How it's evolving

We had dinner outside in the rain, under a maroon awning that offered the perfect amount of coverage. We ate hot dishes of beef and noodles, sipped warm sake and I told him complex stories about travel and old loves. We had the best table in the whole place, so many people cramped on the other side of humid glass, missing out on the electric feel in the air. He insisted the wind was coming from the sea last night; to me it smelt like the earth let out a sigh of relief as it drank up all that rain.

He is becoming softer around me. More and more often he looks at me with deep love and with longing; something that he guarded against showing too readily even a few months ago, even when I looked at him with an urgent desire that made me feel deeply ashamed by its insistence. During dinner, he gave me that look he does when he is totally enamored with our dialogue, when I am adorable and suave and sophisticated but fail to see any of it. He looked at me like this several times and I kept playfully busting his balls about it. He smirked and said “I’ve turned a corner”. And I smirked and said “Yeah but how many damn corners does this fucking shape have?” and we laughed because even if I don’t know what I’m talking about I can still speak about one of its truths.

This is not the first time he has mentioned turning a corner. It’s been an ongoing theme of the past two years. Turning a corner means something in him has shifted and in the process it gives more room for our relationship; it gives more me more significance in his life. There always feels like there is an imperative underlying our relationship and I’ve felt it for years before him. This is not to suggest that I think we are fated in a fairy tale kind of way. I think we are a call to arms for each other, an imperative to act to the best of our abilities embodied in each other’s flesh. I think there is an imperative specifically because our relationship can be so challenging, that it asks us both be patient and flexible in a way that neither one of us has ever had. In a way, turning a corner is like he’s submitting to his own advancement towards the imperativeness of our relationship. I just smile when he says he’s turned a corner, the way anyone would smile when someone else finally comes around to see reason. I try not to smile with too much “I told you so” but sometimes that impulse is really hard to resist.

After a 3 hour dinner soaked in conversation, we parked outside my apartment and lingered in his car. He cried in a way that rarely happens but when it does, it reveals the underlying reason why I love him so deeply. He produced all the tears that he never shed during a part of history that warranted deep release. And when I touched him, I cried too, moved by experiences that happened decades before we met. When he cries like this and when he cannot find his words, when he is so overcome with his humanity and humility, when he is fraught with feeling because he knows more than a human body could possibly express, that is when I become aware that I’ve searched for a man like this my whole life. A man made of consideration, who does the right thing at the right time, but who is also not in denial of how hard it is to live like that. A man who sometimes cries decades after a hardship because he finally feels everyone he cares about is in a safe enough position so that he can release. When he cries like that I cry in part because it fills me with relief: I cannot believe a man like this exists and that he is such an important part of my life.

When we went upstairs, bleary eyed and red-faced, he put his cock inside my pussy and within three thrushes he said “I love you baby”. He said it with such relief. This is new, or at least the announcement of his love has never come this early in our sex. It has typically come later: a reflection to my own unraveling when I scream how much I love him as he glides in and out of me. He said it into my open mouth, as if I could digest his words and build parts of my flesh from his affection. He pushed his cock in deep and held it there, confessed to masturbating to me all week, wanting my body and its response to his all week, wanting what I can give him that no other woman can. He said “Hold me, hold onto me” and I wrapped all my limbs on him, my hips thrusting up to meet his. My legs are the perfect length to meet around the middle of his gyrating torso and I remembered how when we first started having sex he said something along the line of how constrictive my legs felt like that. He didn’t use those words, per se. But after that first time we had sex, I acknowledged to myself that my legs can never extract their strength, that when I use them to hold onto him, they REALLY hold onto him. When we first started having sex, he wasn’t ready for that, he was almost diametrically opposed to it. I had to let him fuck me as if I had no power to hold him in place.

Yesterday, we were genital on genital, mouth on mouth, and my legs, with their impossible tree-trunk determination, kept his hips firmly locked with mine. “Fuck”, I said into his mouth, “I love you too…”

Then we lost track of time and ourselves in each other’s bodies. Even if so much has changed, that’s the way it’s been since it began…