tracing over the fractured gold lettering.

“And on your fourth turn? At twelve?” she playfully teased.

You nodded with a tight-lipped smile. “They love each other so.”

“Who, bud?”

“Jane and Edward.”

You opened to the title of Jane Eyre and flipped to further pages. “He’s harsh, but she speaks to him. She’s plain, but he kisses her. Nothing can come between their souls. Not even the width of a feather.” Finding your desired page, you pointed out a certain passage. “See?”

“Ah,” she smiled after scanning the passage. She looked back at you where you slumped, though your eyes remained on the pages you turned.

“In the end, after all the pain, they marry and have a baby,” you continued. “See? There?” Carried away by your excitement and devotion to the story, you lifted the open book from your lap, your finger and your gaze attached to it.

But your mother’s gaze was on you. “And you will have your Edward someday. Won’t you.”

With your eyes still pinned to the pages, you lowered the book to your lap again and shook your head.

“Why not?”

Choosing a very bright, coy smile and a smushed, juvenile play-voice to cover your already sprouted and matured pain, you glanced up at her. “You know why…”

“No, I don’t!” she looked forward and shook her head grandly.

When she refocused her attention on you, yours returned to the book, and you couldn’t keep your expression from growing grave or the lump from clogging your throat.

“Because I’m much worse than plain.”

Her face slackened and smoothed. She reached out and traced the back of a finger down your cheek. Knowing a mother’s words could do little to soothe the completeness of your rejection by your peers or the reality of the feelings you were living, she said it anyway. “It’s not true.”

Avoiding her eyes, you simply nodded in lieu of, Yes, it is.

She released a small sigh. “You found blood today?”

Another nod.

She leaned closer to you, pressing her arm to your slumped cheek, and kissed the top of your head. “Don’t fret, rosebud,” her warm, delicate voice had said.

After correctly guessing the source of your bleeding, she offered up a prayer of thanks that she was still around to tell you all she was about to. She explained that you were becoming a woman and took time to explain how, and why. She detailed what she knew of your anatomy and shared the process’s purpose of allowing a child. When you took it in calm stride and asked questions, she answered them.

But when you began to ask logical questions of how a baby comes to be, her careful, trimmed answers about male anatomy and lovemaking prodded you slowly forward in your seat, away from her and painfully stiff, with a dreadful pang in your chest and a warped crease above your brow.

“No,” you’d cut her off, your voice quavering and your chin trembling. “Not there.”

“Yes. There.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!” you wept.

Your mother’s own chin trembled then. She was fully aware and understanding of all you meant, though it pained her just as deeply as it pained you. She’d always known that even at your young age, some of your dearest dreams in all of life were of love and children of your own. But she already knew how desperately, deeply unwanted you felt. She knew how thoroughly shattered and hopeless you’d suddenly become in that moment, knowing now that for you to ever have the love of a man, and for you to ever have your own baby, a man must one day touch you. And she knew that with her own fate impending, all her desires to help ease your way, to help you go on after her and flourish in life, were just out of reach.

“Where did you think babies got inside a woman’s belly, bud?”

“I don’t know,” your weak, garbled voice broke as you sniffled and hiccuped, tears streaming down both cheeks. “But it can’t be there. It can’t be.”

She blinked and stilled her breathing. “You will be a woman, and you suitor will be a man, not a boy. He won’t gibe and hurt you.”

You shut your eyes and shook your head, the tears streaming even faster as you sniffed against the wetness that dribbled beneath your nose.

Your mother swallowed and willed her drawn eyes to smooth, willed her voice to steady as she proceeded. “When two people love each other that way, they want to touch. When they really, deeply love each other, they do. I promise they do.”

“It can’t happen for me. Not me,” you shook your head firmly. “I’ll be all alone.”

She beckoned you deeply into her side again, and you nestled your cheek to her shoulder.

“You will grow…in grace and beauty…” she tried to coo to you, cradling your head and kissing your temple. “And a wonderful man will find you. He will be kind, and he will love you. With all his heart. And he will find you. You’ll see, bud. He will.”

You turned your face into the cotton of her nightgown, shutting your eyes and weeping, clinging to her and sucking in her scents of glycerin and laudanum as puddles spread across the fabric.

“It will never happen for me. Never.” Your face crumpled, and you could only heave and quietly wail past the despair in your chest. “I will never have love. And I’ll never get to have a baby, Mama. Never.”

You hadn’t known that your father had been standing just outside the open doorway. That he had overhead your convinced declaration of complete hopelessness and had fully realized how little chance there was that he’d be given grandchildren.

It wasn’t two precious months later that your mother was gone.

How you hadn’t realized, so contentedly cuddling in bed with her then as you often had before, that after such a short passage of time, you’d never be able to do so again.

…

“What’re you thinkin’, baby?” Arthur murmurs, lifting a hand and stroking a wet strand of hair from your pensive face, bringing you back to the present moment. “Hm? Tell me.”

Overwhelmed by the convergence of the memory and your current reality, a rim of tears fills your eyes, and you offer a very unsteady smile. “You’re real,” you whisper.

Arthur watches your heavy lids and wet, clumped lashes lift in gradual stages as you slowly look up at him, though your gaze hitches near his neck and chin, not daring to rise further. He admires their beauty, and the beauty of the shape and shade of your snuffling nose, and the beauty of your glistening cupid’s bow, plump above your slightly open mouth. He even admires the depth of emotion and wellspring of intelligence they all demonstrate.

He tips his head to the side, continuing to watch you with slightly drawn eyes and the flicker of a smirk tugging at his lips. “Last I checked.”

You quietly sniffle again, registering the graciousness of his humor, but hardly able to respond to it in the carefree way it deserves. “Every small way your skin meets mine is a gift to me, Arthur. Because you’re real.”

You finally look up at him and meet his eyes. “Before she died, my mama told me you’d come to me,” you shakily whisper. “I didn’t believe her,” your voice breaks as your brows draw up. “I didn’t believe her.”

Arthur’s expression softens to one of empathy and sweet affection. He pulls you nearer into his arms, cradling the back of your wet head. “Sweet—” he murmurs as he presses a kiss to your temple, “sweet thing.” He buries his mouth in the wet bundle of your hair, letting you sniffle a bit against him and letting himself think on the types of memories you must’ve been contemplating.

“If she could only see you now,” he begins to smirk, his deep voice reverberating in his chest against yours. “If she’d ever met me, she wouldn’a letchyou within ten yards a’ me.”

Scoffing a little laugh, you lift your mouth from the skin of his shoulder. “She’d love you. If she knew you even a fraction of the way I do. I know she would.”

After a few moments, he says quietly, “I shoulda asked and let you know what I had in mind.”

“No. No,” you quickly respond, hoping your tone conveys your earnestness. “It’s all right. You didn’t do anything wrong, love.”

As you think on it, you realize you don’t want Arthur to feel that every time you make love must be somber and overtly gentle. You want him to be free to smile and laugh too, with you. And you know that as a man, he must long for occasional excitement, a sense of spontaneity and opportunism, and that for him to control his powerful body with you to such an acutely gentle degree must be a great feat for him. And you wish now that you could go back, and not react so immediately, so strongly as you did.

After several more moments of quiet, you’re finally able to pull away enough to look up at him, though your smile is a somewhat tense line as you shrug again. “It’s just…not a spot I’m…particularly proud of, Arthur. Or at least not…used to sharing in such a way. I’m just…embarrassed, and I was real surprised, is all.”

But in your careful attempt to be long-suffering and brave and easygoing, Arthur can see your uncertainty and discomfort.

As you tread before him, separated by a hand’s width of water, you gaze at him and begin to wonder certain things and additionally wonder whether asking those things would make this moment ten times more tense, and therefore ten times worse. But your curiosity is so great, you hear the first two words tumbling from you before you can truss them to your tongue.

