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Treasure to Me

RDR2 | Relationship: Arthur Morgan x Female Reader | Rating: Mature

Summary: Reader struggles with severe body image issues and low self-worth and loves Arthur but is convinced he’s too good for her. Arthur does his best to comfort her and set her straight.

Tumblr Fic Masterlist | Ao3 | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

*Comments always welcome!*

Chapter 3

The morning after your and Arthur’s very first night together, though you haven’t yet opened your eyes, you wake to the feeling of a feather-soft nuzzling behind your jaw, just beneath your ear lobe. When you slowly open your eyelids to the sight of yellow ribbons of light sliding between the dainty eyelet-adorned curtains of the hotel window, you realize it’s Arthur’s nose and lips, eager to brush your mind with wakefulness and greet you with love. And you can’t resist slowly smiling.

For just a moment you watch the minuscule bits of dust lazily drift through the slat of yellow light—yellow light? Daylight? How long had you two slept in?

You turn onto your back to find the love of your life gazing down at you with a grin from where he hovers, propped up by his elbow. Once you turn, he rests his big hand on your sheet-draped abdomen, where it seems to fall naturally.

And when you look into his bright, gleaming blue-green eyes, your heart flutters against your ribs. You feel so lucky yet again to be given this—the most amazing gift of his love, and the chance to make him happy, to make sure he’s well taken care of.

“Mornin’, darlin’,” he murmurs.

“Mornin’,” you mumble very groggily in response, with a growing grin.

Though his lips are still pulled into a relaxed smile, he leans in close and softly smoothes them against yours before making the quiet little tell-tale smacking sound of a kiss.

You close your eyes and reach your arm up to rake your fingers through the thick tawny hair at the back of his head, and soon enough he captures your lips in a deeper kiss. You sigh into him and draw your hand down his neck until your forearm drapes across his bare shoulder. It’s only with that meeting of skin that you realize you’re both still very, very naked.

Your eyelids simply slide open at the realization, and your awareness grows that you’re both still tangled in nothing but the hotel’s crisp, velvety-soft sheet.

Once again, you close your eyes and focus on the feeling of him holding you, on his warm presence, on the comfort of his solid embrace.

He softens the kiss once again, planting multiple soft little pecks to your lips as he draws away with a newly-brightened and contented smile. But he remains close enough that you can feel his breath on your upper lip and near the corner of your mouth.

“Ain’t had a mornin’ this lazy since...” he pauses, then finally wheezes a chuckle. “I can’t remember when.”

“Well good,” you say firmly, trying for a mock-serious tone. “I’d say honeymooners deserve it. And you get another several days of it.” With him still hovering, just once you bat your eyelashes slowly, with sweetness and a bit of demure wryness as you sing, “Whatever are you gonna do with yourself, Mr. Morgan?”

He slowly grins, wider and wider as his eyes wade down over your face, and it send prickles dancing all across your skin. “I could think of a few things…” he mumbles low, a sprightliness springing into his ever-so-handsome crows’ feet, “Mrs. Morgan.”

Your heartrate skips a tick at the sound of the name. It’s the first anyone’s ever called you it. “Could you?” you almost laugh, breaking the demure charade you’d had to work hard for.

“Mm-hm,” he hums his reply against your lips before drawing back and pulling up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed with a bit of a grunt. As he does so, the sheet trickles down his side, exposing his muscular back, plump rear, and the side of his thigh to you. “Startin’ with breakfast. You hungry?”

“Sure,” you reply lazily with a warm smile, keeping your eyes on him from your spot on the mattress. Wherever his skin never sees the sun is very pale; and it looks as smooth as ivory and soft and supple as baby skin too, which fascinates you. Your eyes jump back up to his. “But ain’t it a bit late for breakfast by now?”

“Only if you’re goin’ by the demands a’ the world’s clock,” he smirks at you. “But like you said—we’re goin’ by the honeymooners’ clock.”

You silently mime a grinned ‘ah’ in response, which satisfies him and sends him turning to sit and hunch forward from his new perch on the bench at the end of the bed for his crumpled clothes.

“‘Sides. I was thinkin’ we might fish for our breakfast,” he remarks with his back turned to you.

“Fish?” you perk up.

“Uh-huh.”

And you recognize the buoyant tone easily, for it’s been enough of a diamond in the rough: Arthur Morgan is happy.

He knows very well that fishing with him is one of your favorite things in the world to do. Though you’ll eat it, you don’t have a noteworthy over-fondness for the taste of fish itself; it’s much more the whole experience with him that you dearly take to heart and enjoy.

He turns his head to the side—not enough for him to get you in his sights, but you can see half of his face as he looks down at the bed sheets behind him. “Think you’re up for that?”

“Oh yes,” you quickly respond, earning you an adorable wheezed chuckle as he faces forward again.

“Thought so.”

Taking an extra moment of sublime rest in bed, you stretch your arms and arch your feet to deliciously stretch your calves, and your body won’t let you forget a nice, long yawn. With Arthur still turned and gathering his clothes where he sits, you throw the sheet off, push up, and scoot to the edge of your side of the bed.

When you do, you feel something slippery and thick—unusual to you—deep between your thighs. You look down and dip two fingers into your sex, drawing them out to find an abundance of something slick with a slight smell to it that isn’t particularly appealing. Running your thumb through it over your fingertips, it hits you. You realize that even after you and Arthur wiped and tidied yourselves up a bit last night, you now seem to be steadily dripping a bit with what he’d left inside you, like a very slowly trickling reservoir. You hadn’t at all expected it. It’s almost like he’s part of you now, and the evidence is right there inside you.

“You bleedin’? Any blood?”

Hearing his voice you look up at him, realizing that he’d noticed at least a portion of the time you’d spent quietly inspecting this new aspect of your married life. You don’t quite have time to flush hot at the idea; you see that he looks a bit concerned, the space on his forehead between his brows a bit wrinkled.

“Oh, no. No blood. It’s not that,” you reply hurriedly, lightly.

Thankfully, he accepts your assurance on that account. “M-kay…” he mumbles in a light, meandering tone. “You, uh…” he clears his throat, “you sore? Sore at all?”

As you try not to cover the rolls of your bare belly with your arm, you timidly nod with a smile and respond breathily, “Now that you mention it, yes.”

It almost reminds you of the tinny soreness you could get behind your knees after suddenly walking a very long distance non-stop without having stretched beforehand. Only, it was in the valleys down between your thighs instead.

Again, you notice his attention and concern. “I’m all right, Arthur, truly. It’s not that bad. I’m just surprised. Never felt anything quite like it.”

Arthur watches you go back to looking down and closely inspecting something between your thighs as your hair drapes between your face and his gaze, almost as if you were at ease in the familiar stillness of your girlhood bedroom. Dipping your hands past where he can see them, a muted but piqued interest mixed with alert and uncertainty display themselves in your posture.

“Is it—” he begins, before he’s had time to think better of it; and the words have already sprung out of him. When you quickly and expectantly look back up at the sound, he’s already rubbing the back of his neck with a winced look gently pinching half of his face. He takes a breath and allows the tension in his back to release. “Is it…me?”

When you register his meaning, your expression smoothes, and you nod. “Yes.”

He quietly nods with you, then gets up to dampen a washcloth from the water in the porcelain pitcher at the vanity. Returning to the bench at the end of the bed rather than encroaching your space to comfortably and privately inspect yourself, he turns at the waist and reaches over to hand it to you.

You accept it gratefully and dab and wipe yourself again, just as you had the night before. And though lacking a sense of distaste, you wonder how long this reservoir of sorts tends to last.

When you look up again, Arthur’s handing your chemise to you. You take it and toss it over your head, running your arms into the sleeves. As you watch him pull the legs of his long johns up, stand, climb into the arms, and sit again, it occurs to you that you haven’t seen the fullness of his naked body in bright daylight, as you’re both drenched in now. Haven’t ever gotten a look at his more intimate areas.

It’s also slowly dawning on you that Arthur has more experience at the different aspects of all these intimate things than you do. From the way he discusses it, understands it, quite possibly much more.

So, though you’re still in only your sheer shift, you turns your legs onto the bed, scoot yourself down to its foot, past it, and onto the bench beside him. “Can I ask you somethin’?”

“‘Course,” he softly smiles as he buttons the front of his long johns. “I got no secrets from you, sweetheart.”

“How many people have you…” you bring your lips inward for a moment, unsure how to word it while paying due respect to him and all the life he’s lived, “been intimate with?”

It catches him off guard just a bit, and you can tell by the way his movements slow, until he finally stops and sits still. “‘S a fair question. I think you mean ‘slept with’.”

You silently shrug your shoulders high and drop them. “It’s intimate for me.”

“Sure. I understand what you mean.” His nods are large at first, then softly taper into smaller ones as he looks at you. “More times than not though, weren’t nothin’ intimate about it,” he says as he looks down at the floor in front of him and tips his head. “Dutch thought it was…part a’ becomin’ a man. So my first time…I was seventeen. And he made it out that even that was late. Workin’ woman. Can’t say I cared much for it.”

You watch as he slides his left hand over the side of his jaw until his fingers rest there, without any spaces, as if he’s holding a sore tooth. You realize that you wish you were looking at his wedding band flashing in the daylight against his tanned skin there; and just as soon you remember the two of you haven’t gotten around to getting rings in your hurried focus to actually get married.

He gives an airy chuckle. “I was a nervous mess. And afterwards, I felt right dirty. Usin' her like that… But the deed was done, and Dutch was satisfied my…horizons were…widened,” he mumbles and shifts his jaw in his mouth to the left and right, just a bit. “Then Mary an’ I, we never…” He glances at you, momentarily conscious of hurting you with talk of a past love. But he stills himself, actively reminding himself how comfortable he is with you, how deeply he trusts you, and takes one more deep breath, filling his lungs and letting it out.

“She wanted to wait for the weddin’ night. ‘Course that never came along,” he continues. “Then after she an’ I parted ways, I was so forlorn an’ lonely… And it just… It was the thing to do, I guess,” he drawls, “visit the cathouse. Only ever went a couple times, just twice. Dutch made it seem natural, part a’ life. And he likes to have his fun, but I…just…couldn’t take much more of it. Twisted me up. Sure, in the moment, the loneliness was bearable. But after, I always felt a hundred times worse—just wretched. So I stopped.”

“Then there was Eliza.” He looks down at his hand, pressing his right thumb into his left palm.

You both know he’s shared this part of his life with you. Gone into initial explanation about it just the once. But that was more opening up than he’d ever done with anybody. Ever. You’d been spellbound by his trust in you, by his story of fatherhood, shredding fear, lost loves, crushing guilt, and burying sorrow. And like printing their names in ink on the air before him—Eliza, Isaac—he’d spoken it to you, for the first time since it’d happened.

After that, the few instances Eliza and Isaac came up in discussion between the two of you had been by way of other routes, and with fewer concrete details. Sharing what fatherhood had meant to him, in his soul. Why, at the time, he’d felt so deep in his bones that staying away was the best way to show his love for them both and desire to protect them both. How the experience and the loss had solidified his conviction that familial and romantic love simply weren’t meant to be part of his life, at least not the way he’d been living it. Not only that, but that he hadn’t deserved them, and that he still felt he didn’t deserve that love at all.

And in response, each time you’d worked to softly knead those shards out of him. To nurture him in the direction of hope, like a seedling needs ministering towards the sun.

