Daydream
XxX
"Oh, baby, that's right!" He laughs out, his broad shoulders shaking in a mirthful fit. They are playing pretend and passing time. The day bends into the afternoon.
It is "guess this, and guess that" with her.
"Oh, c'mon. You know who this is. No? Ok, let me do a dance for you. Hold on, I have to re-tie this stupid tie. Okay, now how does this look? No, don't laugh. Just sit. Just watch."
He does. It is his heart and not his eyes that see.
Wearing one of his white dress shirts, originally sentenced to the back of his closet, she rolls up the sleeves and loosens the tie around her neck. His tall, white socks sag around her calves.
Bella gives him the clumsiest strip tease, bumping into the coffee table during a shimmy, humming a teasing tune that sounds sexy in her head. She swings his tie provocatively.
Dwarfed in his shirt, he pretends she is his.
It is how they play.
Her white body is ethereal beneath the cotton as it sways to and fro. He knows it is adorned by nothing more than his fingerprints and an icy blue thong.
Taking another swig from the bottle, he sits reclined and legs akimbo, on the couch. He hums against her ditty, appreciating the otherwise-silent loft.
For her, he plays the part coated in indifference, but she is too funny and they are too drunk while it is still too bright out, for him to take his role seriously.
When she is close enough to touch, he pulls her onto his lap.
"Gotcha," he murmurs.
She squirms lightly before she gives in to his hands. She reaches down to fondle and reciprocate, but he scoots further into the couch, away from her touch.
Her body, strewn across his lap, is both plush and firm.
Holding her tightly around the back of her shoulders, his other hand pushes one leg to the floor and opens her fully. Her breathing hitches shallow when he tugs on her thong.
As the first finger slides in, she gets on with the noises that wake him up at night. At the second finger, she stutters out his name. He pumps deeply, letting her body know he is present. When her arms can no longer hold, he bends down and runs a rough tongue along the soft shell of her ear.
"Bella," he whispers. He chants her name with each pass at her delicate wall, holding on to her like driftwood without a shore.
Her eyes open to him.
"Yes." She gasps, swallowing air, while her sex curls and tightens around him in a satisfied grip.
When she comes, his eyes alight on her tits, quivering beneath his thin shirt.
XxX
They fall asleep on the couch. The milky clouds return and block the sun. It is gray out.
More snow falls.
One of them turned on the television and left it on.
Squinting at the screen, Bella watches the local news broadcast the storm in streams, radars, Doppler images - a swirl of colors and numbers.
The mayor gets his say in a news conference, urging people to stay indoors, check on your neighbors, seal the windows - beware the freeze.
Businesses and schools are shuttered. Flights are canceled. People are stranded.
It is unending and it bores her.
She muses about what it must be like outside, right now. She hates the cold. It latches on to your muscles until your entire body feels brittle.
Air, air, it's all out there, she half-giggles, half-glares at the empty bottle of Jameson.
A vice threatens to clamp around her head. This will hurt tomorrow.
Edward is asleep behind her. He dozes on his side - the available arm, not around her, but over his head as if pondering in slumber.
He's so quiet. She wishes she knew what he was thinking.
Does he think about her when he is not with her?
How she wishes she hadn't broken down in front of him earlier. What had started out as a drunken night fooling around with a new life, had turned into a house of cards.
She wishes she could blame someone for it. She wishes she could blame Rosalie for taking her out that night and ordering too many drinks and challenging her to take the next step.
She wishes her timing were better, too.
"It's not your fault," Rose has said, as a friend should and should not say. But, surely, it is Bella's fault just as much as it is his. Oh no, she isn't going to conjure him right now.
She is here with Edward. A man, not a boy. She is not used to this, but wants it badly. Is it too soon? Will people talk if they knew her heart had moved on already?
She should tell Edward everything.
Now.
She should wake him up and shake him up and open his eyes and make him talk and tell him everything.
