Featuring Shakespeare's Sonnet 27
Cool cotton pajamas enveloping his limbs, Munkustrap pulled down the covers and flopped into bed with a sigh, smiling at the feeling of warmth radiating over him from the right, where his husband sat up against the pillows, reading. "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed."
"Haste?" Skimbleshanks muttered absentmindedly, thoroughly engrossed in his book, taking a fleeting glance over his spectacles at his pocket watch on the nightstand. "It took you twenty minutes as usual."
"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed," Munkustrap repeated himself, more firmly this time. He reached over a clumsy arm and patted about for Skimbleshanks' book, securing a hold on it and prying it from his husband's paws. "The dear repose for limbs with travel tired."
"Hey! I wasn't through with that!" Skimbleshanks tried to reach for his book, but even his long arms couldn't grab it as Munkustrap flopped it, pages down, on the nightstand on his side. Munkustrap's head rolled back to meet his husband's gaze, ice blue eyes peering through gold-rimmed spectacles at a brilliant shade of green, the corners of his mouth curling into a warm but sleepy smile. He reached up a paw, hushing Skimbleshanks before he had another chance to request the return of his book, passing two slender fingers over his lips and up past his nose, taking ahold of his glasses and laying them atop the book with subtle finality. "But then begins a journey in my head, to work my mind, when body's work's expired."
This, Skimbleshanks recognized, was his cue to turn off the lamp on his side of the bed. After all, he'd give himself a headache if he tried to read without his spectacles (prescribed, no less, for the exact purpose of reading), and his legs he supposed were too heavy to cross the room to retrieve them. So he obliged, if not without a gruff sigh - but any and all frustration about his reading being interrupted instantly melted when a gentle paw greeted his neck as he turned back, pulling him gently down to the pillow.
Voice little more than a whisper, Munkustrap ran his thumb along his husband's cheek, fingers brushing against ticklish tips of wispy whiskers and the sleek velvet of soft face-fuzz. "For then my thoughts, from far where I abide, intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, and keep my drooping eyelids open wide, looking on darkness which the blind do see."
Skimbleshanks felt his husband's chest rise and fall against their shared mattress as Munkustrap paused to yawn, bedsprings squeaking as he exhaled, settling deeper into the covers and the soothing closeness they now enjoyed. The ginger tabby took this opportunity to reach out a paw of his own, brushing against the side of Munkustrap's aquiline nose, mirroring the stroking of cheek and the pawing of fur.
"Save that my soul's imaginary sight presents thy shadow to my sightless view." Munkustrap opened his paw slightly, feeling in the dark the shape of Skimbleshanks' face - his smooth cheekbones; his pointed nose; wide, rounded ears; tender jawbone slack with tranquility. He allowed his paw to fall into the dip between Skimbleshanks' jaw and shoulder, right in a place that he could feel beneath the roughened leather of his paw pads the rhythmic pulsing of blood in his husband's veins. "Which like a jewel hung ghastly in the night, makes black night beauteous and her old face new."
Indeed, Munkustrap's sonnet held true. For in the dark, while Skimbleshanks could see nothing with his eyes, how he could see in his mind the blur of silver smiling back at him, ears relaxed and muscles finally loosened after a day long and heavy with tension, delicately blanketed by his light bedclothes. And in reverse, on the other side of the bed, as his thumb caught loosely onto the collar of Skimbleshanks' bed-shirt, so Munkustrap could see his husband's glass-green eyes like an emerald lantern in the mysterious dark of his mind, illuminating ginger fur and flannal tartan pajamas bejewled by an infectious diamond smile.
"Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind," it came out as a sigh, as Munkustrap allowed his head to fall as far into his pillow as it was able, "for thee, and for myself, no quiet find." The last words were tainted thick with tiredness, sleep claiming them as their own before they could exit his lips.
"There's plenty of quiet here, love. No need to go looking for it." Skimbleshanks smiled, giving one final, thorough paw-through of his husband's fur before wrapping an arm around him and drawing him close. The warmth of Munkustrap's slow, sleep-lined breath came in waves into his shoulder, a welcome confirmation that his oft-insomniac husband was, at last, asleep, amidst the stress he put himself through day by day and the swirling, surprisingly lucid thoughts which never, even in the black of night, seemed to grant him rest.
How lucky he was, Skimbleshanks mused, to have a night off and a sleepy, Shakespeare-reciting husband, whose head was in just the right place and position to be given a kiss landing right between the eyes.
