She was Dreaming
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She was dreaming about something. I could tell by the furrow of her brow and the purse of her lips, not to mention the telltale eye movement beneath her lids. I wished that I could reach into the recesses of her mind and see what she was imagining in her sleepy escape from our real life. She would always tell me she didn't remember her dreams, but sometimes her mouth would quirk up on the left side and I was left to wonder the truth in her statement.
Watching her at rest, when all was silent and peaceful were some of my most cherished moments. Her hair fanned across the pillow, arms clutching the pillow that rightfully belonged to me, yet I never had the heart to take it away if she was already hugging it when I came to bed. Her creamy skin looked almost ethereal in the pale moonlight against the crimson pillowcase.
I slid into the bed trying not to disturb her slumber knowing she had to get up in a few short hours to go to work. My shift at the hospital had been excruciatingly long today, having been on back to back twelve hour shifts that both ran well into the sixteenth hour. Even though my body was exhausted my mind continued to whir with the events of today and the beauty that lay next to me. I couldn't help my fingers as they brushed gently over her face, moving a stay hair off of her cheek.
"Derek?" she mumbled, eyes fluttering open. Guilt wracked my gut knowing that I had stolen some precious moments of sleep from her.
"Shhhh. Go back to sleep. I didn't mean to wake you." Burrowing down into the covers, she rolls towards me and cuddles into my chest, abandoning the pillow for the real thing. Chuckling, I hold her tight, breathing in the scent of her gardenia shampoo and the remainder of her cinnamon flavored toothpaste. She's warm and soft and everything that I ever imagined a home should be. I can't help but sigh loudly, making her pull away and glance up at me in the dark.
"Did something happen? Why aren't you sleeping? Are you okay?" Her flurry of questions are released at the same time as she sits up, appraising me skeptically. She's always been a worrier, a mom at heart. Coming home hours after my shift, I'm sure she figured something went wrong at the hospital and was up worrying needlessly about it.
"I'm fine. I was just appreciating you. It was a contented sigh, not one that was going to precede a diatribe."
"Oh, okay." I seemed to have taken some of the wind out of her sleepy sails and she lay back down, fingering the sparse hair on my chest for a few moments before she stills and her breathing once again evens out.
"Why aren't you sleeping?" Her drowsy voice comes out of the darkness moments after I thought she had already drifted off.
"I'm not sleeping because every time I do I lose another six or seven hours of being with you." I didn't realize how incredibly cheesy that sounded until I'd actually said it. I meant every word, but if any of the other doctors heard me say that to my wife, I would have been ridiculed endlessly.
"Derek, come here. I'll help you rid yourself of that ridiculous insomnia." I could feel her smile against my chest just as she tweaked my nipple lightly, indicating that perhaps she too needed some release to go back to sleep.
Leaning up, she straddles me, tugging her nightshirt over her head in one swift movement. Any symptoms of exhaustion are long gone by the time she bends down to kiss me passionately, taking my lower lip between her teeth and tugging gently.
"Love me," she moaned, setting herself down onto my almost instantaneous hard-on. She must have been dreaming erotic things because she's already wet and ready for me.
In the stillness of the early morning hours we make love slow and reverently, enjoying our uninterrupted time together, something that rarely happens these days. Every square inch of our bodies are touched, licked, nipped or caressed. When we are joined as one, I can't remember how I ever lived without this woman and I hope to never have to again.
I brushed the hair from her face, watching her eyes move underneath her lids, the sheet across her breasts rising and falling with each breath she took. I never meant to fall in love with her. With all the baggage from my past that I still needed to unpack, examine and put away, I was convinced that I couldn't be the man she needed, the man she deserved. Even still, here she laid a dreamy smile on her lips, the sheen from our lovemaking still on her skin, and my heart in her hands. She'd never asked for it, not once, content in what I'd been able to offer. I'd been so worried about settling the past, that I hadn't realized until tonight, when she looked at me through lowered lashes, my future had fallen into my lap.
She shifted in her sleep, snuggling closer, her nose buried in the crook of my neck. With a deep breath, she sighed, my name falling from her lips, sounding for all the world like a symphony. I wrapped my arms around her, content to watch her sleep, feeling like I'd discovered a new world, an uncharted territory. Over the past weeks, I'd looked at her hundreds, probably thousands of times, but now, my heart full of love I haven't declared, I saw her for the first time. It wasn't her features; anyone could say she was beautiful. Instead, I thought back over all the little things she'd said and done, the things that had screamed 'I love you', if I'd only been willing to listen.
Her hand crept up to rest on my heart. Such a simple gesture, tender and full of promise. I kissed the top of her head, marveling again that she'd seen through all of my bullshit, and taken a chance on a broken man. And, as the sun peeked through the horizon, tendrils of light illuminating the face that had come to mean everything to me, I whispered words to fill her waning dreams.