Tell him, "sit up, I've got something to say."
Take his hand in hers and say, before she breaks: I've left him. I only want to be with you. I left him three months ago. I left him the night I met you, and when I sat down next to you, my heart sprouted new limbs for the first time in my life. When I sat next to you, I wasn't pretending to be a bad woman. He was my best friend, maybe I am a bad woman. I don't know.
It's not so bad. I made a decision the night I met you. Rose brought me out to celebrate. You are my gift. I blinked, and there you were.
The fact is that I'm not a horrible person. I'm not. I was not with him, like with him for years, can you believe that? I was young, he was young, whatever, you know the deal you can read about it in every story about kids from small towns or hear it in a song but it's the same old cliché and, yeah, I had that. That was me.
But for the last three months, what I'm trying to say is that, for the last three months I've been wrapping up divorce proceedings. It's over.
It's okay, right? You want this? You want us? I don't know, I don't know. What if you say no?
She should tell him. It's going to be okay. Isn't it? He would want her, and he'd smile this smile that she has to believe is only for her, and he'd hold her and make love to her and she would no longer feel like an in-between girl.
She should wake him up and tell him.
XxX
When it is dark in the loft and the television illuminates the room, Edward awakes.
Her mouth surrounds him.
He feels himself grow within her tight lips. Her long hair drapes across his thighs and waist. He keeps his repose, grunting encouragement through his drunken drowsiness.
Opening his eyes slightly, he sees her bent over his body, bobbing her head leisurely. His long lashes are a screen through which his vision feathers and flickers.
The glow from the muted television settles around her head. He focuses on his breathing and the sounds of sucking, lapping. The cool air on his skin contrasts with her hot mouth, all slick and dangerous.
"Bella," he says to her now, here, with his hands on her head. "Come up for air, baby." With one more lick, she brings her head up and meets his eyes.
It is how they speak.
"Bella," he sighs, indicating she should sit next to him. She does. He puts himself away and takes a few breaths. She's beautiful in this haze of lust and alcohol and silence.
She is beautiful when he's sober, too, and lonely and far away from her. She is beautiful always with that lustrous dark hair in varying states of tempest.
She is next to him now, taking him in, her riotous waves and fresh face devoid of masks.
"What is it?" she asks self-consciously.
"You came back," he says to himself, trying to become lucid. He takes her hand and puts it against his chest, a rare intimacy creeping in.
"Earlier this morning, I was prepared to...but you came back," he says with a dark chuckle.
As if needing to shake it off, he gets up and kneels in front of her. "Baby," he whispers with his head in her lap, shaking it back and forth. Her hands ghost through his hair.
"Come," he says through a ragged breath, pulling her up. "Dance with me."
He goes to the radio and turns the dial through dozens of channels while crunchy static squeaks through.
He finds a station on AM frequency. She turns off the television.
Darkness blankets them.
A Jazz ballad plays. The trumpet is a bird announcing itself as it glides across the room.
Dancing, they sway at the top of a snow-capped mountain at night. It is a fevered fantasy of his when he is away from her.
He has thought of her in his loneliness. He has thought of her while crossing a stream and wishing her for balance. He has thought of her while hiking across meadows and through falls.
He has thought of her through the raw blisters and snapping nerves of his tired muscles.
With a mind filled of her, he has climbed up treacherous switchbacks, razoring up mountains, burning for the summit.
He craves her when he is away, like a deer drinking at a trickle of broken ice.
He does not know or care who he is anymore.
She is in his arms and she is crooning along to the ballad, "...it was written in the stars, what was written in the stars shall be…here as in a daydream by my side you stand, here with my tomorrows in your hands…"
She knows this song like she knows his heart is her compass.
He holds her tighter.
She sings them to sleep.
It is the best she can do.
The song they dance to is Ella Fitzgerald's It Was Written In the Stars.
You know who my betas are, now go read their work.