“H-have you…”

After a moment more of gazing into your eyes, Arthur’s own blue-green eyes show clear understanding.

done that before?

“Sure, a few times. But it weren’t with Mary, and it weren’t with a tart.”

“O-oh. Oh!” you nod, coming to land in your mind on the one woman left it would’ve been. “Yes, I see.”

The quiet resumes, and you realize that the effort at transparency may not have been worth it. Because yes, this is much worse: your mind now being forced to examine imaginings you’d rather avoid, of him with another woman in such a way, or in any way, for that matter.

“Was years and years ago,” he says quietly with a low and flat tone, addressing you by name and looking at you with a softly plaintive smirk. “And she’s gone, just as long.”

“Oh, yes,” you nod again, willing away the vague thoughts and any creeping hint of jealousy they may have brought with them if you’d let them. “Yes, I understand.”

With a relaxed expression, he looks down at the ripples in the water, smirking thoughtfully at the enthusiastic veneer over your vacillating mixture of discomfort, tepidity, and nervousness.

“Weren’t nothing like what I’ve got with you,” he says quietly, looking back up at you.

He watches you bob there, looking back and forth into his eyes, intent on his words. A beauty, with just as much compassion inside as struggle, with a fascinating mind and an even deeper heart. His heart resounds like a beacon of his love.

“I want us to—” he starts for you, catching himself and forcing himself to slow as he finishes, to think through the words before he startles you away again. “I want us to…” he momentarily sighs, and his shoulders slump with the enormous effort that baring his heart in words always seems to be for him. “To be…open…with each other. Not afraid. Trustin’.”

As his gaze travels over your face, his brows draw up a bit, and his eyes temper and soften. “I know I’m lucky to get to see and touch you. I know that. I know it’s real hard for you.” After a moment, he very quietly chuckles and shakes his head as he adds, “I ain’t ever thought much of myself, but I’ve got nothin’ on you.” He nods. “I know I’m honored. Lucky.”

The glistening sheen of your eyes reflect the moon’s glow as you watch his every move, every small shift of his expression as he speaks, captivated by the sheer size of the love you know he must have for you, to speak his feelings out loud this much.

He fills his chest with a breath and releases it. “I just want us to…be comfortable,” he continues. “Familiar. To know and understand each other. Well as we can.” He searches for just the right words that would balance capturing what he feels and avoid alarming you. And though he stumbles and glances away throughout, he surprises himself for just a moment. “Far be it from me to frighten you, and I don’t mean to say I own you or anything of the sort,” he quickly says. “But I…I’d like to think that…in a kind and loving way, of course, that…” he finally looks up and fastens his eyes to yours, keeping himself from stumbling further, “my body is yours, and yours is mine.”

Somehow, as your heart thumbs wildly in your chest, as your skin floods with fiery prickles, and as you gaze calmly back at him, with the water's surface gently lapping at your chest, you understand just exactly what he means.

“Because I’m yours, sweetheart.” He lifts a hand and brushes the pad of his thumb to your jaw, just beneath the corner of your mouth. “Just want us to…be one.”

You are slain to hear such words from him. And truthfully, you want him to know that no one in your entire life has ever pierced your soul the way he has.

“I want those things too,” you breathe. But after just a few moments, you’re reminded of the fear you still harbor, and reminded why: the intimacy of such a personal spot on you, and to be exposed in such a raw way. You squint and whisper, “But you’d dirty yourself to kiss me there.”

“What?” His face pinches in horror at your sentiment. “I don’t dirty myself kissin’ or touchin’ any part a’ you. And you think I’d offer if I didn’t want to?”

“How can you?”

“How can I want to?” His brows rise, and he finally groans weakly and hisses a sigh through the slivered corridor between his teeth and tongue as he lets his head sag forward and reaches back to rub his neck. After rubbing fiercely, he chances a look up at you, and begins to grin, slowly and lazily. “You’re like a hothouse peach,” he says quietly, “just waitin’ for me.”

He sees the frozen, stunned look in your eyes and notices your eyelids flutter with a few rapid blinks as you swallow thickly. His breathing slows.

“Not me,” you quietly say.

With a mirthless laugh and a coldly wry grin, he turns his head and looks at you from the corner of his eyes. As he releases an elongated, wary mumble of disbelief, you pinch your lips together to prevent a bright smile, realizing too late how many times you’ve said those same words this evening.

“Yes,” he says gruffly. “You.” His softly smirking expression grows thoughtful a moment, and he lets out an effervescent scoff with a shake of his head. “Don’t you think that when I close my eyes and let myself feel you, I could enjoy myself too?”

You swallow and finally manage a small shrug. “Just a lot for me to believe.”

“But...you at least see what I mean, don’t you? ‘S two sides to every touch. And my body touchin’ yours in any way is...” he glances away and softly shakes his head again as he looks for the words before returning his eyes to yours, “it’s heaven for me.” He holds your eyes, the shade of his own like navy depths in the moonlight. “Believe that.”

Your eyelids drape, and your shoulders grow slack. He has softened you. And this is how he loves you: continuously stretching you just an inch past your fear, loving you softly all through it.

In a matter of moments, you’re drawn into his embrace, and he’s kissing your cheekbone, your temple, your head until you’re folded into his arms, your own wrapped around his neck, floating and clinging to nothing but him for several quiet minutes.

“Ready to get out, warm up by the fire?” he whispers into the drying wisps of hair near your ear after a kiss there.

You merely nod against his shoulder, and for a split moment he’s trudging towards the shore with your full weight held in his arms as you still cling to his neck. You quickly find footing on the lake bottom and stand to walk back on your own.

Arthur promptly retrieves a big, thick flannel blanket from the trunk in the wagon nearby and drapes it around your shoulders, wrapping your naked skin from the night’s chill and rubbing your arms up and down to help you dry off. He turns and pulls out his long black duster, donning it and nothing else before quickly beginning to stoke and tend to the fire before it dies.

You slip the sleeping mats from the wagon bed and set them near the fire, just behind Arthur as he works. Going to the trunk, you pull out multiple thick flannel blankets and fan them out atop each other over the pair of mats—the beginnings of a perfectly prepared single bed under the stars for the two of you.

When you return to the trunk to dig amidst the rough denim and cotton for anymore blankets, your hand brushes something cool and water-like—something satin. You still and curl your fingers around it, wondering what it could be as you start to pull it towards you.

Then your eyes alight on it, in all its white, shimmering lustrousness. Your would-be wedding gown—Arthur’s first choice. You’ve still never worn it.

You glance down, your eyes darting back and forth a moment as you think, and you turn to look at Arthur. He’s still stooped on one knee in his black duster, one forearm draped over his upright knee, placidly reaching out with a long, sturdy branch to stoke the fire. You can see his wet hair beginning to dry, each lock shrinking to a slightly swooping wave, and strands here and there glittering like gold as they reflect the dancing embers’ glow. You can make out patches of fine dirt in places atop the black leather of his duster, left by years of wear and weather. You imagine its plain cotton lining soaking up the rivulets of lake water dribbling down his skin.

How you wish to be wrapped around him instead.

A smile slowly grows across your mouth at the idea that fills your head: just bold enough to challenge you a bit, but probably more than enough to please him several times over.

You hold up the gown by its shoulders to get a better look at it. The back is studded with a single row of many silk-covered buttons down the center, and the back neckline is low and ever-so-slightly curved until it meets the straight edges of the cap sleeves on either shoulder. You turn the gown around to find that the front is fairly plain. When another idea leaps into your head, you shrug the flannel blanket from your shoulders and rest it in the wagon bed. You quickly lift the satin gown over your arms, sliding it down over your head and shoulders with the back of it in front.

