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She’s dancingin the rain, arms outstretched, twirling around and around, kicking up the spray from the sidewalk. I stand and watch, in awe of my wife. She has her face tilted up toward the downpour, her smile so wide I want to take a picture and frame it. I’d put a little jokey tag next to it, labelled:Happiest Day of Your Life.I know it’s the happiest day of mine.
“Ro! Dance with me!” She halts suddenly, beckoning to me.
I go to her. No matter what crazy suggestion or destination or game she has in store, I’ll always go to her.
“You realize you’re ruining your dress, don’t you?” I ask, pulling her into my arms, though she’s the one leading as we turn in slow circles, drenched by the rain.
She grins up at me. “It’ll dry.”
“I love you,” I say, with a soft laugh.
“You’re regretting marrying me, aren’t you?” She raises up on tiptoe, the raindrops on her lips joining mine.
“Never,” I mumble against her mouth, sweeping her up into my arms. I can’t dance. Terrible at it. So, this is better.
She kicks out her legs and loops her arms around my neck as I carry her up the street toward home. Our home. It’s late and the streets are fairly empty, but we get a few charmed looks from the nighttime stragglers. I hope we look like what we are: a couple in a love of the deepest, rarest kind.
“That was a hell of a night, huh?” She sighs, her eyes closing like she’s remembering it all.
I press a kiss to her sodden hair. “The best.”
“It’s nice to be going home, though,” she mumbles.
“The nicest.”
She chuckles. “Are you just speaking in superlatives?”
“That’s the effect you have on me,” I tell her, turning the corner onto the street where we live.
Honestly, if someone had told me four months ago that I’d be living in the same apartment I got shooed out of, with the woman who shooed me out, I’d have cry-laughed and retreated to a dark corner to lick my wounds. But it’s home, now. It’s familiar. It’s ours. It’s where I make her coffee in the morning, where we burn things that barely resemble dinner, where we eat the inevitable takeout with a new bottle of wine that I’ve picked up for us to try. It’s where we curl up and watch movies, it’s where we go to bed each night, beside one another. It’s where I get reprimanded for leaving my dirty clothes on the floor, where we talk about everything and nothing, where she goes “faraway” sometimes and laughs until she cries more often, and it’s where I hold her hair when she’s been out with the girls on a blue-moon Friday night.
I refuse to let go of her as I juggle my wife and my keys, opening the door and trudging up the stairs, where I perform the same feat to get us into our apartment. Even then, I don’t set her down; I carry her straight to the couch where it all sort of began, and lay her down on the worn leather.
There, propped up on one arm, I gaze down at her. “Do you want to know something?”
“Always,” she replies, caressing my cheek.
“I’m still waiting to wake up in the hospital with some doctor standing over me, telling me that I’ve been in a coma for three months,” I tell her, my throat choked. “None of it seems real. It feels too good to be true.”
She smiles. “My grandma used to say that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. But the older I get, the more I’ve come to realize that she wasn’t completely right. There are always exceptions.” She pulls me closer. “This is one of them.”
She kisses me, and it’s all real again. I don’t have the imagination to conjure up the feeling of her warm, wet skin against mine, or the shiver of pleasure I get when she gently bites my lip.
Smiling, heart full, I kiss her back, sliding my arms beneath her so I can hold her tighter. “I love you,” I whisper.
“I love you more,” she replies, hooking her legs around my waist.
I make a disapproving sound in the back of my throat, but I don’t argue. She can believe she loves me more if she likes, but it’s not true. I intend to show her that, for a lifetime.
Wrapping my arms around her, I pull her up until she’s in my lap, gazing down at me, running her hands through my hair. She bends her head and catches my mouth with hers, her fingertips unfastening my shirt buttons while my hands move across the curves of her, my head dipping to graze a kiss up her neck and down between her breasts. Through ragged breaths, she peels the damp fabric off me and moves to my pants, shimmying them down my legs until I haven’t got a stitch on me.
She sits back, giving me a funny look. “Is something wrong?”
I have to laugh, which only makes her look more worried. “I… don’t know how to take that off without ripping it,” I confess, putting up my hands in surrender. “Even dry, there are a thousand buttons.”
The concern shifts into a grin as she stands up and turns her back to me, revealing the long line of pearl buttons that follow the curve of her spine. “Then, you’d better get started.”
I get to my feet and begin to unwrap her, letting my lips distract her from my clumsiness. I savor her warm, damp skin, kissing her neck, her shoulders, her back, her lips when she turns to greet them. The scent of her is like the air after a storm, and it’s more intoxicating than any perfume.
