It was well after midnight, well past the point that they had ascended upstairs, and intertwined themselves on the double bed. They slept back to back, an indicator of the mood, as some reluctance had gently undone some things...he imagined ribbons of two different colors that had been tightly tied. Now they were dangling, just barely touching each other.
Her house in Wakefield faced north, so that the slow arc of the sun traced itself from right to left across her yard. The prevailing winds usually came in the opposite direction, westward...so it was usually a surprise to be immersed in a storm...you couldn't watch it come in like a distant ship that starts like that dot on the horizon.
So as he had listened to her breathing become a rhythm, his awareness of her nearby and being asleep, he was almost there when the slight rumble came from outside. Hesitant to jostle the bed he slowly turned and soon he was flat on his back, watching the ceiling, waiting for the storm to arrive.
It wasn't too long.
He counted the beats between the flashes and the thunder and could tell it was moving quickly towards them. She was still asleep as he glanced over and saw her shoulders rising slightly with her sleep breathing. He wanted to say something, wanted to gently wake her...but in this peace before the evening exploded he stayed quiet...wanting her to keep these moments to her...not him.
The room suddenly lit up like a thousand floodlights flashed once and then immediately turned off, while in that blinding blink a bomb went off in the boom of a thunder cracking the evening in two. He felt her body jump slightly and she let out a small almost child-like noise. It had scared her.
He flipped to his right and put his arm around her.
She didn't resist.
For the next 20 minutes he held her, and when the blinking whites from the weather finally stopped she was back asleep against him.
Finally he reluctantly went to sleep...trying to dream exactly what he was doing with her right then and there.
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