He comes to me every night wearing his exhaustion in his walk and I know it's my turn to take care of him.
Of course he'd never ask for it but I know enough about him to notice his relief when I rouse from sleep and pull my legs out from under the eiderdown coverlet—his, the one he brought with him from Philadelphia when he moved here six months ago, the one he asked to leave in my apartment in the exact moment I knew he was serious—and kneel in the centre of the bed as he drags off his shoes loosens his tie. He sits, shrugging off his jacket, unbuttoning his shirt, and when he's skin-bare I wrap my arms around him from behind and run my hands over the broad expanse of his chest to smooth away the day. I kiss his neck and hum in his ear and he closes his eyes and leans his head into my shoulder.
A ritual; bedtime choreography. He's always been a better dancer than me.
Our time together is constructed of perfect rituals like this. And I suppose it ought to be; after all, he spends more nights in my bed now than he does in his own. It's been that way ever since he physically came back from the woods, when his body was here but his spirit wasn't, when it wasn't him looking back at me from behind his eyes. But I don't think about that now. He's coming back, in pieces, each one bigger than the last, and I'm putting him together again.
Patches of his—and it's his, all of it—his scent linger on the pillows and sheets on his side of the bed. He leaves books on the nightstand—the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a biography of J.D. Rockefeller, a Pacific Northwest pocket atlas with dogeared pages of places he wants to take me hiking—and his toothbrush has found a home beside the bathroom sink. He listens to talk radio—sometimes from Seattle, sometimes from the CBC across the border—and makes French toast for us on Saturday mornings. He lets me pick the movies we watch, and sometimes we fall asleep reading books out loud to each other, listening to the rain on the shingles above our heads.
He's decorated my life with domestic adornments like that, stuff I never thought I'd possess, that I never felt entitled to or believed I could ever deserve. The least I can do is press my lips to the stubble on his jaw while his hands whisper their grace and sins across my skin.
But that's not all I do. I don't know what he saw, when he was out there, but I know it's changed him. I know he dreams deeply but in fits and starts because I lay next to him and hold his hand while he speaks in tongues. He wakes up defeated by the kind of tired that even Norma's coffee can't fix anymore because he's vanquished demons darker than any one should ever hope to meet. But he's paid a price. In night's shadow he's darker than ink black, and I only ever see him by the light of the moon so I should know.
You can call it woman's intuition but I think that's a cop-out because he's got more intuition in his pinky finger than I have in my whole body and it's not fair that I should have the market cornered on hunches because I doubled down on the x-chromosome the day those were handed out and he didn't. Maybe I sensed his danger when no one else did. He says I saved him from the blackness of that abyss. But I know he reached out to me, that's all. I listened when he called.
So now I listen. Always. I think it's helping.
See, he still believes in goodness even after all the evil he's seen. He wants to go back to Washington one day and be reinstated, but for now he's happy being a sheriff's deputy because it's simple and good and running away from one's fears never got anyone anywhere. He confesses his sudden fear of owls and of the woods he once loved and of what those hands that weren't his made him to do, to me. He's learning to trust his reflection in mirrors again.
He admits that his strength failed him and that's why he was lost, for a time, but that he remembered me and the time we kissed and the way we danced and it made him fight, clawing to crawl back, Orpheus from the underworld, so I guess that makes me Eurydice except he never had to look back to find me, because I was in front of him the whole time. So maybe I'm Orpheus, I don't know, and that's when I think maybe I should have gone to school more often. At any rate, he says I saved him. He tells me that I'm a good woman, a strong woman, stronger than anyone has ever given me credit for. He says that he will strive to deserve me until the end of his life. I'm the living incarnation of his most beautiful dreams and most terrible nightmares, he says, and it's like I've heard that before but I don't know where. But it doesn't matter because I believe him, all of him. Because.
Just because.
So I kiss his neck and hum in his ear and he closes his eyes—eyes that are his now, wholly his—and leans his head into my shoulder. We play and linger, push and tumble and turn, turn, turn until he pulses within me and we crescendo and fall, clasping each other, gasping for discarded breaths. Piece by piece he lets me reassemble him, until he's whole and true and less of him lingers in the darkness than lives in his skin. He falls asleep with his head on my breast; each night is better than the last.
I long for the day when the fatigue he wears exists because we stayed up all night dancing to the songs only we can hear. But until that day, we dance anyway. We dance to build. We dance to tear it down. We dance to rebuild it again.
A/N: I couldn't get this idea out of my head so I wrote it down and put it here for you fine people to enjoy. Which I hope you do! ~ Lynzee