Part of that had been encouraging him to take better care of himself, to believe that he was worth doing so. Getting better sleep, regularly eating sustenance of substance, living less recklessly, and even saying no to things he felt were sinister, degrading, and haunting—like beating poor souls bloody for Strauss til his own knuckles were bruised to a pulp. You’d been over the moon when he’d held his ground and stopped allowing himself to be called upon to do the very thing that made him feel so terribly guilt-ridden and worthless, back in Blackwater.

“She was the only one I didn’t have to pay,” he admits with an airy chuckle, and you’re brought back to the present topic of Eliza. “I think early on, it had a lot to do with bein’ young—excited an’ hungry for affection, you know,” his voice ambles quietly as he nods. “Then I knocked her up, an’…we found ourselves in this strange situation. ‘Cause I cared far too much for her an’ Isaac to risk their lives by involvin’ ‘em in mine. Thought that’s what love was when it came to me, that it was the best solution—stayin’ away. So I tried to keep myself away as much as I could bear to.” His eyes glaze a moment as he looks at nothing. “‘Course…in the end…wasn’t that just the very opposite a’ what I shoulda done.”

Your chest aches and stings fiercely for him, and a lump lodges itself in your throat as you reach out and curl your fingers into the pocket of his relaxed palm. You gently squeeze his hand and softly grace your thumb over the ridges of his knuckles.

And he stirs, as if from a horrible daydream. Glances at you, tries to smile, and brings his other hand to rest over yours. “Anyways, whenever I visited… Whenever she an’ I were together, we couldn’t seem to resist each other, couldn’t seem to hold our hearts back from each other. Couldn’t seem to…be smart. And I think what we had…between us…it really did grow into a lot more, ‘specially over the years.”

Swallowing and blinking, you smile brightly and work to speak without a deeply moved tone. But when you finally hear yourself, you think you’ve surely failed. Though you do manage it quietly: “You loved each other.”

When he looks at you, his smile is a bit whisked away—dreamlike and nostalgic. “Yeah. Yeah…” and taking a small breath, he’s very quiet when he looks at the floor and adds, “We did.”

Then after a few moments, he takes one more deep breath and happily returns to the present. “And that’s the whole of it,” he concludes in a light tone. “Far less excitin’ than one might think.” His eyes dart up to capture yours again. “But I don’t think of any a’ them when we’re together,” he shakes his head. “I want you to know that.” His gaze is firm and holds yours, assuring you and awaiting your confirmation of understanding.

“‘Course, Arthur,” you whisper as you smile and tip your head.

“And I don’t want you bein’ embarrassed about any experience you’re feelin’ you lack. Most of all, I want you to know without a doubt that none a’ this takes away from the love I got for you, and what we got. Hm?” He starts to grin, and intentionally grows it wider, hoping to spur yours. “I’m jus’ crazy about you, darlin'. Just head over heels. And I always will be.”

The smile that softly lands across your lips indeed feels tethered to his.

You know you can’t expect Arthur’s first love to be his only one, the way it is for you. You don’t at all begrudge Arthur the love he’s experienced over the years or find jealousy in your heart over it. On the contrary, you’re comforted at the way it demonstrates to you the capacity for love he’s always had and just how big his heart still is. And though you know he deeply respects the memory of the family he’s lost, he’s made it clear to you that their memory is just that—a memory. That it doesn’t compete in any way with the whole of his heart that you hold. And though you’re continually struggling to wholeheartedly believe and rest in it, he wants nothing more than for you to be secure in the deep love he has for you, that lives and burns unending inside him.

When the two of you finally get dressed and make it out on a nearby lake in a canoe, you close your eyes and soak in the warmth of the sunshine on your skin like a parched sponge. You tilt your head up and gaze at the vast, bright canvas above you from beneath the flat brim of your brown suede rancher hat. The sky is cerulean blue and untainted by clouds, the water itself as brilliant as a royal sapphire. The gentle sway of the canoe above the small lapping waves takes some getting used to, since the two of you have almost always done your fishing on land. But he’d been uncharacteristically insistent that trying something new would be fun; and you’re grateful just to be enjoying nature with him, the two of you side by side.

Another change you notice is the fact that you two are fishing right smack in the middle of the day. Arthur always said fishing odds were best in the cool mist of day—either early morning or sunset—and you knew him to be right. But you guess he’s taking this “honeymooners’ clock” thing seriously, and you smile at the thought. Throughout this whole week, no one would be telling either of you what to do or when to do it. He was bent on carrying out the notion of the both of you getting to leisurely enjoy your newfound togetherness.

It was the main reason you loved fishing with him so much anyways. It was a chance to share it all, and need no words. To only watch Arthur’s big fingers carefully tie off the fine fishing line to hooks for you both, to watch him nip off the excess between his teeth. To fight the squirming nightcrawlers onto the ends of your hooks, covering your fingertips with oozing black mud. To take in the sight of the glittering crystals across the placid surface of the water. To listen to the tranquil, rhythmic trickle or lap of it. To rest in the knowledge that the liquid glass itself all around you was on its way to give life to everything. To deeply breathe the crisp, cool air, filled with the heady fragrance of pine trees and honeysuckle blossoms. To listen to the pleasant warble and trill of birds, or the low hoots of owls. To drink in the stillness and harmony of the boundless wilderness around you both. Even the small stirs and plops of curious fish meeting the water’s surface and dipping to cover themselves with it again is a delight to behold.

There was a singular beauty and an almost spiritual level of union in it—letting the mingled wonder and peace float down over you like a sheet, and partaking in it together. It was a beauty you’d both come to acknowledge needed to be regularly cherished.

As you bask in the sunlight and simply smile out at the water, you know without a doubt that Arthur feels it too.

After you’ve caught a second small trout for your lunch, you’re looping its bottom lip on your metal stringer when you feel the canoe itself begin to dip and bob beneath you. Your gaze darts up to the water and then the sky, but it’s still perfectly clear—no clouds, and no sign of a turbulent storm. You then naturally turn to look at your boat mate and find him calmly focused out at the water, fishing pole in hand.

Your brows fleetingly come together, but you go back to pinching the chain on your stringer closed. When it happens again, your eyes flash up to him. You catch him mid-stomp with a mischievous gleam in his eye and a boy-like smirk on his mouth.

“I knew it! It was you!” you exclaim, shuffling to quickly grab on to either side of the canoe as he continues to forcefully tip and bob it side to side.

Though it’s quiet, a near-devilish giggle leaps out of him as he holds onto the edges himself and starts tromping haphazardly towards you. “Who told you you could catch a second fish ‘afore me? Huh?!”

Your eyes shoot wide, and you can’t help but slowly grin at the transfixing sight; you’ve never ever seen him quite so affably childlike, so unburdened and almost happy-go-lucky.

You have to blink and snap yourself out of it to respond. “N-no one had to!” you chuckle, leaning backwards and grasping the seat on either side of you, progressively shrugging and squealing as he draws closer and closer. “It’s called skill!”

He freezes, and his brows gather tight in mock shock and offense. “Oooohhh!” he grumbles low. “Gonna getchyou for it.”

“No, no, no,” you warn, gripping the edges of the canoe. And then you realize— “This is why!” your eyes flicker up at him where he’s finally arched over you. “This is why you wanted to come out here on a boat! Just so you could tease me!”

A low, mumbled chuckle meanders through his throat. “Maybe.” He promptly stomps hard enough to really tip the canoe drastically to one side, and you immediately take in a deep gasp and reach out for the edges of the canoe.

“Don’t you dare,” you eye him with a glare.

When his smirk only grows and he makes a move to stomp again towards the other side, you scramble.

“Don’t—” You hold up a single finger; but as he continues to jostle and tip it, dipping the edges closer and closer to the water's surface each time, you rush to get your footing and clutch to both sides of the canoe again. “Arthur Morgan, don’t you dare!” you laugh airily, willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in believing he wouldn’t really tip the two of you over, straight into the mountain-melt lake water.

He’s still giggling low and and quiet over your voice, a knavish, menacing sound. “You ain’t sweaty in this sunshine?” he jokes in a high and flouncy tone. “Ain’t interested in a lil bath?”

“Not a frigid one!” you shout earnestly, frantically holding your hat to the top of your head.

Still chuckling, he finally relents and draws closer, leaning over you until he’s practically lying atop you, smiling uncontrollably at your nervous giggling. “Maybe I just wanted to see that beautiful smile,” he mumbles low and quiet, his eyes wading from yours down to your mouth and back up again, “hear that perfect laugh.”

Your giggles have petered out into a low, wary, elongated sort as you grin at him. When he presses his smile to yours, you gladly accept his pecked, smacked kisses and offer some of your own.

And it strikes you as simultaneously odd and wonderful—maybe oddly wonderful—that even at your ages, when you’re together you can find it in yourselves to enjoy such childlike, winsome moments like this, unhindered and unembarrassed. At least when you’re alone together.

After Arthur finally appeases himself with the catch of a second trout, you head back to shore together and build a fire. You both clean your trout on a nearby stump, and Arthur gets all four fish sizzling on the cast-iron skillet right there, near the water’s edge, beneath the shaggy, shade-casting branches of an accommodating oak.

Sitting beside him on the log before the fire, your eyes begin to wander over the wild around you. You notice that the oak tree itself is a bit unusual in the habitat Arthur has chosen to escape to for your honeymoon—it’s mostly populated with stately evergreen pines. They’re spread so thickly over the rolling landscape that the oak almost stands out like a sore thumb, at least from your current vantage point. But as you lift your eyes up its height, you realize that the oak’s trunk is pressed up against a neighboring pine. It seems that where the newer oak has grown, its spine has packed itself so tightly together with the tall pine that their branches are intertwined, almost to the point of being connected.

As you gaze up at the sight, it’s quite a wonder to you; and you silently nudge Arthur in the shoulder. When he picks his head up from the sizzling fish, you gently jut your chin up to point it out to him.

You watch the brim of his black leather hat slowly rise as he follows your gaze slowly up the trunks until he’s fully taken it in, and he immediately pulls his journal out to sketch it.

Bringing your head back down with your own brim covering your eyes, you smile at what you knew he’d do and contentedly listen to the point of his graphite scratching and gliding across the smooth fibers of the page.

It’s when you look forward that you see a cluster of indigo-purple flowers budding just a few feet away. And you recognize them as the self-same species that you’d picked in sorrow and frustration one night not long ago at all, back in the forest surrounding Horseshoe Overlook.

-

Just after the sun had dipped beneath the horizon, you’d been sitting on a crate under the girls’ lean-to, reading by the glow of lantern light and enjoying the company of Mary-Beth and Karen as they quietly did the same on either side of you with their respective books. And your fellow camp-mates were beginning to wind down, with some like Tilly, Hosea, Charles, Uncle, and Javier lingering around the campfire.

Yours had been a history book about the advent of modern photography and its many uses, both practical and artistic. But as you listened to Mary-Beth sigh deeply and dreamily to your right, you realized that hers was likely quite the opposite.

After a few more of Mary-Beth’s drawn-out huffs, Karen had had enough.

“Why don’t you take up the trumpet, the way you’re leakin’ an’ blowin’ over there?” she remarked playfully.

What none of you had been able to know and what you are still not aware of as you think back on the memory, was that that night Arthur had been assigned guard duty and was incidentally privy to the entirety of your ensuing conversation from where he was stationed with his back turned and rifle in hand, a mere several feet away in darkened shadow.

Upon hearing her name, Mary-Beth sat upright from slouching over the open pages and looked up, a bit startled. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry,” she drawled in her pleasant twang with an embarrassed chuckle. “It’s just this book, I guess. It’s so romantic, got me all sorts a’ bothered.”

“Well, we could tell that,” Karen replied with a smirk. “Just don’t need to hear about it every two seconds.”

