Imagine Rick coming back from a particularly gruelling assignment, where he was snapping photographs of a natural disaster or something. You wait up for him, but fall asleep reading in the armchair. You’re woken with the gentlest kisses, the softest grazing of his lips against the back of your hands, which hold the back of your book to your chest. Blinking your eyes awake you murmur something like, hey stranger, and onto your skin he replies with something like, hi ladybug. You move your book to the side-table and make to sit up, but from his knees before you he hushes you. No, stay, he says, stay stay, and eases your blanket down your body as he kisses up it. Up your chest, the bottom of your throat, up the side of your neck, along your jaw to your chin. He smells citrusy-fresh, and when your lips connect he tastes like it too—like the orange he ate when his plane landed. He slides his palms beneath you, wrapping you up in his arms, and the relief: he’s overjoyed, overwhelmed almost to tears after all he’s witnessed. He kisses all over your face desperately. He just wants to hold you, he says. He just wants to feel you. Hold your body. Feel your skin on his: even just your fingertips, pressing urgently against his to remind him that you’re here and you’re real. He kisses you with eager, slow kisses, once… twice… and a long, third time… before he nestles, one ear to your chest, over the top of your heart to count the beats. You press kisses to the top of his head, run one hand up and down his back and rub circles into his nape—letting him come home.