story - morning

He lay facing her in bed, her soft breath reaching to caress his face.  The faint edges of sunrise were peering around the curtains, but she slept on deeply, peacefully, while he drank her in.  She was curled up stiffly and, despite the closeness of their heads, his body lay angled away, not touching.  He liked to wake early to watch her sleep, to treasure this daily mote-kissed vision before the noise pulled them out of bed and shattered their haven walls of glass and forced them to acknowledge many things other than themselves.  The loose tendrils of dark hair that framed her face and brushed the nape of her neck, the thin, high arch of her delicate brow, the way her slender fingers rested so lightly on the stark angles of her collarbone---all of these things he noticed.  They settled gently one on top of the other in the cavity of his ribs where he felt a heavy, dull ache.  He had never believed he could love like this.  

Cautious, less afraid of waking her than of trespassing into her forbidden realm of dreams, his hand hesitated in the space between their heads.  He tucked a wisp behind her ear and gently traced the jaw line from ear to chin -- a sharp, pointed chin that always had something to say when all words had been exhausted, defiant.  Her eyelids fluttered gently at his touch and he bent in quickly to brush her lips.  Her eyes opened, startled in the blurred middle ground between reality and dreams, then a warm, tired smile of recognition.  He put his hand on her hip, rolled her over into his arms and kissed behind her ear to the sound of her surprised laughter.  He wrapped his arms around her slight frame and felt her relax into him, her shoulder blades against his chest.  "We should get up," she protested half-heartedly, but she only slid into him more, her body moving with the gentle rise and fall of his chest.

"Not yet," he whispered.  "Not yet."