Mary-Beth jutted her chin out and looked up at the starry sky as she adopted a pensive air. “It’s just… There’re a lot a’ things I don’t miss at all. From my life before this, I mean. But I guess I do really miss…bein’ sweet on someone, an’ havin’ ‘em be sweet on me back. You know?”

When she ventured down that topic of conversation, you did your best to dig further into your book and ignore her. But she continued right on in her day-dreamy way.

“The first rushes of love… The quick pitter-pattin’ a’ my heart when I realize I’ve got a hold on his attentions. And a’ course,” she chuckled as she reclined on one arm and looked down at the grass, “the kisses, the love-makin’.” She looked up at the two of you. “I only ever went together with a couple boys ‘fore I joined the gang. But life just seems dim and…dull and dreary without it. Ya know?”

You quickly averted your eyes, working hard to look busy being engrossed by your book. How careful had you been to avoid this subject entirely with every single fellow gang member—and indeed had been entirely successful for the last couple years—only to find yourself caught in the middle of it now?! Not if you could help it. You’d make yourself invisible, as silent as if you weren’t there at all.

“Well… I don’t reckon I believe there is such a thing as ‘love-makin’’,” Karen retorted. “But if you’re talkin’ about fuckin’, I heartily agree with you.”

“Wha… But what could you mean by it?” Mary-Beth looked at her with crimped, perplexed brows. “I just have to believe there’s such a thing. You don’t believe two people could ever truly care so deeply for each other, and it just overflows into passionate, tender physical love?”

“Eh… I don’t know,” Karen grumbled.

With all your might, you kept your eyes focused on the page before you, not allowing them even a moment to glance up and bounce between the two debating over you.

“Well, wouldn’t you at least say you’d like it if you could find it?” Mary-Beth asked.

“Ain’t a question a’ that…” Karen mumbled ruefully, making one last concerted effort to concentrate on her own book. “I guess I ain’t so much of a know-it-all as to claim with absolute certainty that it ain’t possible. But…” and she finally set her book down in her lap with a short huff as she looked up at her with a half-frown, “in my experience, which is all anyone can go by, it just ain’t out there.”

“Hm,” Mary-Beth pondered simply.

And in that moment, you wished you could get up and hurriedly walk away without seeming too conspicuous or rigid or rude, because you could feel in your very bones what was about to happen.

“What about you,” she asked, quietly calling your attention by name from behind your book. “You believe in love-makin’, or only the other?”

You swallowed hard, slowly lowering your book in dreaded defeat. “C- Can’t-” you stutter. “Can’t say I know.” And your mouth twitched with the tiniest of half-hearted smiles.

Mary-Beth’s full attention was still focused on you. “Well do you miss one, or the other?”

Your mouth went dry, and you rushed to find the ground very interesting. “I- I-” You swallowed once more and fought to look up as the words finally came to you. “That…part of life…” you managed to whisper as you briefly looked her in the eyes and worked for a gentle smile, “has kept itself very far from me.” But by the end, a slight frown was gently pulling on your lips harder than you could fight it. And your eyes made a beeline back to your page.

At that point Karen froze and was glancing intently back and forth between the two of you.

But with an incredulous pause, Mary-Beth only continued with her line of questioning. “So you mean you’ve never made love? To anyone?”

Still averting your gaze but feeling hers on you, your poor heart began to pound like a steam engine, and the top of your head felt as if it had been doused with hot oil. As you struggled to know how to respond, the scorching oil was slowly dripping, beneath your skin and down the sides of your face.

All the while, Arthur continued to listen intently, noticing you had long gone completely quiet.

“Wait— Not even a kiss? You ain’t ever even felt a kiss?” When Mary-Beth received not even the smallest reply besides your painfully reddening cheeks, her eyes grew wide. And she quickly added, as if searching to help, “Well, what about a man holdin’ ya? Or…at least holdin’ your hand? Surely, a-at your age—”

“Mary-Beth,” Karen finally stepped in on your behalf with a strained whisper.

You felt as though you were swimming in a vat of oil now, fighting to keep breathing. So you narrowed your sight on a lower-case a within the printed page before you, focused on evening each silently pained, labored breath.

“I-I’m sorry,” Mary-Beth meekly offered. And you had a feeling it was less for anything she’d said, and more pity for what she’d discovered. “I…didn’t mean any harm by it. It’s only that… Gosh…” she mused, looking down again and shrugging one shoulder to her cheek. “I…can’t imagine never knowin’ love. Even a little bit a’ love.”

“Mary. Beth,” Karen growled a pointed whisper through gritted teeth.

Finally, upon catching sight of your tear-laced eyes trained at nothing over your book, Mary-Beth took the hint and silently looked down at her own.

And there it was. The moment you’d worked so consciously, so carefully to avoid, had found you out.

The three of you sat in excruciating silence. You could almost feel their thoughts, running like threads through their minds.

And all of it was true. You couldn’t claim to know the hushed wisdoms they knew by life experience. Couldn’t begin to imagine the precious intimacies that needed no speaking, kept secret and special, kept treasured between two people.

And maybe Karen didn’t believe in any of that. But at least she could know that nothing was wrong with her.

After a few more agonizingly awkward moments, the realization settled on you that you may as well have gotten up and left a few minutes ago; for as it was now, there was no way you were going to last in that spot.

So you softly closed your book and turned to quietly set it aside. “I think I’ll take a walk in the woods, if no one minds.”

“Certainly,” Karen said quietly.

And when you were mercifully given a moment of composure, you faced forward, rested your palms on your knees, and took a breath, managing to begin simply, though quietly, “You have to…be wanted by…” As you felt the stinging pain rise up through your chest into your throat, you steeled yourself a bit, just to get it out evenly. “You have to have someone who wants to kiss you…” you glanced up at Mary-Beth with a flash of a weakened smile, “to be kissed.”

While she nodded at you with a dazed, sheepish look, you nervously nodded with her, just to fill the space, and finally got up.

As you walked towards the tree line, you could hear Karen suddenly burst out with a strained, “God, Mary-Beth! You can be so…oblivious!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Jesus! I swear to God! Put yourself in her shoes!”

But you couldn’t stand to listen to anymore. You picked up your pace, nearly skipping for a moment towards the woods.

What you hadn’t known was that the moment Arthur could be sure you were facing away from him, he turned to watch you make for the trees. Realizing how quick and determined your steps were, he never for a moment took his eyes off you as he took a few steps of his own, parallel to your path. It was like something in his chest was linked with something in yours, and it was pulling his body right along with you.

When his feet crossed with John’s, Arthur didn’t miss a beat as he pushed the rifle into his hands and walked on. “Cover my shift, will ya?”

“What? Arthur,” John protested with a ruffle of his raspy voice.

“You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you nothin’!” he twisted his brows.

“Payback for savin’ the rest a’ your face,” was Arthur’s unaffected reply.

“You can only milk that for so long, ya know!” John called after him.

“Only as long as you’re worth, I guess!” Arthur drawled as he entered the forest, scarcely noticing John’s continued grumble.

Walking lock-step with you from behind the foliage, watching as the sight of you momentarily dipped in and out of his vision between the shadowy silhouettes of trees that passed between you, following you like the star-beam you were as your figure caught the moonlight that shafted in through the canopy of parted branches overhead, he couldn’t get lost.

He watched you finally stop and droop with slumped shoulders where you stood, bringing your arms around yourself. Watched you frown so deeply, painfully, as you began to sniff.

Watched, as you thought thoughts he couldn’t possibly know, memories he couldn’t see.

As you stood there, you’d been caught up and whisked away to memories of your mother first.

You remembered, so clearly, the amber glow of the lamp on the nightstand. The sight of her in her nightgown and the way she’d patted the brushed-cotton bedspread, beckoning you to climb up and snuggle flush to her, into her very side. The cushioned velveteen softness of her breast against your cheek, the linked embrace of her arms around you, the steady crest and fall of her breathing, and the warmth that so easily seeped from her being deep down into the marrow of your bones. Oh. She’d never turned or shooed you away. Had never scorned, ridiculed, or belittled you. She’d wanted you.

She’d held your little socks out over the crackling fire in the hearth and had pulled them gently up your feet and ankles where you lied in bed. You could almost still feel their plush warmth enveloping your feet and the deep calm and safety they had instilled your whole body with. Such a simple gesture, and your mother had known what it would do for you. She’d climbed in again beside you, propped herself on her elbow, cradled your face and cheek in her hand as she looked down at you with a smile, and told you that she loved her baby.

You remembered her. Were flooded with memories of her. Of the feelings she’d taken care to drench you with and wrap you in as a child. Warm feelings of deep love, security, safety. So much of it that you hadn’t known what the absence was until she was gone. And like trying to make your home in a barren wasteland, you hadn’t known it since.

Then you were visited by a memory of your father. One from just a few years ago and about a year before he’d died, when you’d lived together in your little cottage.

It had been night, like it was now, and the crickets had been lively in carrying out their performance as you’d brought a tin mug of lukewarm sun tea to your father where he’d been sitting frozen in his chair on the porch for hours. It had been something that you’d done most nights after your mother passed when you were about eleven. Brought tea to a dazed shell of a man, practically a skeleton, and set it down near his chapped hand on the weathered-wood arm of his chair where he could feel it; at which point he’d startle just a bit from his moondream and glance up at you with what you both accepted as a chuckle, and you’d brush the cushioned base of your thumb to his graying stubbled cheek as you seamlessly walked past him to your own porch chair beside him. You supposed, now, that it had been your small way of doing for him, for someone, what your mother had done for you.

That night you’d nestled into the seat of your chair and had appreciated the vibrant indigo hue of night swimming above the horizon and through the black tree stalks before you. It was a color both so brilliant and so dark that in that moment you’d felt sure it might never occur again. And when you’d grown accustomed to the crickets’ chorus, you’d realized that the cacophony created its own quiet. All you could do was listen to just the stillness—no more, no less. Had tried, to no avail, to keep from thinking on your life. A life the stillness echoed so well.

A father and daughter, aging ever so slowly, and that was all. Caught in the cruel grip of passing time.

“Papa?” you’d finally spoken.

“Hm?” he’d absentmindedly replied.

“How would you feel if you were never to become a grandfather?”

He’d turned to look at you then, in the silence that followed, with quizzical brows. “Well…” he’d quietly scoffed a genially grandiose chuckle, his fatherly duty, albeit out of love. “That won’t happen.”

Glancing his way, you’d kept your chin level with the porch. “Just…answer, honestly?”

After several moments, he finally did, and meant no harm by resuming the familiarity of gazing forward again. “I’d be sad.”

As if set in a cast of stiff sludge, you’d swallowed hard and nodded with a broken whisper, “Me too.”

Even as you remembered it, you weren’t sure whether he’d heard you.

But he was gone, and he never would be a grandfather. And maybe you’d never ever be a mother. Maybe never a lover either. Never know those loves.

You’d never claimed to be things you weren’t. But you’d always felt out of place, brushed aside. All you wanted was someone who would stick around, wouldn’t turn away. A home. Sometimes you tried to convince yourself that maybe if you could get someone to just hug and hold you, real good and long, you’d be okay. And though you didn’t have even that, you knew deep down that if you did, though it might help, it wouldn’t quite do it.

As Mary Beth had said, it was a dim shade of loneliness that you were living in. And like that vast barren desert, you could see all the years of your life, stretched out before you, each day the same as the next and the one before. Each day another inch, until you’d finally arrive there: at the end of an empty life. There was nothing standing between it and you. Nothing to keep you from it. Not even any relief on the way. No hope.

