One week later, the scene was only slightly less awkward than the confession in her mother's living room. But I wouldn't change a thing. Well, maybe one thing, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I had decided to demonstrate to Diana Barnes that I truly meant what I had said that evening, so this time I forced the issue that she had tried to force that day, doing it gently and without hints that could be misinterpreted. I also decided to go against my instincts and not plan this down to the nth degree: partially because I still wasn't sure what Diana would want, and partially because I wanted to leave it open for spontaneity. I did make sure that the apartment was clean, that the sheets had been laundered, and that I had a decent supply of candles that could cast enough light for us to see each other but not so much that either of us felt we were under a spotlight. If I did have a plan, it was a simple one: it was going to be all about her tonight.
The monster had lost its crippling power over me, but I had yet to banish my belief in my ability to fail, so I was more a nervous teenager than the confident man I was supposed to be. Worse, I still remembered what Donna and Lisa looked like naked. If ever I wanted the ability to purge memories forever, it was those two memories at that one time. Diana was now The One, and I didn't want my efforts to prove that to be ruined by ghosts from the past acting as critics from the mental sidelines. But no matter how much I wished them away, those ghosts existed, and I was worried that they would sabotage me. I could already see them in my mind's eye, sitting naked on the sidelines, and I could hear their pre-game analysis banter in the background noise of my thought.
Once Diana arrived, I shoved those concerns aside.
Whatever anxiety I was feeling was not nearly half of the terror that Diana must have been feeling, because I've never seen a woman struggling harder against her inner fears as I saw in my doorway that evening. I took her in my arms in that doorway, forgetting to shut it for about five minutes, just holding her and trying to let my love enter her heart through my embrace, hoping to send her fears running just has she had for me in her mother's living room the week before.
I guessed the name of that fear gnawing at her stomach: Little Miss Perfect.
I kissed her hard, trying to suck that poison out of her bloodstream through her lips.
"Uh, maybe we ought to shut the door?" she joked timidly, trying to relieve her building stress.
"Guess you're not into exhibitionism," I chuckled.
"Who'd want to see me...?" she started, giving voice to the fear inside of her.
"Me," I interrupted. "I want to see you. I want to see all of you. Nothing you can show me can possibly be half as bad as the ugliness I showed to you last week."
Dear Heaven, I needed a better script writer. It was supposed to be a compliment, but it came off very left-handed.
Fortunately, Diana was either very forgiving or too consumed with her own fears that she overlooked it. "Well, not with the door opened!"
I obliged and shut the door, locking it. I immediately went back to kissing her, but her worries still consumed her.
"Don't suffocate me," she joked as she broke away from my kiss. "I gotta breathe!"
I allowed her to back her head away but I did not release her from my arms. I tried to come up with some words of encouragement while she caught her breath.
"Nobody's here but us," I said, trying to allude to Diana's worry without saying Voldemort's name aloud. "No Ghosts of Lovers Past. Just a man... barely... and the Angel from Heaven that he loves. That he loves more than everything in this world. Who wants to prove that to her."
Diana looked away for a moment. "I'm not her," she admitted.
"Yes, you are," I assured her.
"I mean, I'm not Lisa," she whispered nervously.
"I know, and I don't care," I stressed gently. "It's you I want."
"But she's still here," Diana worried. "She's always going to be here. Every time."
I swallowed, admitting to myself the truth in what she was saying. I decided to not insult her with a denial, but I wanted so much to take that fear away from her. I could only think of one way to tell her.
"You don't need to be afraid of Lisa any more that I have to be afraid of Peter," I assured her.
"That's comparing apples to raisins!" she snorted, trying to let me know how little she cared for the guy who broke off his engagement with her. Twice.
"So, Peter had raisins 'down there'?" I asked, trying to lighten her mood with a joke.
"That's not what I mean, and you know it," she replied.
