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November 7, 2015
A bright, twinkling rainbow. Something tickling along my jaw. I smell a hint of fruit and feel…a face. Her hair tickles my neck. Warmth floods through me. I crack my eyes and see the Christmas lights. And I realize she is Gwenna.
“Wake up, you…” I feel her soft brow against my beard, her warm lips pressed against my chin. “I brought you dinner in bed,” she whispers in a husky voice.
Even in my groggy state, her voice makes me hard. I reach out, wrapping an arm around her neck and pulling her down beside me on the mattress.
I let out a soft sigh and turn from my back onto my side, where I can wrap myself around her.
Gwenna laughs. I like her laugh. It’s rough and unrepentant: nothing veiled, nothing held back.
“You woke up snuggly,” she murmurs as I wrap an arm around her.
I woke up wanting to be inside her.
“You cooked?” I ask her in a sleep-graveled voice.
Before she can answer, I hook my leg over one of hers and move closer to her, close enough to wrap my arm around her.
“This feels good,” she whispers.
Gwenna pulls my head against her chest and starts to stroke my nape and shoulders. I fix my attention on the sweet sensation. Gentle fingers… Her other hand is wrapped around my shoulder, holding me against her.
My eyes feel hot. I don’t know why…she keeps on doing this. Why does she keep doing this?
The way she touches me… I inhale slowly, carefully, around the lump in my throat. I clench my jaw before I try to swallow. Gwenna’s fingers cut a slow path through my hair.
I mean to whisper “thank you,” but I groan instead.
“I love it that you like this so much,” she whispers.
All I hear is “so much.” Do I like her soft touch more than someone else would?
I feel her lips against my forehead. She keeps on stroking me. She kisses my right eyelid, then the left.
“Doesn’t work,” I whisper.
“What?” I feel her pull away from me, see her frown down on me. “What doesn’t work?”
I inhale slowly, my eyes on her waist. “Left eye. There was a clot there. A stroke. Just the eye.” My voice sounds rough, and I wonder in a distant way why right now is the time I chose to tell her this.
My gaze returns to her face, finding it troubled. I look into her eyes and feel my insides go cold.
“You can’t see at all from it?”
I blink down at the bedding, shake my head.
The moment spreads out around us, rippling like a stone’s punch through the surface of the water, slowly fading back to clear and calm. It doesn’t even last that long, although it feels as if it does.
Gwen’s palm brushes my cheek. She strokes my hair off my forehead, letting her nails tickle along my hairline.
“I didn’t know,” she murmurs.
I shut my eyes and focus on the way my ribs expand as I inhale. I’ve laid alone so many times and tried to pay attention to my body. To tell myself I’m still alive. I’m here, not there. The one thing that I always wanted most was to feel someone else’s arms around me. Thinking of it now, with her beside me, brings a feeling of contentment, followed quickly by a bite of shame.
“I think this is probably the wrong response,” she whispers in the dark, “but after ‘I’m so sorry you lost some of your sight,’ I’m kind of tempted to say how amazing it is. I mean…I couldn’t even tell. When we were sparring… How’d you do it?”
“It would be harder with someone else,” I say after a minute. “I couldn’t fight another Operator. Not most of them.”
