September 2026 – Listen Here
I could paint him fresh from my shower, prowling back toward the bed only to scoop me bodily into his arms and kiss me – not because the kiss was leading anywhere, not because he wanted another thing from me, but seemingly for the singular satisfaction of watching delight illuminate my face.
I could tell you of his sexual prowess. I could regale you with his seemingly inexhaustible stamina, or recount once more what it felt like to have his nails travel over my skin – not savagely, never quite surrendering to anything so feral, but with that fascinating restraint that made me wonder whether some part of him feared what might happen if he ceased being careful with me. As though, perhaps, I were precious.
I could make your toes curl describing the velvet abrasion of his beard between my breasts, his breath passing over skin made exquisitely susceptible by everything that had come before.
I could whisper about his mouth, his tongue, the draw of his lips as he knelt between my thighs, and the astonishing discovery that, for once, I did not find myself enduring the adoration of his mouth. Quite the contrary. I wanted him there. I wanted the moment prolonged past all reasonable measure; wanted this magnificent man on his knees before me while I surrendered every ridiculous sound he coaxed from my body.
I could paint the portrait of how extraordinarily petite and feminine I felt beneath him, his immense frame eclipsing mine, or seduce you with the account of what it was like to straddle him for the better part of an hour while the minutes slipped past entirely unobserved. I remember catching our reflection in the mirror: his long legs stretched behind me, my body slender and willowy above his, my fingers interlaced with his and held above his head as though I had somehow pinned the Olympian beneath me. With every brush of his hands and whispered reverence, I felt… I felt beautiful, luminous, almost immortal if such a thing exists. And how I moved above him, my hips finding those fluid, undulant rhythms that require no thought once the body has remembered them, rising and falling in pursuit of one crest after another until time itself became irrelevant.
I could describe the almost uncanny yin and yang of us. How, after we had thoroughly exhausted ourselves, I curled onto my side while he went to fetch water, only for him to return and fit himself behind me as though the architecture of our bodies had been drafted from the same plans. There was no arranging myself for him, no bracing, no holding a position that would become tiresome in five minutes. He merely folded around me, my backside settling into the curvature of him, and when he joined himself to me again it felt less like positioning two bodies than knitting them together.
He moved in that languorous cadence – advancing, retreating, returning – until my thoroughly spent body betrayed me by beginning to climb toward yet another summit I had neither requested nor believed it capable of reaching.
I could gloat shamelessly over his skill. I could tell you about my ankles upon his shoulders, those enormous hands spanning my hips and lifting me until scarcely more than my shoulders and head remained upon the mattress while he drove into me again and again, and I became reasonably certain I had begun seeing the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
I could certainly make you blush with the tale of the appendage he brought with him.
He paused before setting it upon the bed, giving me the choice without forcing me to manufacture an answer before I possessed one. I stared.
It had been considerably less alarming as a photograph.
In person, this masculine imitation was enormous.
For all my bravado, I became absurdly shy. I did not know whether I wanted it. I did not know what I was supposed to say. Perhaps he recognized the uncertainty flickering through me, because he never demanded a decision in words. Instead, he took command of the practicalities himself, fitting it into place along his cock where I could not see what he was doing behind me, then raising my hips incrementally until more of my weight settled onto my forearms and one cheek sank farther into the plush mattress.
Then came oil, unhurried coaxing, and the first exploratory press of that foreign length against me.
Gods.
The sound that escaped me seemed to have been dragged from some subterranean chamber of my body when the thing suddenly began to vibrate. I could still feel him behind it – the warmth of his thighs brushing mine, the substantial presence of his body, his measured movements – and then he would withdraw the toy and there would be only him again, flesh and warmth and strength, my body melting around what it already knew. Then its mechanical twin would return, buzzing through me until my fingers knotted themselves into the sheets.
And then, wordlessly, he introduced both.
I remember holding my breath, eyes clenched as he aligned himself with his imitation and began, with meticulous restraint, to ease them into me together. My body stretched around the breadth of them until I scarcely dared breathe.