"Yes, I know it," I agreed. "And yes, Lisa's part of my past. But that's exactly where she's staying from now on. I'm not measuring you against her anymore. I'm measuring her against you. And I gotta tell you: she's not even close."
"Bullshit," Diana muttered. "You showed me the picture. She's gorgeous."
"On the outside? Maybe." I admitted. "Inside? She never let me in far enough to see." I then gently tightened my embrace an looked into her eyes. "You've let me in. You've hidden nothing from me. You've shown me what you think is broken and ugly, but all I see is beauty. I've shown you the ugliest a man can show inside of me, but you've accepted that."
"There's nothing ugly in there," Diana interrupted gently.
I smiled gently. "Because of you. You cleansed me of it. You reached in with your Angel powers and removed all of it last week."
"God, this is sounding like the worst of my soap opera," Diana joked.
"Sorry, best I can do without a script," I chuckled. After a breath, I continued, "She's my past. You? You're my now, and hopefully, my forever. You're my Angel, my gift from Heaven, and like everything else from Heaven, you're beautiful."
A tear rose in her right eye and her lip trembled. "Oh, that was so much better than my soap opera!" she tried to joke before kissing me. Her body was shaking in my arms, but not from anticipation. She broke the kiss and whispered nervously in my ear, "I'll do my best."
"You don't have to do anything," I whispered back. "It's not about me tonight, Angel. It's about you."
"I...," she stammered.
"What?" I asked gently.
She stammered again, no pronounceable words coming forth.
"Remember your promise," I whispered gently. "'Nothing' isn't in our vocabulary."
"Yeah, but that's all I can think to say," she confessed.
"Angel, you can tell me anything," I reassured her. "I promised you that I wasn't letting go, and I mean it."
Diana sighed and looked away. "I feel like I'm forcing you into this."
"You're forcing me to come to terms with something that I should have faced long ago," I softly corrected her. "Something I need to face and defeat if I'm ever going to marry you. And I am going to marry you someday, Angel. But I can't do that until I defeat my inner demons."
"But do we have to fight them now?" she asked. "I mean, I didn't realize... I didn't know the reasons... I thought you were..!"
My heart rejoiced when I heard her question. I chuckled at her stammering, and she fell silent.
"What's so funny?"
I smiled back. "Thanks."
"For what?" she asked blankly.
"For saying 'we'," I replied. She had already thrown herself into the fight with me, even though I would have kept her out of it. Damn, I love this woman!
She blinked a couple of times. "Well, it is our problem, isn't it?"
"No, it's mine," I answered. "But it's nice to know that you're asking to help me."
She gave me a nervous smile. "Yeah. I want to help. More than anything."
"And I want to prove to you that I love you," I said.
"You already have," she assured me gently. "In other ways."
"Diana, I need to prove it to you this way," I softly insisted. "You need to know. You need to be sure. You deserve to be sure. Please, let me?"
The nervous smile returned. "For the man I love? Anything!"
You know those scenes two-thirds of the way into the R-rated movie where the male and female leads finally surrender to the sexual tension? How balanced the soft lighting is? How seductively they undress for each other? How perfect the foreplay is? How the background music crescendos at just the proper time? Sure, but they get about a dozen takes to get that right, cutting the best of each take in the Editing Room and splicing them together to get the perfect sequence.
We had one take. It was flawed. But it was no less perfect.
Yes, I made some mistakes and miscalculations. So did Diana. I'd like to cut out the part where I tripped over my pants and fell into the bed, or the part where I tried to help Diana move to make us both more comfortable and instead banged her head into the headboard so hard that it brought her to tears for ten seconds. She would have liked the chance to rewind her life back an hour or so and pick out the comfortable bra instead of the lacy one with the bent clasp that almost required a hunting knife to rip off, or take back the part where she scratched me with her nails in the one part of the male anatomy that isn't strong enough to take that torture.
