This morning, I lingered in bed a while, wishing you were beside me. The day is overcast, filtering the light like a washed-out photograph, or a dream itself, and I thought of how you would seem like a soft, imagined scene in some movie when I woke and saw you there, your hair across the pillow, the slow rise and fall of your shoulders with each breath. The sheet would have slipped in the night, tangling around your waist, and even the slight shadows cast by the hollow of your neck, by your nipples, by one arm as, without waking, you stretched it above your head languorously. I might bend close – close enough that your breath would warm my cheek – but I would not dare, for many minutes, to caress your soft skin, your delicious, inviting curves, in any way save with my eyes.
But how my eyes would touch you, though – gazing with such exquisite longing at your slightly-parted lips, at your cheeks, pink with the flush of sleep, at the ridge of your collarbone like the edge of some perfect beach, and the slope downward to the rising waves of your breasts – and the curve of your belly, half-surfaced from beneath the sheets and so desirable. I would watch, holding that moment as long as possible, but I would also feel the stirrings of a need that could only be held back for so long, a need rising from the depths inside me as surely as its outward evidence pushed eagerly against the sheet covering
my
body from the waist down.
There would be so many delicious ways to wake you, it would be difficult to decide. My lips would hover over your mouth, your earlobe, the curve of your shoulder; my hand would be millimetres from cupping one breast, the side of my index finger so close to your nipple that it would begin to stiffen just from the change in the air; I would roll to my side ready to slip one leg over yours, beneath the sheets. But then, just before taking any of these next steps, I would notice how far your legs had spread apart, how easy it would be to lift the sheet quietly and kneel between; and there would be no other choice to make.
The waking world would begin to call to you, a slow, indefinite surfacing from your dreams into that half-life where fantasy and reality intertwine, from the moment the sheet slid aside. The cool air would raise goosebumps along your thighs, and your eyes would flutter to almost opening, then settle again, over and over like a butterfly newly emerged into the light. Normally, you would reach out with your legs, blindly seeking the edge of the bedclothes to slip back beneath – but there would be another sensation distracting you pleasurably, the delicate satisfaction of a need that only became more certain the closer you came to the waking world.
Would that be the first sense you were sure of, my darling, before your eyes focused and you could hear the soft gasp of my breath in between diving to the depths of your growing wetness? Or perhaps in the confusion of coming to life, it would appear to you as some deep, violet glow, as the taste of salt on your lips, as things slowly sorted themselves out. Perhaps your body would already be reacting, hips rolling, hands covering your breasts, before you fully realized my tongue, tracing each delicate fold of you, dipping into your nectar as surely and deftly as any feeding hummingbird, riding the throb of your increasing need – and my hands on you, fingertips stroking from halfway to the sensitive depths of your inner thighs, and as you lifted your hips, sliding further back, cupping your bottom in both palms, teasing at the cleft as you began to writhe and offer yourself more fully to me?