What if I couldn’t?
The thought arrived with ridiculous urgency.
What if I was terrible at this?
And, considerably more alarming:
What if I loved it?
I did.
Not immediately, and certainly not effortlessly. I remember chastising myself for not having taken better care of my body beforehand, for arriving at this adventure already tired and depleted when I wanted so badly to discover what I was capable of. But the Olympian seemed to possess patience enough for both of us. He did not make my body’s limitations into a failure. He checked on me. Waited for me. Readjusted. Let me breathe. Let me accommodate him. And gradually what had begun as an intimidating experiment became an extraordinary duet.
Sometimes there was only his slick cock, the familiar warmth of his body fitting against mine, my buttocks nestled into the natural curve of his hips. Sometimes there were both, stretching me to the furthest boundary I could comfortably receive, until I felt astonishingly full. Then the vibration would return without warning and scatter whatever blissful rhythm I had found, diverting me onto some strange tributary of ecstasy my body had never travelled before and did not quite know how to navigate.
And then back to him.
Then both.
Then him.
It became less a feat to accomplish than an exploration conducted between us, his confidence meeting my curiosity, my body discovering its boundaries and then, cautiously, allowing him to show me where another one might be.
I loved it.
Not as an ordinance for every future encounter. Not because I had discovered some new requirement without which I could never again be satisfied. I loved it because he had wanted to discover something new with me. Because there was novelty without expectation, audacity without carelessness. He tested the edges of me without making me prove anything by crossing them. Without asking another damn thing from me.
And really, I could continue in this fashion for pages, like some scandal-starved old bitty presiding over her teacup, cataloguing every indecency with the solemn importance of parliamentary proceedings.
But that is not the part of the evening that has occupied my mind.
For all the remarkable, salacious and indecent things he did to my body, it was what happened afterward that touched my soul.
For three hours, the meal he had so thoughtfully provided, despite my insistence that food was such a mortal inconvenience, had lain entirely neglected upon my coffee table.
Eventually, necessity intruded upon our debauchery. He really did have to eat at some point, but first there was the rather pressing matter of washing away the evidence of the evening.
So I rose and slipped into the shower, pulling the curtain nearly closed before peeking around it with a roguish grin.
“Aren’t you going to join me?”
The smile that spread across his face was positively magnificent.
He stepped beneath the spray and immediately began teasing me about the temperature of the water, demanding to know why I apparently preferred my shower hot enough to cook a chicken.
I cackled.
Not giggled prettily. Not offered some fetching feminine trill.
Cackled.
Like the very hen he had accused me of attempting to boil.
It caught me so unexpectedly that I dissolved against the tile, my thoroughly used body protesting even the exertion of laughing while he looked enormously pleased with himself.
Then the Olympian asked which body wash was mine.
I pointed out the honeysuckle and lilac and reached automatically for the sponge.
He took it from my hand.
I blinked.
Apparently, I was not to be trusted with my own ablutions.
He saturated the sponge beneath the water, worked the sweet fragrance into a luxuriant lather, and then – with a tenderness one does not necessarily anticipate from a creature built more like a gladiator than a gentleman – began to wash me.
What arrested me was that there was nothing overtly sexual about it.
These were not the perfunctory strokes of a man washing the interesting portions of a woman’s body before attending to himself. He wasn’t maneuvering toward another seduction or performing some elaborate prelude whose eventual purpose I was expected to understand. Nor was there any of the awkward haste of an inexperienced youth anxious to dispense with the preliminaries.
He was simply… washing me.
Thoroughly.
The Olympian took my small hand into his enormous one and passed the sponge over my palm, then along each finger individually.
And then between them.
Between my fingers.
I stared at him. Blinked.
Who washes between another person’s fingers?
He did, apparently.