After looking down at yourself, you hurriedly make a few womanly adjustments and shift your breasts upward in the silky satin. You find with pleasant surprise that the low, curving cut of the back neckline and the corners where it meets the cap sleeves cup your breasts subtly yet perfectly, making them look about as pert and supple as you’ve ever seen them.

Returning your eyes to Arthur’s stooped, hunched form before the fire, you smooth your sweaty hands over your satin-draped thighs and take a steadying breath as you silently walk over, trying to ignore all thoughts of the rolls of fat he’ll so clearly see on you through the satin.

You stand there for a moment directly behind him, listening to the crackly spitting of the now-lively fire.

“Do you…want to unbutton me?” It’s your own voice, spoken simply and quietly and a bit unsure, but somehow managing to be a sultry murmur.

You watch the branch in his hand pause, watch him press his other hand to his thigh as he straightens his back and cranes his neck to turn and look behind himself at you. In the campfire’s light, you’re given a perfect view of his expression going slack at the sight of you. He almost looks as though his instinct is to remark or interject in something akin to awe, but nothing leaves his mouth.

You try to keep from squirming and warming at his scrutinizing gaze, and gently rub your palms to the outer curves of both thighs.

Arthur stands, still captivated and dumbfounded as he turns your direction and drops the branch by the fire. You immediately notice a drop in temperature when his large form blocks the fire’s warmth and casts you in shadow.

After a couple blinks, he utters only, “Yes, ma’am.”

At the simple reply in his deep voice, your sultry veneer falters a moment, and you offer a small smile and a very quiet, almost laughed, “Okay.”

“Okay,” he whispers a thoughtless chuckle with you.

Your fingers twitter against each other at your sides. You remind your agitated hands to refrain from the second-nature of darting up to undress yourself. Your eyes are on him when he steps forward. And when he reaches out to the first buttons at your bosom, your breathing grows quietly labored and heavy, your chest slowly lifting and releasing.

When you glance down at his hands, you see that his big fingers are rugged and scarred, calloused and chafed against the daintily glimmering, white satin. He curls the tips of them over the top hem, between the material and your skin, carefully releasing each button one by one.

All at once, you’re struck by his hands. Hands that have bruised and marred, hands that have protected and provided to their own pain and loss. Hands you have seen hold delicately fine fishing line, hands that hold tiny paper cigarettes with the careful caress of clouds. Hands and fingers that have delved between your thighs, have dipped deep inside you, the only hands that have pulled sweetened moans and provoked sugared cries from you. Hands that hold you like you are better than any treasure in this world. Hands that make you know it, that don’t ever want you to doubt it. That now free your buttons from their holes and expose you to him portion by portion, oh so slowly, achingly slowly, much too slowly.

When the fourth button has been freed, he slips his right hand past the satin and slides it over your plump breast, soothing the burgeoning ache beginning to center at the crest.

You notice him softly close his eyes for a moment, taking in the feeling of you. Nibbling your lip, you say his name, and it’s so much more breathy than you’d thought your voice could be.

His eyes open, and he continues unbuttoning. When he’s popped several more, your breasts spill from the new opening. He gently palms them, rubbing the cushions of the base of his thumbs over your nipples. At the sound of your hitched breath and gasp, his hands return to your buttons with renewed singularity of purpose. He splits them from their holes several at a time, baring your abdomen and the triangle of hair between your legs to his eyes and the night breeze. Soon enough, the hems of the slippery gown hang open.

Arthur brings both hands up to your shoulders and slowly pushes the sleeves to either side. In the matter of a moment, the water-like garment brushes your skin and glides down your body, slipping to the earth and grass around your feet, revealing all of you to him.

You stand there, trying not to fidget or hide.

“Your turn,” you quietly say, before he can make another move.

He glances down at his duster, seemingly having forgotten it was there, and looks up at you with a lazy smirk.

You reach both hands out to his shoulders and grasp the heavy black leather, faded to brown near the thick seams, bunching it in your hands for a moment to tether yourself to something. You gently push the leather away, and his duster thuds to the dirt in a crumpled heap, leaving him naked before you.

Holding your breath, you take in the overwhelming sight of his beautiful body. With the dappled amber firelight playing and dancing across the dimpled muscles of his brawny, smooth shoulders, he is breathtakingly resplendent. His chest is firm and broad, his belly so softly scored, his hips chiseled, and his thighs large and taut with strength—all doused with sprinklings of hair. Your very own cicisbeo, even more alluring, intoxicating, and handsome than all the scandalous tales of old, with attentions exclusively for you. And when your eyes follow his darkening hair to the thicket above his loins, you can’t miss the large, arching shape of his aroused and straining sex.

You haven’t even touched him yet; and just looking at you, touching you for a mere few moments, has done that to him. Your mouth tastes of cotton at the realization, and your womb flips and aches for him.

Though his front is shaded from the fire’s gleam, his mop of chestnut hair catches the light, creating a faint, fiery orange glow about his head. The angles of his jaw and face are somehow so austerely beautiful that you ache internally with pleasure and longing. And the unearthly blue-green of his eyes, set in soft shadow and touched with the sparkle of moonlight, sends you reeling and radiating with love.

Simply standing before him, you are so thoroughly, so deeply stirred with desire and passion that you can hardly breathe.

As he steps ever nearer, filling the space and crowding you, your still eyes slide up his tall form to follow the nearness of his face.

He wears the faintest hint of a gratified smile and keeps his chin relatively lifted as his eyes, aflame with hunger, openly wander over you—across your radiant shoulders, down your throat and chest—as if lazily reveling in the expectance of the pleasure to come. With the same hazy, gratified smirk, he brings a hand up to lift your long hair from over your shoulder, giving him a better view of your full breasts. His gaze ventures lower, rounding the outer curves of your hips, traversing your thighs, and lingering on your sex.

Only the sounds of your quiet breaths come as you gaze over him yourself, hesitant to reach out and touch. Finally though, the cushions of your palms meet him, resting gently upon the beautiful planes of his chest. You feel his warm hand slip around your waist, bringing you into a solid embrace—one in which as much of your skin meets as much of his as he can get, and the natural heat of his body is a welcome hideaway from the bitter, outer cold of the shadow he casts from the fire. And you cling to that heat, to his body as your hideaway.

Unable to resist the sumptuous sheen of moonlight across your supple skin, he bows his head and kisses the top of your shoulder. He feels you almost shudder; and when he lifts his head, he runs his fingers over the place his lips have just been, their tips curving over the edge, thumb brushing over the top.

Straightening, he looks to your face. “What is it?”

You swallow and fight to breathe as your mouth twitches with the flicker of a small smile. “My mother told me you’d come to me,” you say. Your smile slowly grows into a radiant grin. “I didn’t believe her.”

A smile bright enough to match yours flashes onto his mouth, and a soft laugh trickles from his nose. He immediately cups your face in both hands and kisses you deeply, his rich tongue melding with yours in a languid dance. It’s as if he’ll devour you then and there; and in a way, you are devoured by his huge hands around your face, his arms and body engulfing you, the passion of his kiss.

You intentionally keep from flinching when you feel his erection nudge against your thigh. In all his eagerness, he shuffles a couple tiny steps forward and pours a mumbled, cheeky moan of overwhelmed delectation from his throat into yours. You can only slide your hands under his arms and up his back to cling to him for the little shuffled, backwards ride.

It isn’t long before you’re both sliding together towards the earth, where you sit huddled, still kissing, never missing a beat.

His wet, frenzied kisses bounce from your neck to your jaw to your chin, lips skidding against your skin and sticking anywhere they can land in the warm pool of amber light. Clinging to his shoulders, you press to him your own flurry of kisses, though you struggle with distraction at the heavenly feeling of the ones he gives you.

Nibbling and licking, he trails a line along the curved edge of your neck, beginning from your collarbone to the soft, vulnerable space behind your earlobe. He begins murmuring and whispering sweet things to you, which soon transform into what he wants to do with you, voiced aloud in words, things that warm you deeply and almost mortify you.