Arthur watched you slide both palms up over your face, pressing them there hard as you began to sob. But suddenly you tore them away, quickly whispering to yourself, “No, no, no. Not today.” And when you stomped off a few more steps, he watched you hunker down, sit crisscross, and pluck a whole spray of nearby purple flowers from their cluster.

He could envision himself skipping stones in a similar circumstance, as a needed breather. But around Horseshoe Overlook, you didn’t have a body of water nearby that also afforded the privacy of a cover of trees.

Arthur watched you focus on the petals and stroke them softly with your thumb. He watched you, and as he did, he saw a strength in you. One that he knew you couldn’t see in yourself. A quiet and a meek one, maybe, but no less strong for it.

He gave you a few minutes of privacy. But knowing you as well as he did, he supposed continued solitude wasn’t what you wanted, not really. So he finally stepped forward and smiled when you heard the stir of his footfalls in the castoff branches on the forest floor and looked up to find him.

“Oh. Arthur,” you offered a small, genuine smile as he stooped and joined you, sitting to your left with his legs forward and knees bent.

“Hey there,” he sighed. “Nice night to appreciate the woods.”

“Guess so.” You tried to inconspicuously sniff as your eyes leisurely perused the faint scuffs and snags in the parched camel-shaded leather of his jacket. You realized as you faced forward that the sight itself was a familiar comfort to you. Perhaps for the person you associated with it.

He sat with you in the quiet, comforting sounds of owls hooting and crickets playing their tune, until he finally asked quietly, “Girls say somethin’ to upset you?”

“Hm? Oh, n-no, they’re fine,” you answered. “Just…the things they talk about sometimes… Feel like I’m on a different planet from them.”

“I understand,” he chuckled. “So what’re you doin’ out here all alone?”

It took you a few moments to know how to answer. “Thinkin’.”

“Yeah? Well don’t go hurtin’ yourself, now.”

Still looking forward, you couldn’t help but chuckle through your nose.

A flicker of a smirk flashed across Arthur’s face when he caught a glimpse of your smile. But he took notice when, after several moments, you grew sullen and despondent again. “Well, you are by the looks of it,” he mumbled. “What about?”

You cleared your throat. “A lot a’ things.”

He nodded, looked at you for another moment before facing forward. “You don' wanna share, ‘at’s okay. But I can tell it’s weighin' on ya.”

You weren’t sure how to untangle all of what was inside you, and you certainly couldn’t talk with Arthur about your deep loneliness and longing for love, both emotional and physical. So you tried to go about being open with him by taking a different route. “About...not ever havin’ any children.”

“Hm.”

“But I feel selfish discussin' it with you,” you quickly and calmly added. “Your heartache must be ten times worse.” You couldn’t fathom what it must be like to have had a lover and a child, and to have lost them both.

He nodded. “Some days. Sure. But other days, maybe not.” He looked away and was quiet for several moments, then faced forward again. And his voice was level and even, his words slow and measured. “A life lost like a vapor… There can’t be any words put to it. And it is its own tragedy, on its own, even if he didn’t have anyone to mourn or miss him. Ain’t no gettin’ around it. But even as I sit here, in some…small way, I think…” you could feel him just slightly turn to look at you, “at least I have the memories.”

You shut your eyes tight and tried not to cry, the truth of his meaning hitting you with full force.

“To comfort me. You know?”

You gave a few quick nods. You knew what he’d meant, and you knew that without saying so straight out, he was telling you he could understand how you must feel. And you were grateful just for that. For just once not having someone say something like, ‘It’ll happen for you someday.’

“It’s the nature of it: it’s deep sorrow, mixed with deep love. Mingled like ink and water—never separated,” he continued, graciously allowing you time to sniff and swallow. “But maybe…it’s at least similar to never havin’ had at all.”

You gulped again and finally managed to get out in a pinched, broken tone, “You’re a wonderful person, Arthur.” Beautiful, inside and out, is what you wanted to say. You fought to smooth your tone to something a little calmer as you added, “Isaac was lucky to have you for his father.”

“No,” he immediately scoffed and wheezed an almost bitter laugh. “No, no.”

“To have loved him with such a big, deep, wide love as you did and still do,” you clarified.

“We’ll kindly differ,” he nodded grandly, slowly, signaling he knew what you’d meant and was maybe even grateful for the kindness of your words, but still disagreed.

You watched him go into his vest pocket for a box of cigarettes, loosening one and tucking the box away without offering you one, knowing you didn’t enjoy smoking.

He left the cigarette between his lips as he struck a match and lit it. “So what makes you think you can never have children?” he mumbled with the lit cigarette bobbing between his lips as he glanced into your eyes while curling his hand, shaking out the embers of the match, and tossing it.

Still looking into his eyes, you fiddled with the fabric of your skirt. “Lots of things.”

“What things?”

“Too many to count.”

“What are they,” he said, cupping his hand and taking the cigarette from his mouth with his thumb and first finger as he released a spiral of smoke, “by name?”

You finally glanced down, first with your eyes, then hung your head a bit. “I’m too old. Nearin’ ancient to be a mother.”

“Nonsense. I’ve seen plenty a’ women older ‘an you with a little one toddlin’ around or even with a swollen belly.” He gestured with his cigarette, “Next.”

You let out a quiet huff. “If it ain’t happened for me yet, it ain’t likely to.”

“Why you say that? You had a...doctor...tell you somethin’ to that affect?”

You scoffed a little laugh. “What reason would I ever have to ask a doctor such a thing. No, nothin’ like that.” You found a little tattered hole in your skirt and began mapping out how you would best mend it later. “I need a special ingredient for that,” you mumbled wearily. “A…very special person.”

You two were close, dear friends—a bachelorette and a bachelor sitting side by side—and you thought he could understand. That he knew firsthand how painful it was, more often than not, to live alone amongst the world. That the ways you sometimes wished for help from a loving partner ranged from practical to running deep and emotionally complex.

He looked forward. “I’m sure you’ll…meet a…real fine gentleman. Real good one.”

Feeling your stilled eyes begin to burn and your chin pucker and tremble, you shook your head and kept your gaze trained on the stitches in your skirt. “Longin’ so deeply. Livin’ with memories of people that never ever were, like ghosts…”

No one had ever expressed any interest in what you were going through when it came to this topic, and for once you were trying to voice the weight of your dreams—or the weight of going without them, you couldn’t seem to tell which—properly. The simple truth, however silly and worthy of shame, was that the vivid dreams you carried of a non-existent lover and children stood in stark relief from the life you were living. Their laughs and smiles, their cries and kisses. Lovelorn felt a word too histrionic, but it seemed exactly how you felt.

So you shook your head again. “I don’t want to live that way anymore. I ain’t deluded, Arthur. Ain’t nothin’ of any worth in me. Nothin’ special.”

As he listened to that last part, Arthur’s brows simply lifted, and he clenched his jaw. “I’m sorry you think that.”

“I don’t think that. I know that,” you said calmly. “All those things in the…writin’s of the ‘great poets’,” you exasperatedly rolled your eyes. “All about how beauty is all there is. And even the romance novels: ‘her eyes sparkled majestically, her mouth was sweeter than honey',” you mocked in an exaggerated tone as Arthur began snickering to himself, “’her body more intoxicating than wine!’ I mean, I am never gonna be able to reach that; it’s like some otherworldly dream someone dreamt up.”

Arthur couldn’t help but smirk and wheeze at what he considered your unbeknownst intelligence. “You’re right; it ain’t real,” he gave big, slow nods with a wholeheartedly conceding tip of his head. “But you’re real. And you’re gonna be real for somebody. Somebody who might even really think those things about you.”

“Ain’t no such person, Arthur,” you said. “It’s easy for folk to gibe and deride an old maid; but no one cares to think on what it was like for her to get there. What’s most often wanted is youth and beauty, someone for whom there’s no question a’ bein’ able to have children—it's natural. My window’s dwindlin’ with my chances. Only gets harder the older I get.” When you heard the sound of your own mumbling, you couldn’t help but internally scold yourself with the label of a whiny whelp.

He pondered your words a moment. “Never thought of it in that way before.”

You tried to hide your sniff with a laugh as you said, “I mean, what’s a man ever gonna think when he looks at me?”

Finally bunching his brows in frustration at the things that went through your head and bewilderment at what could’ve put them there, he let his jaw go slack and hang loosely to one side, then the other. “Someone in town givin’ you grief? Micah?”

A scoffed, bitter laugh tumbled out from under the roof of your mouth. “Micah. I mean, if he ever had his way, ‘m sure he’d put me in the ground…just so he wouldn’t have to look at me anymore.”

Arthur’s head finally snapped to you, his brows gathered sternly. “He ever say that to you?”

You somberly wagged your head as you straightened your legs in front of you and brought your arms around your bent knees. “No. With him, it’s just the way he looks at me, way he talks to me. Makes it so clear he despises me. So impatient an’ irritated, just with my existence, my presence. It’s almost like…if I have to be a woman, at least I could be one he likes lookin’ at.” You rested your chin on the crater made by your paired knees and quietly mumble, “’M used to it.” The lump in your throat was growing more excruciating by the second. “I know I’m hard to look at. I don’t need him to tell me.”

No sooner had Arthur opened his mouth to speak, but you’d addressed him.

“And I know you wanna say, ‘I don’t know why you let him bother you.’ And I truly don’t care what he thinks. Truly, I don’t,” you said. “It’s just… Such despisement centered on me, like a lens…” You sat back up with a tightly bent frown and stinging eyes. Giving your head a single shake, a pained tisk arose from you. “When that, or…distance and silence, is most all you get from folk…you grow weary. You know? Start to think it’s all you’re meant for.” You blinked your eyes closed a moment and rolled one shoulder, as if shrugging off something weighted to you by a strap. “Maybe I’m just not built… Maybe I’m just too soft to take it.”

You swallowed hard past the lump in your throat, and your face began to crumple. “I know I—” When a stinging ache grew and suddenly surged inside your chest, you arched your shoulders forward to let it cave in. “I know I…” But you found yourself trailing off with a quiet groan, a sniff, and a shrugged release of your shoulders. It was no use trying to communicate with words the disappointment and reserve you sensed in those who looked back at you.

The air grew still and quiet between you for a few moments. And as if encased in the shroud of your own mind, you almost forgot where you were.

“What someone like Micah doesn’t care to know,” you continued softly, still gazing downward and hardly moving, “is that I’d change if I could. Transform myself into someone very easy to look at. Be all the wonderful, beautiful things people want.” You felt your forehead begin to pinch and draw up, and you tried your hardest to keep your pain out of the pitch in your tone, hoping Arthur couldn’t hear it. “I’ve got it in me to do it, if I could.”

Closing your eyes a moment, you took another breath and let the pain pass through you and abate. “It doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t, because no amount of wishing was going to change reality. Would change the way people saw and treated you.

You didn’t want to talk about yourself anymore. You wouldn’t let yourself drift from Arthur—not Arthur—no matter how fractured, aching, and alienated your thoughts were.

“Anyways,” you murmured, turning to look at him with a small, affected sigh, “I didn’t mean to have a pity party, Arthur.”

“Nah, no, I know,” he was quick to acknowledge. “Didn’t mean anything like that—”

“Just needed a minute,” you calmly added on the tail end of his response. You cleared your throat, resting your elbow on your thigh and the side of your face in your hand. “How’re you doin’? You tired?”

“Eh… Yeah…” he leaned back and playfully winced. “‘Bout like that.”

You wanted to reach out and pat his knee or the side of his shoulder or even his elbow; but you were far too shy and uncertain to risk any contact whatsoever with the man you considered your closest friend in all the world, the one you secretly so deeply adored.