Without the slightest indication that this was peculiar, he turned my hand over and continued across my wrist and along my arm, coating every inch in honeysuckle-and-lilac lather. The sponge travelled over my shoulder, across the delicate architecture of my collarbone, along my throat and beneath my chin, then down the opposite side of my neck before he claimed my other arm and repeated the entire fastidious ritual.
Not approximately.
Not good enough.
Every finger. Every hollow. Every inch.
I had ceased being entirely certain what to do with myself.
The sponge wandered around the curves of my breasts, bubbles slipping mischievously over skin still exquisitely susceptible from the preceding hours, his thumb grazing each sensitive peak with such restraint that even the incidental contact made my breath catch. Yet he did not turn the moment into another demand upon my body. He simply continued downward, across my ribs and abdomen, his touch becoming increasingly circumspect as he approached flesh already thoroughly taxed by our earlier adventures.
There, between my legs, he abandoned the sponge altogether.
Instead, he gathered the fragrant suds into his cupped palm and used only his hand, the broad length of his fingers passing through my folds to wash away the remnants of the evening with exquisite consideration for everything my body had already endured. No scrubbing. No teasing. No attempt to coax another response from flesh that had already given so much.
Just care.
And I remained utterly baffled by it.
His hand passed over me with soothing attentiveness before the sponge returned to my inner thighs, travelling downward over each one not once, but twice, while I concentrated rather valiantly upon the increasingly ambitious undertaking of remaining upright.
Then this mighty Olympian – this towering, broad-shouldered gladiator of a man – knelt.
Right there in my entirely unremarkable bathtub.
He lifted one of my legs and settled my foot upon his knee.
“Oh, you do not have to – ”
Ignored.
He washed my calf.
“I can absolutely – ”
My ankle.
“Seriously, I’m a grown – ”
The top of my foot.
Then the sole.
Then around my toes.
I looked down at him in disbelief.
My toes.
Every single protest was met with the selective deafness of a man who had apparently decided that my objections were merely ambient noise.
And some deeply ingrained part of me simply could not comprehend what was happening.
I think I had expected him to become bored.
That realization arrived almost sheepishly. Some part of me had been waiting for the point at which his attention would falter – for him to lavish care upon the beautiful, enticing portions and become perfunctory once he reached the ordinary ones. Surely a calf did not merit this much attention. An ankle certainly didn’t. A foot was just a foot.
Yet there he remained upon one knee, washing me as though there were no hierarchy to my body at all.
And suddenly my mind offered a question I could not answer.
When was the last time anyone washed me?
Not helped me shower because I was ill. Not washed my back playfully before reaching for whichever part of me interested them more.
Washed me.
When was the last time I had simply stood still and allowed someone to care for my entire body this way?
I could not remember.
Perhaps that was why I could not seem to understand it.
The showerhead murmured steadily above us, that comforting veil of white noise sealing away everything beyond the curtain until my ordinary bathtub had become a small, steam-shrouded sanctuary. For those suspended minutes there were no obligations waiting beyond it, no heaviness demanding admittance. Only honeysuckle and lilac, hot water, mist gathering against the walls, and this absurd Olympian kneeling at my feet.
He lowered my leg with great care and motioned for the other.
I asked whether he was cold.
No answer.
I asked whether he wanted to move beneath the water.
Another gesture toward my foot.
I sighed with theatrical suffering and obeyed, lifting my left leg and placing it upon his knee.
His mouth twitched.
The scoundrel.
And then he began again.
Calf. Ankle. Heel. Sole. Toes.
Every unremarkable inch afforded the same attention as the beautiful ones.
When at last he finished, he rose with easy grace, placed those immense hands upon my hips, and turned me toward the white tile. He guided my hands high above my head against the wall.
Ah.
This I understood.
I expected teeth against my earlobe, the hot pressure of his body behind mine, the hard length of him that unmistakable indication that all this attention had finally arrived at its anticipated destination. My Inner Goddess was more than prepared to accommodate him. I tipped my hips backward in invitation.
But he did not close the distance between our bodies.
The sponge touched my wrist.