“What if...” you begin to ask, eyes fluttering closed at the distracting feeling of his kisses, “what if I... What if I get lonesome for you?”

“Lonesome?” he mumbles, still preoccupied with kissing your neck.

“Yes. What if I get to missin’ you...while I can’t see you?”

He draws away and looks at you. “Well, we’ll...figure somethin’ when we come to it. I mean, I won’t ever leave you,” he smirks, a laugh lurking right behind the look in his eyes. “I’ll be right there between your legs the whole time.”

You guffaw with a little tsk, “Arthur!” Your face heats, and you quickly cover your eye and cheek with one hand, though your demure smile still shows.

He swiftly captures your smiling mouth in a kiss, prying your hand away and bringing your forearm around his neck.

“I’ll have you purrin’ like a kitten by the time I’m through, sweetheart,” he murmurs from the wry slice of his mouth between kisses. “You’ll hardly know which way the sky is.”

A weakly trilled giggle quietly thrums from your warm cheeks as he gently lowers you backwards while kissing you, the curve of your spine continuously unfurling as you meet the mat, your hair splaying wildly when you finally lie beneath him.

He kisses you passionately, his hands roaming all over you as yours stretch over the expanse of his bare back, the sounds of your mingling mouths competing with each tinkling stroke of the crickets’ melodious violins.

“Trust me?” His voice is quiet and mild, and he pulls back just a little, just enough to get a look at your eyes.

Though he’s above you, his face is still so close—close enough that you’re required to shift your head upon the blanketed mat and draw your chin inward to your neck a little to see his eyes. When your gaze meets his, your heart stills and calms at the love there, a love that fully encompasses you.

What other answer can you give besides the truth?

So you nod as well as you can with your head resting on the mat and with his face as close as it is to yours. And you voice it aloud, your breath flourishing over the thin skin of his plump lower lip. “Yes. I trust you.”

A light like the flickered edge of a blossoming ember blazes to life in his bright blue-green irises. His smile warms and pulls across his cheeks. He comes close and pecks a few smacked kisses to your lips and the corner of your mouth.

He kisses over the crest of your jaw and down your throat until his lips once again meet the supple skin of your neck, his tongue darting out to brush your skin, as if you are something delicious to him.

When he draws back a moment, you note his focus riveted to the point on your skin he’d just kissed and nibbled, his forehead flushed with the rush of blood, and the prominent vein there risen in relief. And it occurs to you just how seriously he takes this, making love to you.

Lowering himself to you again and nestling his open mouth into the soft crook of your neck, he draws your skin inward, first gently, then with a kind of suction you’re sure will leave some sort of mark—red or maybe even darker—if he holds there very long.

Your mind ventures back to your honeymoon, when he’d done just that, and you smile at the memory. It was only the next morning, while you and Arthur were dressing for the day at hand, that you’d learned what he’d done could leave any trace.

When you’d seen it in the mirror, you’d been shocked at the dark purple bruise there. Your inexperience had done that to you; and as you think back on it, you wonder how you couldn’t have foreseen it, when Arthur had kissed and sucked at your neck for so long, and with such force and passion the very night before. You supposed the simple answer was that in your life up to that point, you’d never had any reason or opportunity to know what the reverse of suction did to human skin, just the way blunt pressure could leave bruising.

Only when you’d touched your fingertips to the red border of the viciously, boldly colored mark had the mortification settled in—and you’d realized there was no adequate way to cover it with your clothing. A quietly gasped shriek and a groan had been the portents of your qualms with what Arthur had done. But when he’d turned to see your face hot with embarrassment and horror at the thought of the hotel staff getting a full peek at the clear traces of your wanton lovemaking, he only wheezed and snickered. Hard.

The memory of his laughter makes you smile wider. By the time your thoughts return to the present, Arthur’s mouth is leaving your neck and inching down your chest to press kisses down the line of your sternum. You softly close your eyes and let his blustery head of hair slip down from between the gentle hold of your hands.

His mouth trails to the right, toward the silken, rounded swell of your breast, each having slid slightly to the side. When his lips arrive at the tiny beauty mark he adores atop the upper curve of your plump breast that sometimes peeks above the necklines of your frocks and gowns, he kisses and sucks at it a bit, even playfully slurping loudly against your skin, knowing it’ll make you meekly smile. He continues until the skin there is ruddy, but he stops before a bruise begins to develop and ventures lower still.

When you look down, past the crease created by the meeting of the bulbous form of your breast and underarm, you watch his lips fondle with the soft tissue of your breast. You’re reminded of the ways you’d both just tried to describe its texture in the lake. And now, as he opens his lips wide and draws your nipple deep within the cavern of his mouth, he’s partaking of you—the cake and the meringue and the buttercream, all in one.

Still glancing down, you notice the way Arthur’s large hand resides so gently on your belly, his long fingers restfully curled over the side of you. His hand moves ever so slightly, his skin skipping over yours one moment, his fingers brushing over your soft belly the next. Then his hand rests still again. It’s all unintentional, you realize, with his focus being elsewhere on you. But at the sight of something so simple, you ruminate in the understanding that you are his lover, and he is yours. You possess him, and just as naturally as a hand at rest on a naked belly, he possesses you.

As he lavishes his kisses on your breast, you feel him focus his tongue back and forth across the hardened bead of your nipple. The luscious feeling of his tongue there slowly sifts over you like the firmament of a thin, trickling veil of warm water. Resting your head back on the mat, you close your eyes, and with slightly parted lips, you release a very quiet, stuttered moan.

All the while, Arthur’s other hand gently cages your right breast—almost hovering over it—and his fingers splay as he slowly, gently skates his hand back and forth over you, simply allowing your nipple to dip into the spaces between each digit and catch on the next. When the heel of his palm arrives at your skin, he finally passes his thumb firmly to and fro over your nipple, then gently rolls it between his fingers.

The sweet tingles shooting from so much precise focus on such highly sensitive spots of you send shivers up and down your spine and cause you to quietly mumble some inarticulate, imaginary tune for Arthur from behind closed lips.

Looking at Arthur, no one might ever know how gentle and thoughtful a lover he can be, just how much he delights in patiently, generously courting your physical form, in slowly, hungrily feasting on your body. No one but you.

When Arthur’s mouth gently glides from off of you, his eyes glance up into yours for a moment. A quaint smirk rests on his mouth—the kind you know so well, that somehow both indicates nothing superfluous and hides nothing.

His face immediately continues to your soft belly, somewhat flattened by gravity’s pull while you lie on your back. He peppers several kisses there, slowly continues in a meandering but determined line down your body. Rounding your navel, his kisses venture over the creases formed by your pelvis and a collection of excess tissue, until his lips grace the edged protuberance of your bone at the top of your thigh, from which much of your ample soft flesh cascades towards the pull of the earth and inward, towards your womanhood.

Then his kisses cease as he rears up, resting on his shins between your calves, and looks at your face.

Since your thighs are still gently pinched and your knees still pressed together, when you look back into his face, you know the silent question there.

He rests a hand atop your bundled knees, then drapes his splayed fingers over your thigh as he gently brushes them back and forth over your skin.

“Open your legs nice and wide for me, honey?” come the quiet words aloud. He presses a kiss to your kneecap.

After the span of a few moments, you comply. As you let your thighs fall to either side like two mountains parting and crumbling into the sea, you feel the margin of you part.

While you lie there, your sharply bent legs like two halves mirroring each other at an axis and with Arthur still sitting between your calves, his hungry gaze rakes down over you—the whole of you. And you feel it—tendrils of desire needling beneath your skin, flooding and heating you liked spiced oil.

Naked, as a word, has never held the utter fullness that it does in this moment. The sheer naughtiness claws at you, leaving a sparkling sting over your skin.