It was as perfect as two imperfect people could make it. Once the clothes came off, I could not understand what we feared. She was indeed beautiful. True, she was no runway model, but that was not a flaw. Her body was perfectly proportioned, and Davie Junior wasn't shy about showing his admiration. True to my word, I kept it all about her for the evening, bringing her to three climaxes without the help of the appendage between my legs. The appendage in my mouth was getting a little sore, as well as my nose from her pelvis bucking against it...
After the third one hit, she started protesting through large gasps for breath. "Stop!"
"Why?"
Her body convulsed uncontrollably for another ten seconds before she went limp. As she panted on her back, she gasped, "because... I've done... nothing for you..."
I smiled, sliding myself up alongside her and looking into her face. Diana looked back at me, and I finally saw what I had wished to see in a woman's face for years: contentment. I drank in that look on her face, the look that Donna never showed me and that Lisa had been unable to show me.
"You've done everything for me," I corrected her gently. It was no idle pillow talk. It was the honest truth. At long last, "nothing" was gone. Finally, the monster was slain.
She looked lovingly at me for a second and inhaled gently. Quickly, the loving look soured.
I put my hand over my mouth, guessing at what caused that reaction. "Fish breath?" I muttered ashamedly.
"Sorry?" Diana winced. "I know it's mine, but...?"
Chuckling, I jumped from the bed and trotted to the bathroom, where I tried to set a Guinness World Record for Hands And Face Washing And Mouthwash Gargle. I hurried back to the bedroom, this time avoiding my pants on the floor which tripped me up last time. I slipped into the bed, wrapped my arms around her and kissed her.
"Better?" I asked.
"Much," she cooed.
I then felt her hand groping for Davie Junior.
"Angel..." I started.
"It's not fair for this to be all about me," she said.
It was then that I realized that I should have planned for one obvious contingency, but that I hadn't.
"Next time, Angel," I said, trying to dissuade her.
"But I've done nothing for you," she replied.
"You've done more for me than you can possibly know," I assured her. She had done what I could not do for years. She defeated "nothing."
"Honeybunny," she said, using for the first time a nickname she'd often use for me in the future, "I've got to prove something. To me. Please?"
I grimaced. "Angel, I'm not prepared for this..."
She tugged on Davie Junior, who was reporting to both her and me that he was Ready For Duty. "Doesn't seem that way to me," she smiled.
"I mean, I don't have any condoms in the place!" I ashamedly admitted. I had been so worried about making her happy that I had not planned at all for satisfying my own urges.
She glowered at me. "You're kidding?! You mean you're the only man in the Universe who doesn't carry a damned rubber in his wallet?!"
Aaaaaaand... the moment's gone.
I shrugged. "Haven't had the chance to use one in a long time...!"
"You must have had some back in your old apartment," she pressed. "You could have packed them up and brought them here!"
"They expired!" I claimed. "I'm telling you, it's been a real damned long dry spell for me!"
"What about Paula?" she asked.
"I was telling the truth," I explained. "It was dinner-only with Paula, no matter how hard I tried. I can't even tell you the scent of her mouthwash, because I never got close enough to find out. Whatever she told you ladies down in the Accounting office was a damned lie."
"Not all of it," Diana smiled. "You are the Cute Guy From Drafting."
"Glad you think so," I smiled.
She started tugging on Davie Junior again, whose stature had slumped a little from the scolding I got for forgetting the Boy Scout Motto. Smiling, Diana whispered, "well, there's more than one way to please the little guy..."
I groaned.
"What?" she asked curtly.
I sighed. "Angel, a word of advice? Never use the words 'little' or 'small' when holding your boyfriend's dick in your hand? It's a real mood killer."
Diana blushed. "Sorry," she whispered before giving me a kiss. She then slid down the bed along my side.
"Uh, what're you doing?" I asked.
"You'll see," she winked.
It was then that I discovered that my Angel had some skills that were learned a few steps short of Heaven.