What?
He began washing my arms.
Again.
My wrists, my forearms, the crooks of my elbows.
I could have sworn the man had already washed them. I was reasonably certain there could not possibly remain an unsullied molecule anywhere between my fingertips and shoulders, but his Olympian standards of care were evidently more exacting than mine.
So he washed them again.
And there, with my hands against the tile and my forehead coming to rest between them, I think the bewilderment finally became too much.
I still did not know how to receive this.
I knew how to be desired. I knew how to respond to seduction, how to recognize lust and return it with interest. I even knew how to accept admiration when I was feeling particularly gracious.
But this?
To simply stand there and be tended to without reciprocating, managing, or finding some way to make myself useful?
I had no script for that.
My forehead settled against the cool tile. Somewhere beneath the shower spray, my eyes began to sting.
How very convenient.
The water carried the evidence away before I was required to explain it.
Eventually the sponge descended across my shoulders and along the ladder of my spine. Suds slipped after it, tracing winding paths over my skin and disappearing into the seam of my buttocks, drawing an involuntary murmur from my throat.
Still he continued.
Across my back. Over my hips. Down the backs of my thighs. Along my calves and finally to my heels, until there was scarcely a millimeter of me from nape to toes that had escaped his ministrations.
When at last he finished, I turned in his arms.
There was nothing thoughtful about what I did next.
I threw my arms around his neck and pressed my newly scrubbed, thoroughly slippery body against his, catching his mouth with mine beneath the cascading water. His arms wrapped around me as the shower streamed down my back, soap making our bodies glide against one another, and for several glorious moments I simply kissed the impossible man who had apparently decided that even my toes were worthy of adoration.
Still wrapped around him beneath the cascading water, my fingers slipped mischievously between our bodies, finding him already hardening where he was trapped against me. I let my fingertips wander lower, nothing premeditated, merely a caressing glide over my pearl, already pulsing at the proximity of his cock.
His attention sharpened.
And in what seemed scarcely more than the span of my next breath, the Olympian was seated upon the floor of my garden tub.
I hardly had time to comprehend the rearrangement before those immense hands were around my thighs, his palms supporting me, drawing me securely toward him as his mouth found me.
Gods.
He feasted upon me.
There really is no more decorous verb that tells the truth.
Whatever tenderness had governed the sponge remained in his hands, keeping me steady as my knees began to lose their usefulness, but his mouth possessed considerably fewer manners. His tongue pursued every response it discovered, returning again and again whenever some involuntary movement betrayed that he had found precisely where I was most susceptible.
My fingers wound themselves through his hair.
Then tightened.
Then ceased pretending to be civilized at all.
I held him there by the roots while pleasure broke through me again and again, my legs quivering around him, every attempt to retreat thwarted by the infuriating strength of the hands supporting me. I would have considered one such surrender a perfectly respectable conclusion.
The Olympian disagreed.
He would not rise.
Every time I thought surely he must be satisfied with what he had wrung from me, his mouth returned to its occupation until thought itself became increasingly impractical and I could do very little beyond cling to him and endure the consequences of having invited his attention in the first place.
And still, apparently, he was not finished attending to me.
Still seated upon the floor of my bathtub with the shower raining its torrent over us, he turned me away from him, toward the tile.
I glanced back, already suspicious.
His voice came from behind me, lower now, touched with amusement and considerably too much confidence.
Every part of me, he informed me, must be clean.
I froze.
Surely he did not mean –
Oh.
Oh, the scandalous man absolutely did.
There are confessions I can commit to paper with enviable shamelessness. I can tell you about being pinned beneath an Olympian. I can describe toys of alarming proportions and admit without blushing that I enjoyed them. I can catalogue indecencies over tea like a dowager with particularly excellent gossip.
And yet this?
This nearly defeats my pen.
He guided my hips back toward him and parted the seam of my buttocks.
And then his mouth went somewhere I had scarcely dared imagine permitting a man’s mouth to go.