You slowly blinked your eyes once and smiled, reflecting his fatigue back at him. “Well you should get some rest.”

Arthur felt the muscles in his back do just that as he looked into your eyes. And after several moments of your gazes being connected, he cleared his throat. “There is…actually somethin'…” he scratched his cheek, “I been meanin’ to tell ya. To uh, talk to you about.”

“Oh? Me?” you sat up.

“Mm-hm,” he mumbled, dodging your gaze a bit.

“Anything. What is you wanted to talk about?”

“I… Actually… Well, I-I, um…” he stammered. When he glanced back into your eyes he was held there, not just by their alluring brilliance in the moonlight, but by their steady, earnest interest. “There’s…someone…” he said under his breath. Finally, he simply said, “I met someone.”

As you looked back and forth into his eyes, a pain leapt into your chest and dropped there with a dreadful thud. For a few moments, you could only open your mouth with no words before finally managing, “O-oh.” And you worked desperately to keep your expression from falling any perceptible amount. “I didn’t know…you’d been seein’ anyone.”

“Well, no one does,” he wheezed a chuckle.

“Someone from town?”

He glanced up and tipped his head with a latent smirk. “She’s around.”

“And it’s…it’s serious?”

Continuing to face forward, his eyes slid over to you, and he nodded. “As the grave.”

Your brows lifted of their own accord, and you just barely breathed out, “You love her?”

With his eyes remaining steady and stilled on you, he again nodded. “Yes. With my whole heart.”

And yours sunk like a black anvil. But you lifted your lips into a precarious smile, hoping he couldn’t detect any hint of hurt there or see anything glistening in the rims of your eyes. “Arthur, that’s so wonderful,” you could only trust your voice to whisper. “That’s so, so wonderful.”

You watched his gaze drift over your face and back up again, almost as if in thought himself.

Of course, you should’ve known. Should’ve never allowed yourself to think on him, to let your heart imagine things that were not meant for you. It was fool-hardy to grieve a loss of someone who was never yours to claim. And you could’ve expected that the very thing life seemed to forbid you from would be the very same thing that would take your dearest Arthur away from you.

He wouldn’t be yours anymore. His deepest, most fulfilling friendship would naturally shift to be with the one who would bear his name and his heart and share his life. And in gaining everything, the two of them would tear away your everything, the one genuine friend you’d ever been able to make and keep.

You couldn’t let the ugly weed of envy creep up. But you readily acknowledged to yourself that though you were elated for him, you were equally gutted—absolutely, whole-heartedly devastated. Perhaps foolishly so, but no less utterly.

You gulped past the jagged rock in your throat. “You’re gonna get out?” you asked hopefully. “Gonna take each other away?”

Taking a few extra moments to look at you, he responded quietly. “Promise.”

You sucked in a breath and began to tremble just a bit, with numerous conflicting emotions you couldn’t begin to put into words if you tried. You closed your eyes and brought a clenched hand to your chest for just a moment. And though you worked to corral and collect yourself, you couldn’t hide the couple tears that escaped your eyes then. “That makes me very happy, Arthur,” you gasped and gulped with overly strong nods. “Very, very happy.”

But by now, your lip was quivering and the corners of your mouth were clearly pulled down in pain.

“You sure?” he tried to chuckle, dipping his head to try to get a better look at your face. “I know you…feel things so deeply,” his voice ambled. “Didn’t tell you to make you sad.”

“Oh, I know, it’s just…a lot of information, is all,” you wiped at a tear on your nostril with your thumb. “Gonna miss you,” you said as your chin tightened and quivered. You pressed your fingers over your eyes socket, then rested your face in your hand. “Gonna miss you a lot.”

“Yeah?” He grew quiet beside you, then asked, “What’re you gonna do? Gonna stick with the gang?”

You sniffed and released a long sigh as you wiped your palms over your bent, skirt-covered knees. “Oh… Probably,” you said low, even with a broken chuckle as you went for nonchalant. “I know it’s wrong and’ll probably end badly, but it’s all I’ve got.” You leaned forward and rested your temple atop your knees with your face towards him. You thought for a moment and added in a dazed, daydreamy tone, “Maybe I’ll get a dog.”

He huffed an incredulous laugh. “A dog?”

Looking at him from where your temple rested atop your knees, you nodded. “Maybe I’ll be able to give one a good home.”

A smirk, ever so latent in its wryness, pricked its way up his cheek. “You’re gonna replace me with a dog, huh?”

“Sure. A dog. You had Copper,” you said, feeling yourself slowly begin to grin along with him. Still looking at him, you straightened to sit up. “But I won’t be takin’ baths with mine.”

You watched him immediately erupt into a snorted laugh, prompting your smile to brighten further at the sight and sound.

“Well, I guess that’d be allowable,” he grinned as his hummed laughter slowly subsided. Still grinning, he looked over at you. As long as you were looking down, he let himself linger in taking you in. “I like it when you smile.”

You looked up at him. And though your soft grin started to melt away for a moment in pensiveness, it returned at the thought of how you were about to respond. “No one makes me smile as much as you.”

And with those few words, a glint shone in his eye. How you adored it and wished you could bottle it up and save it in your pocket forever.

Your eyelids fluttered as you fought to even out your cracking voice. “You’re my friend, Arthur.”

His throat pulsed as he swallowed and softly grinned. “That I am.”

After a few more minutes, he proceeded to get up and say he’d turn in for the night, asking if you planned to soon as well. When you answered that you needed just a few more minutes, he made sure you’d be okay before turning and walking back to camp.

You watched him walk for a while before getting up and walking to the other side of a tree a few feet deeper into the woods and sliding down its trunk. It took several moments of you sitting there, swaying and fiddling with your skirt while wearing a deep, frozen frown, that your sorrow finally hit your body. And you burst into tears, and gasping where you sat, finally pressing both hands over your face.

-

It had been only another day that Arthur had been able to knowingly leave you like that. A day for him to gather the courage to express his feelings for you. By anonymously leaving a bundle of hand-picked wildflowers. A bundle that ended up sitting and drying for a week where he’d left them on a crate beside your sleeping mat. And you’d gone that week before overhearing Micah’s awful insults, when Arthur stood up for you, witnessed you beneath the waterfall the next day, and confessed his love for you.

It was another few days after that before you were able to sneak off to get married. And now here you were. On your honeymoon with the love of your life.

With eyes still trained on the purple flowers, you vaguely hear something muffled from over your shoulder and realize that Arthur was speaking to you. Blinking, you return to the present.

“You all right?” he says.

“Yeah,” you respond quietly. “What was that?”

“Ah, I’s just sayin’ I think I’d really like for us to share this journal. You an’ me.”

You follow his gaze down to it and watch as he flips to the very first page. Bringing his pencil over the paper, he scribbles in his flowing script a label denoting ownership of the journal, with both your names included. And your smile grows in time with your understanding.

It’s both of your journal, your life, your marriage. Each and every day. He has no intention of withholding himself or hiding anything in his heart from you.

You look up into his eyes with a huge, bright smile. For Arthur Morgan to share his journal with you… With anyone. You could’ve hardly fathomed it, and you’re not sure what to say. Your eyes wade over his face, his bashful smirk warming at the sight of yours. And you lean forward to place a simple kiss on the corner of his mouth.

“Missed,” he says.

“Hm?”

“Missed your mark,” he repeats, turning for a kiss fully on the mouth.

The breathed, huffed little laughs that escape your toothy smile as you lean in to plant a kiss on him remind you of a tender, toddling child.

“Mmmm!” he mumbles low just as you’re pulling away and adds quickly, “How ‘bout another one?”

Your eyes dart to his from above your grin, and you scoff and giggle as you lean forward again before you’d even fully pulled away. This time he tilts his chin forward eagerly, and when your lips meet his, he’s quick with his exuberant mumble of appreciation.

“Mm!” he exclaims again, right into the smacking kiss. When you both sit back, he watches you bit your lip. “‘S awful good,” he grins with a tip of his head. He looks down at the journal and flips back to the page adjacent to where he’d sketched the tree, turning and handing it to you. “Wanna add somethin’?”

You take the book and read what he’s written there:

Here on our honeymoon and went fishing with my love,

Your heart immediately flutters wildly at the sight of the all-endearing term on the page before you. Smiling wide, you require yourself to continue reading.

…and she saw this very interesting pair of trees growing together. Knew I’d like to get a sketch of it down. I won’t mention the bit where she caught her second fish before I did.

A chuckle bubbles through your nose.

We’re enjoying the wilderness and each other, very much, and truth be told, I’m happier, more at ease, and more hopeful than I’ve been in a very, very, very long time. Maybe ever.

You read over that last part at least three or four times, letting the words seep into your heart and soul.

Taking the pencil, you add where he left off:

Me too. They might call it a whirlwind romance, but maybe we were working on it while we were friends. Lord knows I did enough longing. I’m ready to live it now. Though I’m not perfect, I’ve got a good man—the best—and I’m going to spend all of my life cherishing him and learning to do it better. The sun could stop shining, but tomorrow would still look wonderful. I love you, Arthur.

When you hand it back and he reads it, you revel in the look on his face. Like a shy little boy giddily discovering candy.

After eating, you head back to the hotel on your horses. And when the two of you arrive in your room, you plop down on the end of the bed with a tired sigh and begin removing your boots one at a time.

“Yeah, I feel ya there,” Arthur concurs with the sound of your sigh by way of a grunt of his own as he removes his vest and begins unbuttoning his shirt. “I was thinkin’ a’…goin’ ‘cross the hall for a bath.” He looks over at you and sees that you’re still focused on pulling one of your boots off. “Want a bath?”

When the room grows quiet, your eyes pop up at him. “What—to share?”

A latent smirk ever so slowly rises on the corner of his mouth. “Sure,” he lazily chuckles.

“Oh,” you feel your cheeks begin to warm as you grin. “All right.”

You follow him across the hall and close the door behind you while he sets the running pipe water to as warm as it’ll go for the bathtub. It’s a very large, elongated tub with a heightened back for reclining and relaxation.

When you both begin to undress, you can’t keep your eyes from taking peeks up at him. Though the sun is setting, there’s still light filtering in through the window, perfect for getting a glimpse at your husband’s naked form.

When you’re in the middle of unbuttoning your blouse, you look up to find that his button down is already off and wadded on the floor. Looking back down, you listen to the pleasant jingle of his belt buckle, and an involuntary smile springs onto your face at its thud when it hits the floor. When you look up again, he’s shimmying out of his jeans until they’re crumpled on the floor and he’s in only his long johns; but before long, those have joined the others on the floor as well.

As you watch him, you try not to forget your task of removing your own clothing, but your movements inevitably slow. Your gaze follows him as he turns to retrieve each item of clothing from the floor and hang them up on a nearby hook on the wall. Though he’s still several feet away, you’ve now seen much more of him in the light than you’d had a chance to before. You watch transfixed as he comes to stand beside the tub, dips his fingers in, and deems it warm enough with a shake of his hand.

“Sweetheart,” you hear, and look up to see his expectant expression when he asks, “you ready to hop in?”

You nod and disrobe the rest of the way, shedding your blouse and removing your dungarees and pantaloons. Joining him and facing each other beside the tub, you both quickly climb in one leg at a time and lower yourselves into the deliciously hot water with gratified groans as it sloshes around you. With his height, you both have to adjust your legs around each other, and you don’t mind when his end up on either side of you and yours have to rest bent and up and over his thighs.

You realize only too late that your gaze had lingered a bit over his bare form as he’d entered and sunk beneath the surface of the water. At the realization of that and the knowledge that he likely noticed, you timidly glance away, a bit ashamed of your apparent need to ogle. And trying to steady yourself with reminders that you’re a well past full-grown married woman, you finally look up at his face.