But somehow, deep in the recesses of your heart—the sound of his voice tenderly adulating, and the feeling of being so fully and vulnerably opened and displayed to him—somehow, it feels right. Like a reminder of intimacy: that he is the one and only person in all the world you want to do this with, the only person who will catch and hold you within the caring frame of his hands, even amid your scathing vulnerability.

You think that this is trust. It must be. Trust is what he wants for both of you.

As he takes you in, you try to envision what he sees in your own mind’s eye. What you know is that all Arthur’s slow and generous, sensual touch has amply received its return. Your body’s excitement seems to be leaps ahead of you—enough that when you’d first opened your legs, your sex had, of its own will, gently clenched once around nothing at all in softly aching anticipation and yearning.

For several moments, you can hardly look at him. But when you hear him tsk his tongue and release a small groan from his throat, your averted eyes snap back to him to find him gazing down at your womanhood with his forehead pinched and brows drawn tightly, almost as if in pain.

“All this ain’t from the lake water,” he says, his tone low and gruff, moving only his eyes to look up into yours while his head remains tipped down and the corner of his mouth flickers.

You immediately feel warmth spread up your neck and across your face, and fling the back of your hand over the bridge of your nose to hide your eyes. “Arthur…” you quietly murmur, trying not to moan.

“You’re just awash, darlin’.”

You can hear the smile thickly present in his voice as you bite your lower lip.

“My god…” you hear him whisper after a few moments of quiet. “I have to tell you, darlin’. You have to know.”

The subtle urgency in his voice has you beginning to pull your hand away to peek at him where he sits hunched.

“Your body… There’s nothin’ more beautiful to me in all the world than this—than you... Just you, just like this,” he shakes his head. “Bare naked. Yieldin’. Offerin’ yourself to me. You can understand that, can’t you, honey?” he asks, meeting your eyes again.

For a moment, your breath is snagged in your chest. At his words, you swallow and nod, resisting the impulse to reach for him as anticipation and longing for his sweet, familiar touch build to a nearly volcanic heat across your skin. With great effort, you finally successfully breathe, “Yes.”

“I ain’t ever seen anything as stunning as you in all my livin’ life,” he says, his gaze raking over you again.

When he breathes the last words, you look at his eyes again. They’re framed by a crimped forehead and an almost pained brow, as if the very breath itself that carries the words from his lungs and delivers them to your ears is dependent on your belief.

After a moment, his breathing stutters. “You make the air catch in my lungs,” he mumbles to himself with an incredulous smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. You watch his glazed eyes continue to glide over you. “You’re like one a them ol’ paintin’s,” he says. “Only ten thousand times better.”

Flattening both hands side by side over your belly and taking an inward breath, he slowly slides them up to the plane between your breasts and leans over you as he does, allowing his torso to drop between his slightly pinched shoulders for a moment. He slowly brings his hands back in the direction they’d come, reclining once again on his calves and following with his eyes the surface of your skin he’s traced with his hands.

When he arrives at your womanhood, Arthur slowly runs his splayed fingers upwards through the fluffed coils of your mound. You close your eyes and hold your breath as he splits his paired, still flattened hands and slowly sends them in opposite directions over your opened thighs.

“And I’m gonna take my time, baby…” he quietly drawls, shaking his head has he looks down at your body and gently swipes his hands over the sacred, secret skin of your inner thighs. “I’m gonna take my time makin’ love to you.”

Looking back up to your face, he quickly leans forward with the intent of meeting you for a kiss. “And you,” he says quietly, sweetly pecking you on the lips, “can make love to me by just lettin’ me. Hm?”

You silently nod amid another kiss.

He smiles and pulls back to sit on his haunches once again. Scooting back and lowering his chest to the mat, he dips his face low, down between your legs.

Quickly closing your eyes and taking a breath, you shift your back a moment against the mat, trying to focus on remaining calm and comfortable. In doing so, one of your thighs naturally lifts from its place a bit.

You feel him gently press his lips to the inside of the knee that had lifted. “Want you to keep your legs as open and relaxed as you can for me, all right?” he whispers.

With eyes still closed, you offer another small, silent nod.

“I know it’ll be tough at first, but just take it easy…” he drawls, “and we’ll get through it together.”

When his softly reassuring commentary ends, you feel his lips return to your inner thigh, as he gently presses his mouth to the soft, flabby flesh there. He very slowly continues the same sort of kisses in a steady line, to the very edge of you, where your thigh and womanhood meet.

When you hear the dissipating bounce of a very quiet, breathy chuckle from him, you open your eyes.

“You know you got a freckle here?” he says, his tone low and dry.

“What?” you ask groggily.

“A freckle. Right...” he leans forward and presses a tender, brief kiss to the softness of your labia majora, “there.”

You nibble at your lip as you try not to smile and your face and neck heat very quickly. “Arthur, it ain’t possible.”

“Well, I’m lookin’ at it!”

“No-ho! I mean— Freckles come from the sun...” you quietly groan. “It can’t be a freckle.”

“Oh,” you catch sight of the cock of his head. “Well a...beauty mark then,” he grumbles with a laugh over your own incredulously whined and stuttered laugh.

Arthur presses both of his flattened hands to either side of the very soft outer flesh of your sex, and in an alternating manner, he very slowly, very gently rolls them. He rolls his flattened hands over you, like two bellows synced to each other in an alternating rhythm, or like two sea vessels bobbing amidst two different ocean waves. And if his hands are bellows, their action must be directly linked to the expansion of your lungs; for your chest begins to slowly, quietly heave and huff with the heavy lust that quickly overwhelms you.

Before you can think about it, his lips are on you, pressing softly and almost chastely into the tender flesh of your open sex with a quiet click. Again and again, his lips meet you at different points there, just like that.

Your heart pounds and thuds incessantly within your chest like the hooves of a runaway wild horse.

His hands leave the mounded flesh of your womanhood to softly slide again over both your inner thighs, sounding out a very hushed swoosh over your smooth skin as they go.

His tongue darts between the partition of your labia, fiery hot and slick.

It hadn’t met with any part of you that was particularly sensitive. Still, the wholly new sensation itself has you instantly gasping and warbling a little cry of startled pleasure, and clamps your thighs closed in a springing recoil around him.

“’S all right,” he coos to you, gently but firmly pressing your inner thighs back to the earth after having had the foresight, you realize, to position his hands in just the right spots for your reaction. “Just take another nice, deep breath there for me, baby.”

It’s only then that you realize you’re trembling, almost as if chilled to the bone. But he doesn’t ask whether you’re cold or offer to cover you with a blanket. He knows exactly why you’re trembling.

He watches you calmly take deep, long breaths that slowly lift and lower your breasts, though your eyes are now wide at the dark, star-filled sky. Without another word, Arthur dips his face between your thighs again.

This time when his hot tongue glides between your labia, it yanks from you a single broken, almost hiccuped moan.

When your thighs don’t clamp around him and you grow quiet again, Arthur glances up to find your eyes closed, and he smiles. For just a split moment, he closes his own eyes as he lets his clandestine smile flicker wider at the thought: the hardest part is over now, and it’ll all be even sweeter enjoyment for the both of you from here.

After pulling his chin away from you for a moment, he swoops it down closer over you, letting his warm breath unfurl over the center of your parted sex. He grins as he watches your fists clench and turn in the blanket on either side of you in response.

Pressing the flat of his tongue to you, he turns it just a bit as he cocks his head, allowing you to grow more accustomed to the heat and slipperiness of his mouth. He takes your inner labia between his lips and draws at it with a bit of suction. He gently pulls it away from your body, releasing it suddenly and watching it spring back into place, then slowly morph back into shape with the rest of you.

You immediately gasp at the sensation. And you breathe out his name as the air seeps again from your lungs.