My eyes flew wide.
A gentleman should never be subjected to such acts.
That was genuinely my first coherent thought.
My second was considerably less respectable.
Because – heaven forgive me – it felt magnificent.
I was not supposed to like this. Surely there existed some obscure statute of civilized society forbidding a woman from enjoying this quite so much. Yet there I was, hips jutted back, scarcely breathing, my hands returning to the tile and my cheek finding its cool surface while his mouth continued its scandalous exploration.
Some final, scandalized fragment of me wanted to disappear beneath the bathwater and emerge in another county.
The rest of me had rather different opinions.
My eyes shuttered. My breath came fractured. Every nerve seemed newly awakened as his attention continued, as his tongue delved deeper, until even my own hand joined the conspiracy.
My fingers slipped between my thighs and then within, answering the ache his mouth had awakened elsewhere, and suddenly I was participating in my own corruption with considerably more enthusiasm than the scandalized lady in my head considered seemly.
The Olympian remained entirely unconcerned with her objections. His impertinent tongue only grew more audacious.
Whatever remained of my ability to be shocked dissolved beneath the mounting pleasure. My body convulsed around my own fingers; my other hand sought purchase against the tile. The shower continued its relentless downpour while everything within me gathered toward that inevitable breaking point, until the release he had coaxed from me upon the bed seemed to return in another great tide, washing over him like holy water.
There was no graceful surrender at the end of it.
No elegant little sigh.
I simply came apart.
And somewhere within the ensuing haze, one mortifying truth became inescapable:
It had felt so damned good.
But even then, my princess treatment did not end.
We traded places beneath the shower, and while the Olympian tended to himself at a considerably more survivable distance from what he persisted in calling my lava water, I began to shiver.
At first I tried to conceal it. The trembling was slight enough that I could pretend it was merely the aftermath of excitement, but exhaustion had settled deep into my bones, and without the water pouring directly over me, my thoroughly spent body seemed suddenly incapable of generating its own warmth. I folded my arms around myself and attempted to look perfectly normal while tiny, uncontrollable shudders betrayed me.
Of course he noticed.
I had barely grasped the navy towel, absentmindedly beginning to dry myself and seeking its comforting warmth, when he wordlessly took possession of it. He began at the top, blotting the water from my hair and shoulders before wrapping the towel around me like a cape. I clutched its ends together over my bosom and made to step from the tub, only for him to halt my escape. His own body was scarcely dry, water still coursing over him, yet he stepped out, procured another towel, and crouched before me to begin drying my legs.
“I am a grown woman,” I informed him as he patted my thighs.
This apparently fascinating piece of biographical information did not alter his behavior in the slightest.
“I can absolutely dry myself.”
Nothing.
Water still jeweled his shoulders and travelled in rivulets down his back because the impossible man had scarcely bothered to pat himself dry, yet there he knelt attending to me. I continued my remonstrations while he lifted one foot, dried my calf and ankle, and then carefully passed the towel over my foot.
Including between my toes.
I stared down at him.
Again with the toes. Again with these infinitesimal attentions to things I scarcely considered worthy of attention at all.
My Inner Goddess looked at me.
I looked back at her and blinked, dumbfounded.
Neither of us was entirely certain I had ever bothered drying between my own toes.
There was something increasingly disconcerting about being tended to with greater thoroughness than I habitually afforded myself.
By the time I escaped the bathroom, I had been bundled into towels with such efficiency that I was beginning to suspect my status as an autonomous adult had been temporarily revoked. I found pajamas, dressed myself, and wandered in a pleasant haze toward the kitchen, determined that I was finally going to do one thing for him.
The Chick-fil-A he had brought hours earlier was still waiting upon the coffee table, the casualty of considerably more interesting pursuits. I transferred everything to the air fryer, wanting the fries crisp again and the nuggets hot. He had brought the meal, after all. Surely I could manage the minimal undertaking of reheating and serving it.