“Are you very embarrassed if I look at you?” you ask quietly, though your words are even-keeled. “I mean, do you mind if I do?”

“Nah,” he responds. “I mean, I ain’t used to it, but… I ain’t real shy of ya or nothin’.”

You gently nod. “What about…if I ask questions?”

“About…the way things on me work? Or lovemakin’? Or…you an’ me, what we got?” he gestures between the two of you.

“All of it,” you chuckle.

“You can ask me anything,” he assures you.

“You won’t get embarrassed? If they’re too…intimate?”

“No such thing,” he gives his head one shake as you continue under his voice.

“Or…annoyed, if they’re too many?”

Grinning warmly, he lowers himself deeper into the water until it reaches past his shoulders. And he draws closer and closer. “You can ask me,” he says low, “anything.”

You feel his big hands start on your knees and slide up your thighs as he closes the gap to your lips. You smile and hum into his kiss. You’re beginning to feel relaxed and loosened everywhere the warm water soaks into you, including your bared and quickly slicking womanhood as your husband presses kisses to your mouth. You can’t help but sigh and close your eyes.

But after just a few more seconds, you feel him disappear, and you flutter your eyelids open to see him going for the soap and sponge on a little table nearby. At the sight, you realize all at once that after the long day you’ve had sweating in the sun, and after living a lifestyle in which a bathtub is so rare, what you really do want in this moment is to feel good and refreshed and clean. So you make a mental note to try making love to Arthur in the tub before your honeymoon is over.

The two of you share the bar of soap and sponge and even have a hoot giggling and mumbling, wheezing and tickling while you gather a suds and attempt to aid each other in washing different sections. When you’re finally both thoroughly clean, you climb back out and each reach for terry cloth towels.

When Arthur has his clutched to him and glances up at you and back down, he has to hurriedly dart his eyes back to you. Your hair is stringy, clumped, and dripping wet, and the towel is draped around your midsection, starting under your arms, and tucked into itself just above your breasts. A smile slowly creeps across his face.

“Hey…” he says in a squirrelly tone as he comes close enough to frame your chin with his broad shoulder and slinks an arm round your waist. “I like the sight a’ you with a towel wrapped ‘round ya.”

“Huh? Really?” you smile up at him.

He mumbles confirmation on your neck just under your ear, fully intent on tickling you. “Look divine. Got me all hot an’ bothered.”

“Really?” you practically squeak and guffaw.

“Yes,” he wheezes as he pulls back to look at your face.

“But…” you look down at yourself and back up at him, “you can’t even see me with the towel coverin’ me up.”

“Sometimes I like to see parts of ya, framed real nice, rather than all at once. I guess part of it, for me, is bein’…enticed. Allured. And I told you: you look even better than those sculpted goddesses with their drape fallin’ away.”

“Wow,” you breathe as he plants a kiss to your growing, toothy smile. “So you like a tease? Like the towel, huh?” you mumble against him.

“I like the towel,” he responds between kisses. “A lot.”

When you bashfully glance down with a smile, you notice the state of him in his towel and can’t help but burst into laughter. “You’re so tall, you’re dwarfin’ yours! It looks like a napkin on you!”

“Agh, well…” he accepts your playful ribbing. “Hey, let’s not bother gettin’ our clothes back on; I just wanna get back and get comfortable.”

“What!” your brows come together. “Across the hall in nothin’ but our towels?”

“Sure, I’ll peek my head out an’ make certain no one’s hangin’ ‘round the hall. Grab your things,” he says, hurriedly gathering his own clothes. “We c’n tiptoe an’ be back in our room in two seconds flat!”

You scoff, but seeing how serious he is, you hurry to comply and follow. When he opens the door, cautiously peeks out to and fro, and reports back favorably, you make sure to grasp the towel tightly and securely to yourself. And the two of you dash and tiptoe in hushed cackles back to your moonlit honeymoon suite, leaving a dribbled trail of little puddles, and quickly closing and locking the door behind you.

When you’re finally both alone, you plop down on the end of the bed in your towel, and Arthur plops after you on your right, both smiling and catching your breath.

You look over at him, and his eyes are already on you. In the matter of a moment, his mouth is on yours too. And he reaches out to caress your neck with his big hand, drawing you as close as he can. You feel the kiss deepen, and before long, he’s gently reclining you back onto the bed as he unspools the towel from around you.

“Arthur,” you breathlessly whisper between clicks of his lips on yours. “Arthur.”

He pauses and draws back just a bit to look you in the eyes.

“I was thinkin’…” You lick your lips and compose yourself. “I was thinkin’, I haven’t really seen you. In the light and all. Would it be okay with you if…if we took a moment…?”

Mulling on your request, he pulls back further and looks to the kerosene lamp on the bedside nightstand. He reaches over and quickly lights it, and you reach over and do the same with the other on the opposite nightstand.

When you slowly turn back, he’s simply lying on his back with his head on the pillow and looking at you—not the tiniest hint of roguishness or duplicity in his gaze.

You come close, the crisp sheets swooshing and stirring beneath you, and prop yourself up on your side and elbow beside him, looking down at him. With their proximity, the glow of the lamps is indeed bright, and you can clearly see all of him.

You begin at his dark chestnut-blonde, almost tawny hair, drying in a swoopy storm against the pillow. You gaze into the brilliant jewels of his blue-green eyes before appreciating the finer features of the face you so dearly love.

Breathing carefully, you forget everything but him as everywhere your eyes explore, your fingers gently trace too.

The long, feathery lashes, the small moles across his cheek, and the faint scars. The ridge on the bridge of his nose and the dimple on the end. A similar one in the center of his chin, and the smooth, raised scars there too. You’re so close you can see the nature of his skin—the sun damage, the pores and lines and valleys, the faint broken vessels and the tan between his handsome crows’ feet. Then your thumb traces the subtly scared outlines of his plump, gorgeous lips, mainly the bottom one that entrances you. And your fingertips dance across his devastatingly beautiful and angular jaw.

You force yourself to continue to his strong neck, the dips on either side of his throat. You trace his collarbone through the dewy beads of water drying along the pronounced muscles of his vast, broad shoulders. You slide your palms down over the planes of his chest—one of your favorite parts of him, something you deem will fit you perfectly and was made for cuddling and holding, snuggling and kissing and sleeping. You relish the feeling of his coarse hair there, tracing the other places it appears on his forearms and the gorgeous veins in the backs of his large hands. With your fingertip, you trace a lazy, thoughtless pattern into his restfully open palm before returning to his abdomen.

Letting a single fingertip gently graze his belly, you adore the sparse coarse hair you discover there too. You can’t resist allowing your whole hand to rest there, and the meeting feels so natural and comfortable. Though his frame is certainly tapered, his belly is soft, and its rise and fall under your hand as he breathes is indescribably comforting. A thought flits through your mind about how very nice it would be to kiss him all over his neck and chest and belly.

You savor the dip and shape of his hip bone. And as your hand gingerly ventures lower, over and past his navel, the trail of hair grows thicker and more prominent. The path itself is quite simply beautiful and lures you. It clusters above and about his manhood, and it takes everything in you not to avert your eyes. You pass your hand over it once, brushing him. And a short, soft moan arises from him throat. You turn and look up at his face, and he smiles down at you as he lifts one arm and rests his hand behind his head, revealing a dark bush of hair in his underarm.

Resting a hand on his bulky, sturdy thigh, you glance back down at his shin, his bony feet, with hair on each and every one, right down to his little curled baby toe. A smile springs onto your face at the sight.

As your eyes slowly venture back up the length of his body, you imagine his scrumptiously pert bottom and the delectable dimples you’ve seen in his lower back; and you wish you could savor and appreciate them along with the rest of him.

You finally gently recline back to the pillow and look down at both your bodies lying side by side. In his every inch head to toe, he is a real-life, gorgeous, full-blown man. And as you gaze at the two of you, you can clearly see that every part of him is so different from you. The etched build and angular shape and make up of his body compared to your overly plump crests and valleys, your soft edges and rolling curves. Even the shades of your skin are unique from each other.

“My turn,” he gently grins as he rolls onto his side and looks at you where you lie next to him. And though his tone doesn’t slide upward in a question, you know he’s tentatively asking permission.

You look into his eyes—eyes of the man you love so much, adore so deeply—and find only love and longing there. You know his request is only fair, not simply because of what he’s just freely given you, but because of the fact of your love for each other. So you work to soothe your nerves and steel your courage as you face the ceiling and get comfortable yourself, with him propped up on his side and hovering beside you.

He cups your cheek in his hand, runs the pad of his thumb over the top of it. And he begins softly tracing the outlines of the features of your face with the barest touch of his fingertips, as you’d just done to his. He traces your brow, your nose, your jaw, and his fingers skate across the bow of your top lip and the shape of your bottom one.

When his hand ventures downward past your chin, onto your throat, and further, your heartbeat kicks up until it's racing. You can hardly bear the thought of him looking at you as closely and intimately as you’d just done with him. And you close your eyes and involuntarily clench your hands, tightly balling the sheet in your fists on either side of your hips to keep from using them to hide yourself.

He immediately notices and slides a gentle hand up across your sternum, quickly coming close to your cheek and whispering into your ear, “Hey. It’s just me. Me who loves you.” He peppers your cheek with feather-soft kisses to help ease you. “I won’t ever despise or spurn you, snap at you, turn you away. It’s me. Me who loves you.”

The surface of your skin lights with feathery, fiery prickles at the warm mist of his whispers on your neck. And from your arms to your legs, you’re filled with something like quiet lightning. You open your eyes and gently nod, taking deeply breaths in and slowly letting them out.

“Me who loves you,” he whispers again, almost like a chanted song, effectively etching the words into your brain as he goes on softly touching you.

It crosses your mind that he means including this. That your body is inextricably part of you, and he loves you.

When he’s confident that you’re all right, his fingers return to where they’d left off. They skip and dance like waltzers down the flat sternum of your chest. And where the swell of your breasts have each slid lightly to the side, the dancers turn and stand to attention in a neat row at the underside to admire the plump curve.

He moves on to your padded belly and waist, something you’ve always been so deeply, dreadfully ashamed of. But he seems much more fascinated by the very fine, almost imperceptible layer of velvet fuzz that lives there. You wonder if he also enjoys the steady rise and fall of your breathing, the way you had with him. After a few enamored, appreciative stroked of his hand and thumb along your lower abdomen, he continues to trace a gentle path over the roll of fat above your hips, and lower still to your thick thighs and your womanhood, covered by a thick thatch of hair. And you struggle with all your might not to pinch and cross your legs or cover yourself with your hands.

As you breathe and focus on the feeling of him, as soft as curled eddies and clouds across your whole body, you think that so much of love must be trusting. Trust in simple truths that for some reason could be so difficult to rest in. Trust that you didn’t need to have been present for every single moment of his life to truly know him. Trust that he is good and will be good to you. Trust that you are valuable and precious to him. Trust that he really does love and adore you.

You try your hardest to think on that and not on what you know you look like. But the truth was, there was so much wrong with your body, ranging from weak, to faulty, to distorted and distasteful. You were just entirely off the mark from—

“Beautiful,” you suddenly hear him say.

Your eyes dart to look at him. For a few moments more, his eyes wade over your form above his dreamy smile, until he finally looks up at your face to intentionally meet your gaze.

Your lips part incredulously. Several seconds pass as you scramble for the words. “Arthur,” you whisper, “you can’t possibly be seri—”

“Beautiful,” he once again asserts, more firmly. But his gaze to you is soft and gracious, even in its knowingness, his brows ever so slightly drawn, almost painfully.

