He rolls over, curling his arm to pull me closer as he levers himself over me. Gazes down at me. His eyes are full of unconditional love, blazing hotter and clearer than the day we said “I do.” Whatever the puzzle is, I do not have a single shred of doubt that this man loves me. I can rest on that. Whatever is going on with him, he loves me, and more now than ever.

I can taste the truth of that as he kisses me; it’s written in the crush of his lips on mine. I can feel it as he touches his forehead to mine, breathing my breath. Times like this, we need no foreplay. No games. He kisses me, and I kiss him, and we wrap up together as if someone had filmed a braid coming loose and then reversed the flow, so you saw the braid twining itself together. Or, perhaps more apropos: a glass shattering on the floor, breaking into a million, million pieces, into glass dust and infinitesimal shards. Filmed, the flow reversed, so the dust assembles into shards, and the shards into jagged chunks, and the chunks puzzle fit themselves into sections and the sections fuse into the whole.

That’s how we make love, in this moment. He kisses me, and I taste the absolute adoration on his tongue. I feel the fullness of his devotion as he fills me, bare within me, and then our love is joined, molded together in this sacred movement. We writhe together in an everlasting ouroboros, whispering love, worshipping each other by name, and the time it takes to reach our mutual completion is an instant, an hour, I neither know nor care, I only find awareness of him pulsing within me and my own shattering around him and our sweat commingling and lips touching and tongues tasting and gasps mashing into tangled groans.

Evening Saturday. Sunset a bloody orange fading to full scarlet.

I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve made love since his return Thursday. We’ve screwed on the back porch with a bottle of wine as the summer fireflies flash orange in the dull heavy suburban Atlanta heat. We’ve fucked in the kitchen, me bent over the island, the marble cold against my bare breasts, his thrusts short and rough. We’ve languorously debauched in the tub, frothy mountains of bubbles revealing our union in brief glimpses of flesh as the water sloshes over the edge.

He’s frantic for me.

Wild.

Rougher than he’s been in a long, long time. Desperate, almost.

As if proving something to me, or to himself.