Arthur pulls back from you just a moment and smiles at the sound. Such an intensely intimate sound; never has he heard one more so—his name reduced to the faintest exhalation on your lips. And he fully revels in the fact that it is exactly as it should be—his very own name and no other there. While his slippery mouth is still open and pressed to you, a very short, curbed moan of satisfaction escapes him at the reality.

As you lie there with eyes still closed, you feel Arthur’s whole warm mouth rest upon the center of your slick sex. What next takes you by surprise are the sounds that naturally arise from what you and your husband are doing. They’re the same sounds that often occur when you passionately kiss each other. But it’s certainly not your mouth he’s kissing now. The lewd, bawdy slurps as he laves you, mingled with the regular beat of brief hums of satisfaction at the back of his throat, make your ears and cheeks burn with excitement. It takes an additional moment for you to note the quiet breaths and coos of pleasure that involuntarily arise from your own mouth, mingling with the incidental sounds of your husband’s mouth on you to create a sonata all its own.

At the very warm and slippery feeling of his mouth dancing amidst you, though your eyes are closed and you lie motionless upon the earth, the world begins to feel as if it’s spinning for a few moments. When the fractured atmosphere rejoins and stills, you release a long breath and feel your back settle deeper into the mat beneath you, feel your thighs relinquish their tension.

“That’s it, honey,” you hear your husband whisper from down between your legs, “just fall into it.”

Amidst your state of pure and deep rest, you open your eyes and softly blink, and the dark sky sprinkled with luminous stars is all that fills your vision. Somehow, that’s exactly what this feels like, exactly what it is: falling, falling…falling into your husband’s eager and welcoming mouth.

At the swipes of his tongue, you remember the similar experience of watching his tongue swiping over the broad, dew-covered leaves in the forest, just a day ago. And an almost delirious smile ghosts over your face at the silly thought.

Dew on the leaves, dew on your sex.

After a moment, the amusement suddenly begins to ebb, and against your wishes, a peculiar, slight pang slowly takes its place. Not painful, but a longing for someone who strangely feels missing.

“A-Arthur?” you stutter.

“Hm?” he muses.

“I’m lonesome for you.”

You feel him pull away and emit a quiet, smothered sound of confusion.

“Already?”

Although you want to laugh at yourself, your brows draw tightly. Your expression somehow fluctuates between the levity of a slight smile and the silliness of a pained frown as you nod, finally covering your eyes and laughing.

“I’m right here, darlin’,” he says, reaching up and brushing a hand to your chest and over your breast.

“I know,” you say with a light tone, blindly reaching your arms down for him.

Arthur looks up at your face and sees you gazing at the sky overhead. And it occurs to him just how much you enjoy feeling him everywhere around you, being wrapped in his arms, and seeing his face and eyes.

“Well, uh... Well here,” he says after a moment.

You feel him suddenly mount your leg and position the underside of his rigidly erect sex tightly against your shin. You sharply suck in an astonished gasp at the same moment that he groans, low and rumbly and quiet in the depths of his chest.

“Feel that, baby?” he asks, his voice tattered with lust.

“Yes!” you breathe.

“‘At’s me,” he says gruffly, running his hand up the edge of your hip until he brushes the side of your belly with a feather-light stroke—a specific touch in a specific spot that he knows tickles you and lights your nerves aflame. “And ‘at’s what you do to me.”

Dazed, you take another staccato breath from your wide-open mouth. “Yes,” you breathe again.

When Arthur returns to kissing and tasting you, every slight twitch and flickered jut of his hips is readily felt against your leg.

“Mm. Goddamn, that’s good,” you suddenly hear the appreciative mumble escape from between your sex and Arthur’s mouth, as if he’s dining on some fine, rare, and exquisite culinary fare.

The frank, thoughtless comment released beneath his breath should be comical—should be ridiculous—should spur a scoffed, unbelieving laugh. Instead, it only pulls a rounded moan from the now gaping cavern of your mouth and sends a warm trickle of more slick from your wanting sex.

After several more moments of lapping and drawing at your inner labia, Arthur flattens his tongue against the center of you and remains still for the fraction of a beat. He then slowly slides his flattened tongue lower and lower, searching for your canal, until it plunges into you.

All at once, you gasp and whimper aloud, taking a moment to catch your breath.

Arthur closes his eyes, breathes in your heady scent, and drinks in the delectable taste of you as he wiggles and flits his tongue inside you. When he opens his eyes, he glances up at your face to see your crimped expression of surprise and heightening pleasure. He plunges his tongue as deeply as he can into you and slowly, sleekly pumps it from shallow to deep, shallow to deep, as if reaching into the neck of a bottle. Your hips involuntarily jut slightly in response.

In the space of a moment, your eyes shoot open at the thought: he’s aware of every uncontrollable move and rolling wave of your inner muscles, every tiniest twitch of the walls of your harbor. He can feel them on his very tongue.

As if proving the thought true, Arthur unleashes a loud, desperate moan of appreciation and enjoyment, and its vibrations deliciously reverberate into your sex and radiate up through your body.

A garbled, staccato mewl of his name bounces low through your chest and up into your throat at the sound from him and at the plethora of sensations. It prompts Arthur to immediately groan and growl loudly into you again and again, and in return, you can’t possibly restrain another string of your own moans.

You breathe, “Oh, God... Oh, God, help me.”

Arthur smiles against you with his tongue still caught deep inside you. Withdrawing his tongue, he watches you involuntarily hitch forward for him in sweet agony. He dances the tip of his tongue across and around the margin of your canal, darting it just within the edges and back again. Intense currents of concocted delight and pleasure course through his veins at the way it causes you to suck in multiple gasps.

“Mercy!” you shrilly pant, almost unaware of any words that escape you. “Oh, God…”

Arthur stifles a wheeze at your outburst. He’s never known you’d been quite so devoutly pious a woman. Though, he reckons that to be fair, involuntary cries torn from you during the very heated congress of sex with your husband—nay, the most lubricious act you’ve ever, in your life, taken part in—might not be the best, most authentic and clear-headed moment of indication for you on the subject.

He withdraws his tongue from the ring of your canal and smacks his lips to savor the traces of your passion and desire.

“You okay, baby?” you hear him ask.

Still panting and drifting unmoored amidst arousal and passion, you look down at him through your hazy fog. You find him lifting his head from your sex and looking up at you with a very dreamlike, drowsy expression—one you realize might be similar to your own. When he groggily grins at you, you refrain from laughing at the implausibility of it—such a dopey look in the woozily concupiscent eyes of an inured, supposedly ruthless outlaw.

“You okay?” he murmurs again, the doltish smile on his face steadily growing as he presses a kiss to the inside of your thigh.

Resting your head back, you curl both lips inward and bite down on them with a demure smile as you nod to the sky.

“You sure?”

“Arthur,” you huff a quiet laugh. “I can’t answer such questions.”

“Okay, all right,” he chuckles. “Just checkin’ on ya.”

Arthur returns his mouth to you and slips both hands down the outsides of your thighs until he can cup the outer edges of your round bottom. He then slowly, ever so slowly slides his warm tongue up the inner side of your right labium, with the aim of cresting at the apex of your womanhood. Once there, he quickly passes his tongue over the top of the thin hood that covers your tender, sensitive bead, as if rounding a corner.

As he does, your whole body involuntarily squirms and writhes, and you hiss and whine.

And he slowly slides his tongue back down along the inside of your opposite labium, until he reaches the ring of flesh at the margin of your canal.

Over and over again, he repeats the exact same trick, with the exact same motion of his tongue, and the same agonizingly slow pace. With each slow-to-quick pass of his hot, slippery tongue, your body increasingly wriggles and convulses.