Behind me, however, the Olympian was gathering every sopping towel we had abandoned, along with the linens from the bed, and depositing the whole damp aftermath into my washing machine.
I arched an eyebrow at him.
His selective hearing was becoming positively tyrannical. I huffed at the absurdity of him. I always changed the bedding and started the wash after my company left. That was mine to deal with – the mundane aftermath, the towels and sheets and testimony left behind once everyone had gone home. These gods were not supposed to concern themselves with such trivialities.
It was my mess, after all.
Yet apparently he had annexed that responsibility too.
While I fussed with the air fryer, he disappeared again and somehow returned carrying the white throw from my living room. Before I could ask what he intended to do with it, he draped it around my shoulders and drew it closed around me.
My entire body sagged.
I hadn’t realized I was still shivering.
In anticipation of his arrival, I had turned the air-conditioning up earlier, never considering that several hours later I would be exhausted, freshly showered, and so thoroughly depleted that my body could scarcely keep itself warm. By then, standing itself was beginning to feel like a task requiring an unreasonable degree of commitment, so I surrendered and migrated to the couch to await the food.
The Olympian joined me, and I tucked the white blanket more tightly around my shoulders. A moment later, his hand descended around my foot, that enormous palm practically swallowing it whole, and the warmth of him against my icy toes drew a helpless sigh from somewhere deep in my chest.
He laughed and grumbled something about the absurdity of my being cold after attempting to poach us both alive in the shower. Then, apparently dissatisfied with my blanket technique, he unwrapped the entire thing.
I protested on principle, which naturally accomplished nothing.
He wrapped me again properly, tucking the blanket around my shoulders and sides until I had been transformed into what could only be described as an extremely contented burrito. However, the throw blanket was too small to encompass my entire body. Displeased with this, he reached for the enormous blanket folded over the end of my couch and drew that over me as well, tucking in my legs and toes.
And there I was: nested, warm, ridiculously comfortable, my head in his lap, my damp sapphire curls drying against the blanket.
We talked while the food crisped, his attention wandering to the books lining my shelves and our conversation meandering with the easy aimlessness that comes when no one is trying particularly hard to arrive anywhere.
Then the air fryer dinged, and I began extracting myself from my nest.
“No.”
I stopped.
There are voices men possess for ordinary conversation, and then there was the voice the Olympian employed when he informed me, several octaves lower than anything I could have produced myself, that I was to remain precisely where I was.
“But you brought the food. The least I can do is – ”
One look from him adjudicated the matter.
I frowned. This was not the arrangement. There had been nothing in the fine print stating that I was to be babied for the entire evening.
Nevertheless, grumbling with what remained of my dignity, I stayed in my nest while this impossible immortal went into my kitchen, retrieved the food upon which I had performed the heroic labor of pressing several buttons, divided it between two plates, and brought dinner to the coffee table I had raised earlier into its makeshift dining position.
He offered me the assortment of sauces he had brought with him.
“No, no. I’m good.”
I was perfectly content eating my French fries unadorned at 10:15 at night, which felt decadent enough in its own right.
Then he remembered.
“You like ketchup.”
I looked at him, trying to formulate some protest – perhaps even a harmless white lie – but my thoughts had become too scrambled to produce one convincingly. I stared at him and blinked blankly.
He disappeared into my kitchen again, opened my refrigerator, located the absurdly enormous bottle of ketchup residing inside it, and returned with it.
It was such a tiny thing.
Perhaps that was why it landed so heavily.
I hadn’t reminded him. I hadn’t asked. More importantly, I had already received so much that asking for anything further felt almost grotesquely greedy. I had been adored until I unraveled, bathed, dried, cocooned, served, and now practically fed. I needed nothing else. I would ask for nothing else. Not one preference. Not one favor. Not one additional scrap of his attention.
And somewhere among everything else I had said and done that evening, he had noticed that I liked ketchup.
He had remembered.
