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not beta'd

storyline - Laugh

prompt - point

The light had completely faded outside, even dusk leached of its grey.

I reached up hesitantly, unbuttoning the last remaining button on Edward's dress shirt.

He stared at me, his eyes flickering across my face, like we'd never been this close, or like it had been so long he'd forgotten what I looked like.

I pushed his shirt off of his shoulders. He pulled my sweater off over my head, and I stepped away from the window, conscious of the transparency and cold.

"Do you love me?" I whispered. Something welled up inside me, and for a second I felt like I might cry. Being here with him was either very right or very desperate, and I knew that the decisions we made from now on would really matter.

Edward was a good man, a great one. He wasn't the sort you let walk away, not without a fight. I hadn't any pride left; I'd come to terms with this before leaving home. Pride wasn't the point, anyway. Love was. And not a pie-in-the-sky, overly idealistic view of love – we'd had that once and it had been wonderful, but when it started to evolve in to something more mature, we'd lost our grip.

Love's an action word, and I knew we'd simply grown stagnant.

He nodded, pulling me closer so that he was hugging me. His skin felt so warm and good.

"I love you," I told him, resting my cheek against his chest.

"I know." His voice was soft, and for a moment we just stood there, holding each other.

I tiptoed and kissed his cheek; he turned his face and met my mouth with his.

It was chaste at first, but our bodies knew one another, and we soon fell in to familiar ways of being, kisses and touches; his hands splayed across my lower back, my fingers twisting in his hair.

We broke apart, and I went to the bed, pulling him along.

He climbed in with me, undoing the button on my jeans so that I could pull them off. He took his pants off then too, and we got under the covers.

I loved his hands on me; they were precious, he was precious. Even more so now; we were an uncertainty... we'd separated and were trying to come back together. Why wasn't it easy? Why could I just say "Okay!" and wake up as his?

Something shifted in his demeanor, and he rolled on to me with renewed lust, sucking viciously at my neck and the tops of my breasts. I pulled at his hair and let him handle me; I'd been alone and without him for too long.

He kissed my belly button. I removed my bra.

He came back up and kissed my mouth. "Are you still on the pill?"

I nodded, and my hands shook.

"Why?" he whispered, becoming gentle again, kissing my nipples.

"I thought you'd come back," I admitted. I realized I hadn't even thought about it like that; that the decision to keep things in his absence (the way they'd been in his presence) had been made somewhat subconsciously.

There was that look again, the painful one.

"What is it?" I asked, rubbing my thumbs against the roughness of his cheeks. "Is there something you need to tell me?" Panic washed over me and I stilled, focused on not freaking out.

He shook his head and laid his face of my chest, much as I had done before, only now we were lying down.

"Things feel irreversible now," he said. "I'm here and you're there, and… so much has happened. We're broken. And then you tell me things in your emails, and you come out here and tell me you want me and you love me, and all I did was leave you. I left you because there was nothing left. Now you're showing me there is something left. I don't want to take steps backward…I don't want to end up this way again."

I let his words sink in. He was right, of course, but he'd never been wrong. Neither had I, really. If only it had been a simple matter of right and wrong but instead it had been this weird falling away; complacency.

"It doesn't have to be stepping back," I said. "It can be stepping forward. It can still be new."

I urged him up with my legs and feet, missing his mouth and his kisses. Greedy, I didn't want to think about the repercussions sex would have. It had always been us, and been good. I would take whatever he'd give me, because I knew in my heart he loved me like he said he did.

Our kisses lasted and lasted. I tasted him and smelled him and felt him feeling and smelling and tasting me. He moved against me until I needed him and then he moved inside me.

I couldn't remember the last time we'd kissed the whole time we made love.