At the sensation and the new attention to the top of your sensitive bead, a warm, rounded rosiness spills and rolls over you until you’re wading in it. Each time his tongue leaves that spot, you float and tread amidst the feeling for a few moments. Just as soon, his tongue comes for you again, and you’re splashing to keep your head above the crashing waves.

Before you know it, your thighs are releasing whatever little tension was left that you hadn’t known was there, both opening further and melting deeper into the mat. And your pelvis is lifting ever so slightly higher, almost as if of its own accord, like the magic carpets in the tales of old, chasing the sensual source of this heaven.

Involuntarily, your hands reach between your legs and find Arthur. Your fingers plow through his beautiful chestnut hair, and though your eyes are closed, just your memory is enough to supply the image: glossy with depths of tawny brown and surface flashes of gold. Loosely resting your hands to the back of his head, you cup him to you as you relax heavily into the mat and luxuriate in repose, enjoying the feeling of his mouth on you. The sweet, blunted edge of a yawning ache swells low and rapidly spreads through you, racing through your veins with the resounding pulse of need.

Without even thinking, your head lifts and your chin dips to your chest to get a glimpse of the one you long to see. There he is, with eyes softly closed in pleasure and brows intently drawn, feverishly devouring you.

For a few moments, you merely watch him. The view stuns you. Then when his eyes flicker open, his gaze lifts and meets yours. His crows’ feet crimp with a smile, but he doesn’t stagger or skip a beat. He simply flashes a wink at you—an impossible mingling of sweetly intimate connection and devilish roguishness.

You fling your head backward again with a deep, growly groan.

After several more quick, calculated turns of his tongue about your sex, you’re unsure how many more you can take. Your whole body has begun to quake whenever he nears your sensitive nub.

Suddenly, you feel a warm, misty hollow cover and encase you exactly where you’d yearned for his touch. After taking you into his mouth, Arthur slips a finger, then another, deep inside you.

Quickly filling your lungs, you whine as your hips rock forward in instinctive reaction to the way his long, thick fingers fill you. When he curls and prods his fingers, you slowly exhale a long, weakened moan, allowing yourself to enjoy every moment.

Arthur then does nothing more or less audacious than fully suckling at the tender pearl of your womanhood, as if it were hiding away a mysterious life source.

Immediately, your mouth opens wide to eject several loud squeals and moans, and your brows shove violently together as your whole body begins to almost jerk and thrash and gyrate.

“Oh, God! Oh, oh-oh-ohhh…!” you fling raucously into the night air.

Arthur couldn’t stifle his delighted snicker at your new mix of sentiments if he wanted to. Even his wheezed laugh is caught by the bundle of nerves in his mouth, and you’re quickly huffing and whimpering and moaning his name, loudly and repeatedly and earnestly.

The sound is far better than the best of symphonies to Arthur, and he pumps and curls his fingers deeply inside you to perpetuate your melodious outbursts. The focused rhythmic action of his fingers within you puts a lewd squelching sound in the air, nearly as present and real as the lazy whorls of smoke rising above the campfire.

“Please, please, oh, please, baby,” you beg him, though you can’t place exactly what you’re pleading for.

Somewhere in the scattered tangle of half-thoughts and muscles tightly knotted with agonizingly building pleasure, you’re snagged by a new notion. That Arthur has been very carefully prolonging this, because he knew how sensitive you’d be, and because he wants to draw out the enjoyment as long as possible, for both you and himself. A final haze of renewed arousal saturates you at the thought.

Arthur suddenly removes his mouth from your bundle of nerves and strokes the pads of his fingers over it as he plunges his tongue deep inside you again, drinking from you and feeling every feverish twitch of your continuously-nearing climax. After several moments, he returns his mouth to your pebbled nub and returns his fingers to curling inside you. Twice more he repeats this quick alternation, until he at last remains suckling at you and pumping his fingers inside you with full focus.

The mewls and moans and squeals of ecstasy rumble through your chest and throat until you’re shouting his name like a fervid rant. Your toes curl tightly, and you fist bundles of Arthur’s hair snugly at the roots with both hands.

Your back arches, and your clenched legs begin to shake. The peak of the mountain you always climb together with him is nearing, quickly nearing.

“Give it to me,” you hear Arthur’s low, breathy command against you. “Ah, God, yes,” he moans your name. “Give yourself to me.”

Shutting your eyes, a shrieked cry of maddened euphoria is torn from you as the mountain’s sharply tipped crest punctures your heart, and the whole of the very mountain itself is blown away, finally crumbling weakly to powdered bits at your feet.

You almost sob and whimper as your hips jerk and your sex spasms and clenches wildly about Arthur’s fingers. You must be jolted through with a forked current equal to the branched, flashed glory of lightning. And the strong, chopped waves of euphoria billow through the whole of your body, enduring and never ceasing for what feels like an impossible length of time.

Arthur’s mouth graciously pulls away, and his fingers continue to gently roll with you as you flutter and tremble. Broken, mumbled moans tumble from your lips at the dull vulnerability of the sensations, like smoldering nerves caught to blazing.

Never, never have you known such rapture with him before, or ever in your life.

After gasping and swallowing back gulps of air, an eased peace begins to filter over you. Lying there, you breathe and simply take in the black molasses sky, dusted with popping pinpricks of glittering light. Just a few moments later, Arthur’s form rises above you, gilded by a faint halo from the light of the campfire.

He hovers there, gazing down at you. And when you take note of his soft expression, you realize, suspended here with him amidst the sweet, euphoric daze of deep love and thorough rest, that this—this spiritual interweaving of the two of you—is what he wanted for you both. Closeness drawn closer. No matter how you got here together, this is what he foresaw, what he wanted to give you, and what he longed for the both of you to have.

You catch the softest hint of a grin slowly appearing on his ridiculously shiny mouth, the smile itself like wisps of a watercolor-cloud at dusk. Immediately, you break into a smile, and a giggled laugh bounces loudly from you until you squeak with tight, radiating coils of joy. Arthur promptly joins you in sweetly huffed chuckles.

Without allowing your eyes to leave his face, you reach out your left arm for a far corner of the blanket to wipe the shiny mess that gleams across his mouth, chin, cheeks, and nose.

When you’ve finished to a tolerable degree, he lowers himself atop you and nestles himself in close enough that his face is beside yours. You immediately pepper a flurry of sweet, playful kisses all over his cheek, jaw, mouth, and nose—anywhere you can get to.

“How can you be so good?” you mumble hastily between kisses. “How can you be so good to me? Huh?”

“I just love you, is all,” he laughs breathily, his smile meek, but genuine. His eyes flash to yours, and his brow arches coyly. “I think she liked it…” he coos in a gravelly, knavish tone, growling low and friskily at the end.

With his face tucked so close, with the sound of his audacious growl like a rumble to your cheek and neck, and with his feather-like touch roaming the bared, sensitive skin of your sides, you can’t help but giggle and squirm a bit.

“See? You gotta trust me…” he sings in a squirrelly pitch.

“I trust you,” you breathe softly into the corner of his mouth as he presses smacked kisses to your cheek and neck. You can’t imagine ever being timid with him again or ever feeling the need to withhold anything. For that matter, you can’t imagine any scenario in this life when you wouldn’t trust him with yours, trust the entirety of your heart to him with abandon.

“I want you, baby,” you whisper, curling your arm up around him and resting your hand on his bare shoulder, smooth in the glow of firelight. “I want you. Come here to me.”

A brief, weak whimper leaks from the back of his mouth at your plain directive.

“Does it hurt?” you ask.

“Hm?” rearing up just a bit on his elbow, he looks at you.

You glance into his eyes. “You mentioned…once on our honeymoon that…that you were so hard, it hurt.”

His face quickly flattens and relaxes into a smile as he emits a chuffed syllable of understanding. “Yes,” he admits, his familiar, earthy voice low and hoarse. “Yeah, it hurts.”