Your face heats to red hot as your thoughts fly back to all you’ve experienced in life that taught you differently, to the current moment, when the man you love is insistent. And you feel the convergence of the twain in your very body as he leans down close and kisses your mouth.

Reaching up to run your fingers through his thick hair where it swoops a bit as it dries against his skin, you feel the kiss quickly deepen.

“Arthur,” you manage to whisper, hoping to prompt him to pause. When he doesn’t even slow, you whisper his name again and rest a palm to his chest.

“What is it, honey? Hm?” he responds quietly, pulling back enough to look at your face.

“I… I don’t know how to do this. I need you to teach me.”

A grin spryly curls onto his mouth. “Wha?” he mumbles, crowding you and planting more and more kisses to your lips. “But we’ve done it already,” he chuckles. “More ‘an once!”

He quickly pecks your lips in quick succession over and over, as if he can’t help it and can’t get enough in.

“I mean—” you wheeze in laughter and try to continue between his kisses, successfully placed on their target as each one is. “I can’t take the lead, and I’m a bit ashamed—”

“It’s nothin’ to be ashamed of,” he assures you between kisses.

“But I don’t have any clue what you like. Not even how to kiss. How to please you. I need you to teach me, so—”

“So I don’t leave you?”

The words are spoken low and even and steady as the rush of his kisses stops. And right as his jewel-like eyes find yours, you take his meaning: that he doesn’t at all want this to be some sort of transaction, something either of you do out of any harbored fear.

You swallow. Dipping your fingers into his hairline and swiping you hand down his cheek, you clarify. “So I can do my best to make sure you feel my love.”

You’re glad when his expression relaxes into a smile.

“Hmm… Let’s see,” the gravelly quality of his tone deepens and meanders as he draws his neck back and pins his chin down a bit, still hovering over you. “I like it when…I feel your hands on me,” he says, reaching for one of yours and bringing it around to rest on the underside of his broad, tapered back, “roamin’ along me, goin’ wherever they wanna go. Holdin’ me real, real close to you. I like to feel your warmth against me, feel your chest rise an’ fall as you breathe.”

A smile immediately springs onto your face at that, not just at the sentiment that echoes your own, but at the lyrical sound of the thoughts arising from your humble and unbeknownst-poetic, supposedly-cold-and-hardened outlaw lover.

“I like when I can see an’ hear all the ways you’re moved by me. Like learnin’ ya, every inch. Like it when you look me in the eyes. And I can see,” he says, growing quiet as his gaze flickers into yours, and you bring your other hand up to track a path along his clean-shaven cheek up to his temple, cupping your palm to his cheek bone, “we know each other. Down to the soul.”

“I like bein’ joined with you, and I like just bein’ with you,” he continued. “‘Specially skin to skin. Everything else…” his tone mellows as the subtlest smirk alights on the corner of his mouth, “we’ll just have to figure out as we go, won’t we? I think that’s part of it.”

When he presses a couple easy kisses into your palm, a delighted, tingling shiver runs deeply though you. You'd never considered such a simple spot could be so beautifully intimate, and the effect has you so touched you can feel something beginning to bubble like a fountain deep in your chest.

“I wanna know how to best make you feel my love too, don’t forget,” he lightly tips his head.

The fixed look in his twinkling eyes sends your breathing into a soupy, heavy, rolling state, forces your heated chest to rise slowly and deflate hurriedly to find the next intake of breath.

He reaches to caress your neck and kisses you, kisses you long and languidly, each one warming further, like he’s taking his time, like he might’ve completely forgotten what time is. All you can hear is the tinkling click of your lips together.

You feel him focus on your bottom lip using only the suction of his mouth and no contact of his teeth. He very, very slowly pulls it away towards himself with a lovely little suckling sound, rolling it a bit between his own lips as he goes, until he finally releases, and it springs back into place between you. When it's over, it seems to have happened so quickly that all you're left with is a single fluttery gasp.

You look into his eyes with a smile. “Do it again.”

He matches your smile. Crowding his bare shoulder into the crook of yours and beneath your chin a moment as he gets more comfortable beside you, he proceeds a second time.

This time you listen more closely to the wonderful peeling squeak of suction, let yourself feel your heart bounce in your chest. When your lip sprightly returns to you, the giddy, breathy laugh that leaps out of you as you glance down at his mouth and back up into his eyes is unrestrainable. “I wanna try.”

Splaying your fingers across his cheek with your thumb folded under his jaw, you take his mouth into yours and give him a wet kiss, then shift all your focus to his plump bottom lip. You loudly suckle it between your own, pulling gently and slowly, just as he’d done, even rolling it slightly to savor it. And you keep your eyes open the whole time, watching him close his, watching when you release his luscious lip with a pop and it jostles back into its place. When you do, you feel his erection shudder a bit against your thigh.

He’s clearly at a loss for a moment, still leaning forward for you and blinking his eyelids open. “Jesus,” is the breath he breathes then.

But you’re smiling wide, and a trill of a giggle bounces from you. “I like that.”

His smile warms and softens like sugared buttercream. Leaning in again and kissing you, he tilts his head slightly to the right.

When you taste the warm buds of his tongue as they slink across yours, a low moan rumbles in your throat. You feel his calloused hand slowly brushing and inching up the inside of your thigh, feel him trying to slip one knee between your pinched legs.

“Oh, oh. Wait. Here,” you whisper, looking down between you. “I… I just ain’t used to it yet.” Resting your head back against the pillow, you close your eyes, serenely breathe, and take the split moment you still require to think about opening your legs to him. Relaxing into the mattress, you simply let your thighs fall open.

Just as you open your eyes, you see his looking down between your opened thighs. And when his gaze very slowly rolls up to meet yours, you discover that his eyelids are half-mast, and his eyes are smoldering beneath them with something entirely new, something ablaze. By no means is it lost on him—what it takes for you to open your legs each time. The simple action together with the bared sight of you has the whole of him so heavily-laden with cupidity that he has to swallow thickly, and he can’t wait another moment to climb between your spread thighs and rest in the cradle of your hips.

And the understanding clicks into place for you that for Arthur, trust itself is not only something he personally yearns for from you and holds extremely dear, something that touches his very soul. For Arthur, trust is something that also becomes highly sensual, something that lights and feeds a flickering flame in his body.

At the realization, you smile and almost have to chuckle. Trust is somehow the exact same thing you must work to build in yourself the most.

A few more wet, needy kisses later, and he pauses and whispers to you as he catches his breath, “What do you feel?”

“I feel I love you,” you say with a dazed, rosy smile. When you hear him wheeze a little laugh and feel him press a chaste kiss to your lips, you lift your eyelids to get a better look at him.

“And I’m very grateful for that,” he says with an unrestrained grin as he pushes himself up over you, arching his back to look down at all of you. “But I guess I meant,” he says warmly, hazily, sliding a palm over your belly and up your sternum between your breasts, “what do you feel, in your body?”

“Oh,” you bite your lip and smile against the heat that crawls over your cheeks and the tips of your ears.

“Tell me.”

“I feel…” But you realize you need a moment to take stock, and then another to try to put any of it into words. “I feel prickles, all over my skin, when you look at me,” you say, slowly running a hand over your arm and shoulder to demonstrate. “Like nettles from the limbs of the evergreens, pokin’ me.”

A sweet smile faintly paints his face, as if with the barest touch of the soft bristle tip of a full watercolor brush, slowly sending both delicate and vibrant hues across the page.

“I feel flutters in my chest, like the flaps of sparrow or butterfly wings. I feel… real, real warm. Almost hot, all over.” Indeed, as you look at Arthur, you can see pinprick droplets of sweat gathering atop his shoulder, collecting on his forehead above his brow, clumping his hair until a droplet slides down a strand and slips off to meet your skin somewhere below. You brush the wet strand away from his face and back into his scalp, and you’re entranced when he involuntarily closes his eyes to savor your lingering touch.

“I feel…” you trepidatiously continue, “a throbbing flip-flop feeling—almost violently so—down, down, real low,” you say, venturing your hand down between your brushing bellies until it rests above your lower abdomen. “I think…” you whisper, needlessly nibbling your lip a moment, “I think it’s my womb, tellin’ me I want you.” And you catch his eyes. “Need you.”

“Yeah?” he whispers, his smile brightening.

You nod as he draws closer, unable to keep from matching his smile. “Yeah.”

When his mouth meets yours again, you whimper and sigh. At the feeling of him simply touching and gently cupping your sex, you almost hiccup and sputter. You push away the fleeting notion that he could be disgusted by the glistening wet hair his fingers meet with.

Bracing for the dull shock just as he slowly joins and sinks into you, a groan reverberates in the base of your throat. Your hand flies above the two of you to grab onto something—anything. But it returns and crashes down onto the broad planes of his bare back when you have to realize—there’s nothing to grab onto but him.

When his mouth glides to focus on the space under your jaw and along your neck, your chin lands in the crook of his shoulder. And you focus on the raw feeling of him inside you, hooking the two of your bodies together. Ruminate in the tinny, musky smell of his body flooding your senses as you pinch your thighs around his waist.

With each intake and release of breath, your breasts are pressing tight against his chest, both of your bellies mercilessly, deliciously brushing. And as he rolls his hips, strains and relaxes his back, and as you arch to meet him, the totality becomes an undulating rocking, what you’re doing together—like the crescendoing current of ocean swells. Giving in wholly, you let it overtake you and sweep you away.

You both quickly lose your breath, and you find that you don’t mind in the slightest. He almost frantically scurries to kiss different parts of you and face you again; but when he does, your breath and his intertwine for a moment in the space created by the caverns of your open mouths. And when he folds his nose along the side of yours, the gentle play of his breath flits and dances across your cheek, like a wispy forest sprite sent to rollick through the mist of morning. And your heart is not far from the same.

Remaining pinned to you, he draws his head up enough to look you in the eyes. “Feel that, sweetheart?” he manages to pant hoarsely.

Without needing an explanation, you somehow know what he meant before he’d even uttered the question. And as tears beginning to prick your eyes, you respond with several quick nods and a thick, clicking swallow past your dry mouth.

“It’s you and me,” he says, confirming it to you like a nail plunged through tender bark. He rests his forehead to yours and breathes low, “We’re gonna get through this together.”

It only takes the space of a feathery lash’s flicker for you to realize that he means this moment—the almost painful delight of making love; the unyielding way your bodies are willingly locked tight to each other; the yawning ache of not being able to get close enough, until suddenly you are; the profound, mysterious fulfillment of a longing so deep, it sweeps upon the many waters of your soul without words. And in the moment it takes you to understand him, the desire and arousal you throb with is heightened tenfold at the simple thought. Together.

You couldn’t begin to explain it if you tried, not quite. What appears next in your body. It’s something like a drive, deep in the core of your soul, to show him your love, and to feel his. To be joined. One.

You’re stroking your hands up and down the dips in his back, finding new moles and scars, tucking them into your memory like discovered diadems. Slipping a hand into the crease made by the meeting of his sturdy thigh and the underside of his perfectly round rear, simply cupping him there like you’ve wanted to do for so long. When something immediately grinds out of his gut at that, you press the full span of your hand to him there and let it roam.

He’s brushing his thumb over your breast, gently kneading you, finding comfort in your silken softness and simultaneously offering the sensation of his large hand over your tender skin. He’s turning his hand and trailing it downward between your bellies until he reaches the tender flesh of your joining, spread wide and cinched taut. He’s searching you, finding and fiddling with a spot that sets all the nerves in your body sparking and ebbing, sends you gasping and gulping for breath with reckless sighs and moans. And all the while both your hips are rolling into each other’s, your bodies softly rocking.

