012: Rafe

Loving Aubrey....

Pretty sure I will not get tired of this.

There is something about her--- this wild innocence--- unencumbered by expectations--- the thought that she hadn't been with anyone else---wasn't comparing me to anyone else--- gave me license to lose inhibition.

Get a room? Are you kidding? Didn't we have someplace we had to be right now?

And then--- who cares?

This is us.

This is our life. And we're making it. We're cherishing it.

I took her once--- and then again, loving the way she forgot all about pressing engagements and was with me in this moment--- needing me as much as I needed her. I just wanted to please her--- meet all her dreams and fantasies.

We lay entwined--- and I mean entwined--- crazy on the bed---- having lost the covers and the pillows and torn it all up. She was fondling me---- keeping me aroused, even though I was completely drained and completely satisfied. It was more like she just wanted to touch me absently.

In this relationship, there was no one else.

Memories swirled through me in possessive streams of light and awareness. Every time I'd held myself back--- holding her naked in my arms out on the lawn at Kell's after skinny dipping in freezing cold water--- that hot tub experience, where she'd flat out laid it all on the line--- she was done placating me--- done with the lust of my early courtship----

Nothing compared to now.

Her leg was across my chest. I tickled her with gentle fingers and heard her sigh, then pulled her calf up and kissed it lingeringly.

"You can get a room with me anytime, Rafe Stryker." She murmured in her throaty, after sex voice that I loved.

"It was worth it." I answered as she rolled over, and straddled me, moving rhythmically against me, even though it was over--- and we were satiated.

I sat up, holding her to me carefully.

"I love you." She said kissing my lips, playing with my hair.

"I love you." I kissed her back, swallowing hard against the lump of wonder and awe and gratitude in my throat. That this amazing, lovely, fresh, innovative, inspiring woman would agree to be mine forever---- it was almost too much to bear.

Her eyes grew anxious as she traced the contours of my face.

I didn't want to explain. I traced her features too. "Back in the store. What were you thinking that made you cry?"

"That we needed a bodyguard, and that made me miss Jake."

I sighed looking down at her lovely breasts, kissing her between them as I thought of all we had gained and all we had lost.

"The--- memorial is----when?"

"Next week." She replied.

"At Rosewood?"

"No, here, on the beach." She was tracing the tattoos, looking over my shoulder at the ones on my back, which pressed her very tightly to me. I didn't understand her attraction to the tattoos---- I don't think it had always been that way. She openly declared she didn't believe in marking the body--- the whole our body is a temple thing--- she ascribed to it. But by the same token, she never let a moment pass that she wasn't tracing them with those lithe fingers, or draping her hair over them--- perusing them.

"You still feeling guilty?" We'd been to five or six counseling sessions where this had been a topic for both of us--- the guilt over what had happened.

"I don't think its guilt I feel. I understand the ramifications of what happened and how we reacted was how people react to trauma, and to extreme pressure and war like situations. It was a battle--- I understand that now." She was kissing my shoulder where the ink on that side was intricately dark, covering more than it revealed.

"What is it then?"

"I miss him?" She said this with a question as she sat up on my lap, her knees bent over us, my hands now dropped to her bottom, pressing her close to me.

"That makes sense."

"I miss Angelee."

"Yes."

"I miss the babies---- all the sweet, tiny, little babies." She hung her head and tears dripped down my back as I cradled her carefully. The counselor had told us to be there for each other for these times. It wasn't going to be easy. This was grief, and grief could not be rushed. I was here for her... she had been here for me. Countless nights now--- she'd held me as I woke shivering and shaking with nightmares.

I couldn't imagine what she went through.

But a thought suddenly occurred to me. "Aubrey...." I wasn't sure how to broach this subject. It made sense, but I know it wasn't what she wanted to hear.

"Honey, maybe it's time to rethink the line of work you are in."

She swallowed hard, and I felt it against my neck.

"I am not pushing you to change careers. Not at all. If you feel that neonatal surgery is still your vocation, then I support you and love you all the more for it. Always, Aubrey. Your skills amaze me." I swallowed hard against that searing pain that making her late this morning had caused. And I tamped it down into the roaring background of our internal/ external issues.

She didn't answer at all. I wasn't sure she wanted to hear those words just now. I had thought them a couple of times, but was hesitant to bring them up. She was a damn fine surgeon with half her life invested in it.

"I don't know what I want to do." She said quietly, finally, voicing something that was obviously hard for her.

"You don't have to make that decision right this minute. I am just slightly concerned about the amount of death surrounding you and how it is affecting you."

"I know." She said and squirmed. "I have to pee." I let her go, and laid back, my arms framing my head as I tried to think what this Aubrey would do if she wasn't being her chosen profession. She identified so strongly with it, it might really drastically change her to give it up.

I heard the water running in the shower and smiled, thinking how weird it would be to shower and then put our clothes back on and simply waltz out of here, having done the proverbial "get a room" when you're too horny to wait thing. Our clothes were scattered all over the floor, so I rounded them up, arranged them right side out and then folded them and put them in the bathroom, then I pulled back the shower curtain and sidled into the shower. Aubrey was lathering her hair with her eyes closed.

How could I be expected to resist that scene?

*****