The response silently robs the air from your lungs and lowers your lids to half-mast, and you quickly grab him by the back of the neck and mash his mouth to yours. You taste yourself there, having forgotten in your urgency.

In a frenzy, you scoot to cradle him in your ready hips and wrap him in everything you can—hands, arms, thighs. When he responds with avid eagerness, clambering to huddle in closer and flush himself to you, you hook your calf around his pelvis.

Without a word between your heated, frenetic kisses, you reach down and guide him to the margin of your sex. For a moment that seems to hover in time, you feel the lush softness of the tip of his shaft as its cool wetness just touches to the heat of your swollen sex. For a moment, Arthur’s labored breath is all you hear, all you feel as its warmth wafts over your cheek. For a moment, it is a simple meeting of both your most sensitive, vulnerable flesh.

Reaching over your knees and below the muscles that protrude at his back and under his arms, you slide both hands down his lower back until you reach the top of his plump rear and press him closer. As Arthur pushes in, you both groan and pant. His face contorts, and he clasps the blanket in his clenched fist near your head, finally curling his chin inward and resting his forehead to yours with a gentle plop.

After quietly hissing in pleasure, you whine, “Arthur, baby…”

You’re overcome by the dire, impulsive need to press your bare chest up into his, to strain and push the whole of your body up against his. And you’re again filled bodily with the wonder of something as simple as someone wanting to enter you, to place the flesh of his own body within yours, to join with you physically. Especially someone like Arthur.

He slowly plunges himself more and more deeply inside you, and you swivel and shift your pelvis towards him to welcome him in. With eyes closed a moment, your brows draw up tightly as you savor every inch of him that brushes inside you. You feel the feminine lips of your sheath flanged around him, feel him stretching and filling you completely, and you whimper and moan.

As he begins to slowly drive and roll, drive and roll his hips into you in a languid, fluid motion, you hear him where his face is pressed into the side of your neck. With the release of each breath, he grunts and moans, a labored, almost spasmodic thing.

“Oh, shit,” he murmurs under his breath. “Oh, shit,” he says a bit louder and clearer.

At the sound, you’re on the verge of asking if anything’s wrong. But before you do, you realize it’s the equivalent of an outcry of intense pleasure from him, and that perhaps he’s hurtling towards his own climax far more quickly than he’d anticipated or meant to.

You rest a reassuring hand to his lower back, bracing him and brushing your fingers over the firm muscles along both sides of the central, linear dip in his back.

He continues to roll his hips and drive himself into you, and you rock yours in time with him. When you note the intense sound of labor in his almost broken moans and way he restrains the dragged motion of his hips to something slow and languid, you realize he’s focusing all his effort on not spending himself too quickly, and on prolonging your lovemaking as much as he can.

You press him more firmly to you, encouraging him on, and he very gradually picks up speed and pressure. Before long, you’re taking shrill, panted breaths; and the hand you’ve got at his back has become jaggedly bent at the knuckles and is digging its fingertips into his skin.

“Goddamnit,” Arthur quietly grinds out through gritted teeth, reaching down and taking a handful of your rear at the base of the thigh you’ve got hooked up around him.

You let out a low, roiling moan. He draws his face from the crook of your neck and takes your mouth in his for a single deep kiss, swallowing your moan whole. You run your hands up and down the muscles in his bare back, hips, and rear that ripple with the effort of his every rolling thrust into you.

When his lips part from yours, you lift your head to chase him. He instead presses the side of his nose to your cheek with another steady roll of his hips and watches as you shut your eyes tight and gasp through your wide-open mouth.

“Arthur,” you pant, the side of his face still pressed to your cheek. “It can’t be this good,” you moan and whine, beginning to smother your words into his plump lower lip. “It can’t be.”

“Like hell it can’t.” With those few words, his thrusts become quicker and deeper, and he lets the demanding urgency of his intensely building pleasure take control.

You cling to him, your lungs scrambling for breath promised just beyond the reach of your lips as he hits your womb with every delving thrust. It feels as though you are unfolding each other from halves, tearing each other into clawed shreds in a desperate attempt to find the center, to be one and abide there forever.

Huge, heated billows of pleasure roll through you, from the epicenter of your middle, to sparkling across the back of your head and the soles of your feet, until you’re immersed and drowning in them. Your visions tunnels and narrows further until it all darkens for a split second; all you can feel are Arthur’s white-hot spend inside you and the erratic, violent tremble of his body; and all you can hear are his shockingly loud moans and gravelly groans, accompanied perfectly by your own pealing cry.

Both of you sigh and moan and gulp as you slowly grow limp, both totally spent as Arthur plops to lie beside you. The crisp forest air wafts along your bare bodies.

After dabbing your sex with a washcloth, you reach for the thick, beige woolen blanket and pull it up over his and your shoulders, just as Arthur turns onto his side. Once you’re both cocooned inside, you notice the erotic peppery scent of your lovemaking. You bundle in close to him, gazing contentedly into the shadow cast over his eyes by the blanket. You draw a piece of the blanket over your hand and tuck your covered fist near your mouth as you simply watch him and listen to the crackle of the campfire and the effervescent rhapsody of crickets.

After several minutes, you pull the blanket away just enough to quietly murmur, “I never knew.”

“What,” he asks.

You ponder for a moment what exactly it is that you mean. When you have it, you dwell longer on how to say it without seeming deplorably juvenile.

Finally, you mumble with a delayed smile behind the blanket, “What wonderful ways we could love each other with our very bodies.”

A smile, beautiful in its fatigue and faintness and pensiveness, slowly unfurls on Arthur’s mouth. And as his smile spreads wider and wider, your own brightens, until the air fills with the intimately familiar sound of both your laughter and giggles.

Arthur slinks his arm over your waist and pulls you close.

You take the blanket further away from your mouth. “You never have thought of me as disgusting, have you?”

He gives his head a single soft shake. “Never.”

A rush of deep love and gratefulness swells in you, and you think on what you could give him in return, that could mean as much to him.

“I’m never gonna leave you,” you finally say, reaching one hand under the blanket to touch all your fingers to his scarred, stubbled chin and trace its bold, chiseled shape over the side. “Never.”

A knowing belief shows itself in Arthur’s gaze. There is no doubt to be found among his trust in you.

He leans forward and gently brushes his lips to yours. You accept his tender kisses, giving him a few of your own.

After another several minutes, Arthur notices your eyelids beginning to droop.

“Tired, kiddo?” he asks.

You nod.

“You want a pillow?”

After a few moments, a smile grows on your face, and you nod again.

The two of you scoot and adjust until Arthur is lying on his back and his chest is beneath your cheek and hand.

You quickly begin to drift away, enveloped in Arthur’s warmth, floating atop his every tranquil breath, and assured by the steady rhythm of his precious heartbeat. As you do, you catch sight of the innumerable stars that scintillate overhead.

“The stars always seem so close when I’m with you,” is your quiet murmur as you cross the line of equilibrium.

“Mm,” Arthur assents, kissing your forehead and brushing your hair back from your temple.

Your own hand and arm suddenly slide into your view, outstretched to touch the onyx sky. When you do, your fingertips surprisingly dip into it, and it ripples like the inky black water of the lake you’d enjoyed with Arthur. The platinum wrinkle of each ripple flashes over every chipped crystal star as they radiate outward.

Having watched your eyes close, Arthur rests his hand over yours that never left his chest. As he holds your still form, he recognizes the heavy placidity of deep sleep and wonders what you’re already dreaming.

Yes, the stars above seem isolated and impossibly close, and yes, they are undoubtedly beautiful. But Arthur does not notice them, no. He is wholly transfixed by the radiant glimmer of a light of a different kind. His eyes watch the flame’s light glow and shimmer where his fingers gently dance and plow and run, over and again. And an almost pained awe overtakes him.

Your hair, like liquid metal in his hands.