But even remembering wasn’t the whole of it. He could have mentioned the ketchup and allowed me to fetch it. He could have thought nothing of my rising and walking the ten feet to my kitchen – in my house, containing my refrigerator and my ridiculous bottle of ketchup – and reasonably expected this grown woman to retrieve her own condiment.
Instead, he simply went and got it for me.
I didn’t know what to say.
By then, however, eating was becoming increasingly theoretical. I nibbled a fry here, half a nugget there, but my eyelids had acquired weights, and my head felt less like a normal anatomical feature than a bowling ball precariously balanced atop my neck. Eventually I gave up holding it there and, with half a nugget still occupying my mouth, lowered my head onto his thigh, curling like a kitten into my nest.
At almost that same moment, the house reached its programmed nighttime setting, and the main lights disappeared. The room fell into darkness except for the tiny lights adorning the doorway and twinkling down the velvet curtains, and the candles still flickering throughout the living room, their glow turning the familiar space strangely ethereal.
I made some drowsy attempt to sit up and call to Alexa to restore the lights.
He refused to let me.
So I stayed where I was, my head heavy against his thigh, wrapped beneath enough blankets to survive a minor ice age while candlelight trembled around the room, and gradually I became heavier – not merely tired, but weighted with a lassitude that seemed to be drawing every vigilant part of me downward.
It felt as though some internal mechanism that ordinarily kept me upright and alert had begun, one cog at a time, to disengage. My muscles relinquished their vigilance. My thoughts lost their edges. Even the room seemed to recede until there was only warmth, candlelight, the solidity of his thigh beneath my cheek, and the peculiar sensation that nothing whatsoever was presently required of me.
I continued making valiant, if increasingly unsuccessful, attempts at dinner. Occasionally he would ask me a question, and I would open my mouth to answer only to discover that the treacherous Olympian had used the opportunity to pop a nugget or French fry into it instead. My startled protests were rendered spectacularly ineffective by the immediate necessity of chewing, which left him looking altogether too smug about his own cleverness.
And because I was already lying there, because getting up had become unimaginable, and because he appeared perfectly content to continue feeding me whenever my efforts at feeding myself became too inefficient for his liking, eventually I stopped fighting that too.
I remember only scraps of our conversation after that: holiday meals, childhood traditions, memories from his life so long ago they seemed to belong to another incarnation. He told me about morning rituals and small family customs that had once been ordinary simply because everyone still did them, but which had quietly disappeared as the years passed and were no longer being carried forward.
That made my drowsy heart ache, because there is a peculiar sadness in realizing that some traditions do not end ceremoniously. No one announces their passing or knows, while living them, that this will be the final time. One year everyone simply gathers as they always have, performs the familiar ritual without thinking to treasure it, and somewhere along the way life changes.
Then one day it exists only because someone remembers.
Sleep had been edging nearer for some time, though I made brave attempts to remain interested in the conversation. It was hardly my fault that the Olympian had cocooned me beneath half the blankets in the house, settled my head in his lap and begun tracing his fingertips absently across my brow.
Really, the man had engineered his own defeat.
My eyes closed for increasingly suspicious lengths of time. His voice continued to croon somewhere above me, and I tried to follow it, but words began separating from their meanings and drifting past without requiring answers. The candlelight blurred amber behind my eyelids. His fingers moved through my hair, across my temple, back again, and eventually I slipped beneath the surface without noticing the moment I went.
What followed survives only in fragments.
At some point we were lying beside one another. I don’t remember him curling behind me, nor when I rolled over and positioned myself within the cradle of his arms. I remember my face nestled against his chest, his arm beneath my head and our legs intertwined beneath the blankets. I remember the rise and fall of his breathing beneath my cheek and, most distinctly, the reassuring weight of his hand resting upon my hip.
And I remember peace.
Not excitement. Not infatuation. Not the intoxicating fiction that this man belonged to me or I to him.
Peace.
I had not felt it all week.