You certainly feel his love, not just in the precious gift of every touch that he gives you, but in the simple act of him letting you touch him. In the way you can rest your fingertips to his sun-touched cheekbone. In the way he groans and the way his muscles clench and release, over and again. In the way you both clutch to the other, needing to be closer than skin, unable to get enough. It’s as if you’re both coming to the edge of yourselves, each relying on the other to bear you up. And when the other is right there, ready and eager to do so, it fills your soul and body full to overflowing with an incomparable lightness, so much so that you feel you might actually float away together.

As you shut your eyes and begin blindly clambering up the mountain, it simply overwhelms you, his love. And a single cry squeezes from your throat, embroidered by a little sob.

Arthur immediately picks his head up from where it had lolled against your shoulder, concern etching his features. “Whoa, hey… You’re okay,” he murmurs, cradling your face in his hand. “Ain’t you?”

He’s a bit blurred before you until you manage to blink back the tears. “I’m so in love with you, baby! I love you so much!” you cry out lightly in a strained whisper.

Arthur’s eyes sparkle at the sound. It was the first time you’d used the word for him, and he takes a moment to quickly look over your face and back into your eyes with a burgeoning smile as you continue to whimper.

“And all I am is thankful. You make me feel so lucky.”

He draws close, folding into the space above your shoulder and pressing his cheek to yours. With his mouth hovering near your ear, he whispers low and easy, like warmed honey, “I’m the lucky one. Hm?”

An eruption of incredulous joy leads you to sniffle and giggle before you have time to doubt the reaction. “Arthur…” you softly breathe as he draws back to his place and looks you in the eyes. Another stunted laugh bubbles behind your nose. “Am I always gonna cry when we make love?”

“I don’t mind it at all,” he shakes his head, cupping your jaw and gracing a thumb across your cheek. “Means I’ve got your heart.”

When he sees the whole-hearted confirmation your bleary-eyed smile, he rests his forehead to yours a moment. And you continue making love, climbing the mountain to its peak together and slowly retreating back down with trembled shudders, breathless gasps and sighs.

And in the wake of the journey, there are more intimacies in the way you see each other in your raw, vulnerable states, with nothing to hide behind, and still accept each other. In the very gentle way you cradle and caress each other. It’s just as beautiful to you, if not more so, as the heated moments. And it occurs to you that it must all be lovemaking.

As you serenely lie side by side, facing each other with your cheeks on the pillows, you each rest a hand between you, and they naturally touch. You realize that the sensation lingering within you makes you feel as if you’ve been hugged from the inside out.

Noticing that stray hair dangling in his face, you reach up and gently lift it out of his eyes, just to get a better look at him. Whereas you’re on your side, he’s belly-down on the bed gazing at you.

Lying there with your limbs and your whole body completely exhausted and forced to fully rest, you can’t seem to get enough of absentmindedly tracing the features of his face. Even with it buried halfway in the pillow, looking back at you. His thick brow, the side of his nose, the faint moles on his cheek. Your eyes follow your finger as it plows a path over the hills of his face. On its way, your fingertip plops just beyond the edge of his bottom lip into dampness, briefly breaking the seal of his mouth and pulling his lip out. But there isn’t any resistance or recoiling; rather it feels familiar.

Lit by the lamplight, Arthur’s calm, piercing eyes remain on your face all the while. Even when your hand returns to the bed, even when your eyes finally meet his again.

“Did you,” he suddenly begins then, his tone hushed, his speech slow and measured, “marry me because y— because you didn’t think you’d ever get anyone else?”

Immediately, your heart all but shatters. That he could bear such a concern, even after the things you’d just done and said to each other. It smacks of all the fear and insecurities you struggle with yourself, that you know so well. And you don’t know how you couldn’t see it before. Not just that he carries his own. But the effects on him of the way you can tend to harbor your fear. Nourish it—rather than opening your hands and letting go.

“No,” you firmly almost shout, your forehead quickly drawing and crinkling as you look back and forth between his eyes. But just as soon, your voice fails you when you try to continue and have to whisper. “You’re everything I want. Everything I want. Only you.”

Seeing the pure earnestness reflected in your eyes, he shifts to lie on his side and faces you squarely.

You watch him lick his lips, as if intent on something very important he needs to say. And you can hear his breath catch a moment through the wind tunnel of his slightly ajar mouth.

“I don’t have a claim to…all a scholar’s knowledge or a…grasp of all the prettiest words there are. Sure wouldn’t be able to use ‘em well if I did,” he dryly chuckles.

You half-heartedly smile and simply shake your head, allowing the gesture to speak for your disaccord with his self-deprecation, rather than interrupting him in his resolution to get out what he needs to get out.

“But…I need to tell you that the love I carry for you,” he shakes his head, “it just fills me like a river—an ocean—fillin’ dry earth, right up to the top an’ spillin’ over. The way you believe in me, change me, make me…better,” he realizes the simple word fits best. “Truly. I’m…better…with you. I mean, I think about you,” he’s quick to add, his tone growing in fervor, “e-every moment, every wakin’ breath—and even sleepin’—you’re right there, inside me, like you’re part a’ me.”

Entirely captivated by his ardent declaration, you lose track of everything else but his words, and find yourself in his jewel-like eyes.

“Every inward breath, I feel your love,” he curls a large hand to his chest, “and with each outward breath, I think of us: our future together, all my hopes, and the most beautiful dreams. I see us, for all the years of my life, stretchin’ out before me.”

When his drawl lowers to a hushed whisper with the next words, you unravel, reaching for him.

“I mean, I try to think a’ livin’ without you,” he squints, his voice almost quavering, “and I can’t breathe.”

“Arthur… You’re everything to me. My soul’s deep longing and my heart’s sweetest joy. You’re more me than I am myself. My home.” Taking his hand, you run it over your chest. “Believe me when I tell you my heart is true, and sometimes…I’m afraid so that it might come burstin’ right outta my chest,” you have to duck your head and laugh with a sniff, and you’re glad when a short snicker tumbles from him too.

When you’ve both taken a few chuckled breathes, your smile softens. “You have to know that I’ve never been shown a kinder, more patient soul than yours in all my life,” you say. “And I will spend all a’ mine showin’ you the great many oceans and oceans of love I’ve got for you. They’ll only mingle with yours.”

Glancing down, you touch your fingertips to the front of his chin. “It’s true, I never thought I’d get to know a love like yours, Arthur. And I haven’t known anything close for a long…” you take a breath and release it with a sigh as you speak, “a real long time.”

Looking back up into his eyes, you’ve forgotten your worries and fears. So you tell him. Tell him of your mother. The ways she’d show you her deep, boundless love, many, many years ago now, when you were only a little child. Remind him of what he knew: that she was gone away, out of the earth.

He’s silent, and his eyes venture down as he listens to you. When your story is finished, he turns and thoughtfully peers up and away. The mere shadow of a smirk ghosts across the corner of his mouth for half a moment. And still naked, he gets up, his bare feet patting the hardwood floor as he goes to the dresser.

You turn onto your back and watch his as he rummages through a drawer. You hear its slide when it closes and watch him return to the side of the bed with something wadded in his hand. But he turns and almost wedges himself between the nightstand and the bed, hiding what he’s doing. Your curiosity is piqued, but all you can make out is that he seems to be fiddling with something and the kerosene lamp together.

When he turns around, you see what’s in his hand. And you’re clapped with the realization that he was dangling them by their furthermost ends above the lamp, rolling them on their sides back and forth over the flame, warming them.

Dumbfounded, you watch as he climbs back into bed and bunches one of the socks to the tip, aligning it with your toes. The moment he slides it onto your foot, you can feel it: the embrace of the warm fabric, the memories that come rushing back, the deep sense of calm and safety, love and security. Before you know it, he’s already pulled the leg cuff up your ankle and shin and slid the other sock onto the other foot as well.

Eyes glued to his face, you watch, awestruck, as he crawls up to you. He props himself on his forearm beside you and looks down at you. Looking into your eyes, he smiles warmly as he brings his hand to rest on the side of your face, carefully caressing your cheek.

“I love you, baby,” he says.

The sight of him quickly blurs before you, and you smile brightly with a whimpered squeak.

Arthur doesn’t scorn you, ridicule or belittle you. Doesn’t shoo you away. And just the absence of it is like a fountain trickling down into the dry, arid cracks of your thirsty, thirsty soul. But beyond that, he is affectionate, compassionate, thoughtful, and abundantly loving. The depth and height and breadth of his love is like nothing you’ve ever known; it’s like a warm balm enveloping your heart. He sees you, in your vulnerable state. He sees you. And not only that, but he holds you. Close.

When he’s with you, it begins to become clear that you hold the very tenderest space in his heart.

~~~

Beside the singin' mountain stream

Where the willow grew,

Where the silver leaf of maple

Sparkled in the mornin' dew,

I braided twigs of willow,

Made a string of buckeye beads,

.

But flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,

And you're the one I need.

.

I leaned against a bark of birch

And I breathed the honey dew.

Saw a north-bound flock of geese

Against a sky of baby blue.

Beside the lily pads,

I carved a whistle from a reed. .

Mother Nature's quite a lady,

But you're the one I need.

Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,

And you're the one I need.

.

A cardinal sang just for me,

And I thanked him for the song.

When the sun went slowly down the west,

I had to move along.

These are some of the things

On which my mind and spirit feed.

.

But flesh and blood need flesh and blood,

And you're the one I need. .

And when the day was ended

I was still not satisfied,

I knew everything I touched

Would wither and would die.

And Love is all that would remain

And grow from all these seed.

.

Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,

And you're the one I need.

.

Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,

And you're the one I need.

.

- “Flesh and Blood,” Johnny Cash

~~~~~~~

Author's Note:

Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed anything about the story, would you consider sharing a word or two to let me know? It helps encourage me to continue writing. 🌻

Visit my blog or ask inbox! I don't bite and am a very lonely person. I would love to say hi, chat, answer questions, or take requests. 💕

~

Though I still have ideas for more, I almost didn't write this honeymoon chapter. I didn’t even give a second thought to a honeymoon, because I don't remotely know what goes on in one. But I realized I should slow down and try to write things I might normally gloss over.

I began writing this because I could never seem to truly imagine myself in the place of 'reader' characters. It seemed they were always... Beautiful. Confident. Bold. Independent. Self-sufficient. Every time. Most importantly, so beautiful the canon character didn't think twice about stumbling over themselves for her. I just couldn't manage to imagine myself in that spot. Even with this work, I still struggle truly imagining Arthur looking back at me.

To tell you the truth, writing this work is excruciating for me. I look at Arthur and sometimes, deep in my soul, I genuinely think, 'he is so. so. SO. far out of my league.' (Isn't that pathetically, abysmally silly and sad? He's pixels. There's something seriously wrong with me. 💔💔) It can get so bad that it can make me cry. So I think, part of me writing this is me subconsciously trying to work through things like that. Trying to believe that in some fantasy world, Arthur or someone like him, someone kind, could possibly choose to love me. I think I'm also trying to let go of hoping; it only hurts me. It would take a bonafide miracle, and I just cannot live that way anymore.

At times while writing and imagining, I feel ok. But then afterwards I can emotionally crash pretty hard and severely, because it is just. SO. distant from my reality.

All this to say, I do have more ideas for this work and will do my best to keep going. But the chapters can tend to take me quite a while to write. I hope if you enjoy and appreciate it that you'll be patient with me and stick around. 💛🌻

Thank you so much.

- Rosie (Sara irl)

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