For those suspended hours, there was somebody else guarding the palace. Somebody else stood at the gate. Nothing was getting through him. No one was coming to ask anything of me, require anything from me, wound me, surprise me or hand me another thing to carry. I did not have to anticipate the next problem or remain half-alert for the sound of its approach.
For once, I wasn’t standing watch. I could lay down my weapons and simply exist.
I don’t know how long I slept before his voice found me again. It came from very near and yet so, so far away, low against my ear, telling me that he needed to go.
I remember the brush of his lips against mine, fingers moving through my hair, the tightening of his arms around me before he began the rather unreasonable undertaking of convincing me to wake sufficiently to lock the door behind him.
The door?
My sleep-addled mind could not understand why that should suddenly be my concern. I was safe. Someone else was guarding the gate. Sleep sang its lullaby, and I continued to float away, my cheek nuzzling farther into his chest as though this settled the matter.
Except gradually he truly stirred, and consciousness returned in reluctant increments until I understood that he really was departing.
It must have been near midnight. I kissed him goodbye, still warm and drowsy and wrapped in the remnants of my ridiculous nest, while my Inner Goddess – who had been suspiciously cooperative through the latter part of the evening – abruptly staged a rebellion.
She wanted me to leap into his arms, wrap my legs around him and drag him back toward my bed, stealing a few more hours of everything we had created there: sleep and skin and warmth and perhaps sex again, but mostly that seductive little illusion of intimacy that exists when two bodies remain tangled together until morning.
I understood her.
I wanted it too.
But wanting another hour did not make him mine to hold, and the hour was already ludicrous. What if indulging my own selfish desire to keep him caused problems for him beyond my door?
So I let him go.
One more kiss became another, our bodies crushed together in one final, lingering embrace before his warmth withdrew from mine.
Then I locked the door behind him.
I returned to the abandoned kingdom of blankets upon my couch and crawled back into the warmth he had left there. The palace was mine again. The keys were mine. The gate was mine to guard.
And perhaps that was what bewildered me most about the entire evening.
There was nothing particularly novel about being treated like a princess. I knew that language well enough: doors opened, and dates planned, flowers and beautiful dinners, indulgence and ceremony – all those lovely gestures by which a woman is made to feel considered and adored.
Nor, if I was being fair, were the smaller kindnesses some astonishing revelation. Men had noticed things about me before. I had been cared for before. I had been loved before.
So why had this felt so different?
Perhaps because it had been a hard day.
A hard week.
A hard month.
A hard summer, if I was being honest.
I had been carrying the weight of my own small world for so long that I scarcely noticed its presence anymore – the daily calculations and contingencies, the overthinking and worrying, the endless micromanagement inherent in being a single mother, the thousand invisible things that must be remembered because someone has to remember them.
And for one impossible night, I didn’t.
A sponge passed between my fingers because they were there to be washed. A towel passed between my toes because they were wet. The linens went into the washing machine because they needed washing. I shivered, so a blanket appeared. My foot was cold, so an enormous hand closed around it. An errant lock of hair fell across my temple, and fingers brushed it away.
I kept searching each gesture for the part that belonged to me. Surely I should get up now. Surely I should reciprocate. Surely there was something I ought to do, provide, manage, or consider in return.
And there simply… wasn’t.
For those few hours, I got to be babied and worried over, seen and spoiled, worshipped and adored, while someone else kept reaching for the tiny things before I could.
Maybe that was why it felt so extravagant.
The doors and dates, flowers and beautiful dinners were princess treatment. I had always known that. But, apparently, so was this: being tired and allowed to be tired, being capable without having to prove it, being cared for without immediately looking beyond the care for whatever still needed doing.
For a few hours, I had been allowed to put down the keys while someone else stood at the gate. Nothing had changed hands except care.
When the palace became mine again, I found my weapons exactly where I had left them.
They would be mine to carry again soon enough. For tonight, they could remain upon the floor.
The princess could sleep.
And I did, without stirring, until the first rays of sun breached the horizon.
Until next time, XO. Elsie.
