Tick Tock The Clock

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

I could hear the sound of the clock in the living room as I lay there, unblinking in the midnight dark of our bedroom. The sound of it, the ticking, drove me crazy, the only audible thing in the whole house. I shifted against her, ran my fingertips down along her shoulder, and wrapped my arm about her, tugging myself close to the softness that was completely signature to her. Everything about her was velvet - the curves of her body, the way she smelled and tasted, the texture of her skin, the way she smiled when I told her how much I loved her.

Her breathing was so quiet I had to strain to hear it, but the rise and fall of her chest told me she was fine. At peace, asleep in my arms and lost in the dreamworld of her psyche. I leaned forward, and buried my face into the crook of her neck, inhaling deeply the scent of her skin, the shampoo and soap she used. The soap I'd lathered her body with only a few short hours ago. She was intoxicating, the smell of her and the softness of her form snuggled next to mine. She made my thoughts jumble together, and sometimes I found it hard to talk when she looked at me, the smoldering dark chocolate of her eyes soul-searching and licking feather-light at my heart.

I relaxed into the plush pillows, wrapping one of my legs about hers to make sure that she wasn't going to slip from my grasp sometime during the night. I'd been laying there, listening to that clock for a good three hours, and sleep was finally beginning to take hold.

Suddenly, she stirred. I didn't move, but she turned her body toward me and pressed a kiss to my mouth, and for a moment I was lost in the sweetness of her lips, spiralling headfirst into the delicious tingles that raced up my spine every time that candied pout came even a hair's breadth away from my lips. She was still asleep, I know because there was a slur of words, mushed together and nearly inaudible. But in the still of the night, with the starlight sprinkling our bedcovers like a dusting of silver glitter and the indigo breeze licking at the back of my neck, swirling in through the open windows, I heard it. I heard it because at that moment, the clock stopped ticking. There were no crickets, there was no clock ticking away at the insides of my brain. Only the collision of my thoughts, something that happened every time those words left her mouth.

"I love you, baby.."

My insides swelled to make room for my heart, when she did that, and sometimes I puffed up like a blowfish and the tips of my ears and nose went blush with rose. She had this way about her, this mystical girlfriend skill that people spoke of in sappy romance flicks and the fairytales told to children before bedtime. This ability to make me happier than I'd ever been, to make my thoughts swim and my heart do somersaults in my chest, the ability to make me want to scream it to the world that she was mine and she was my every thought, feeling, and emotion. That everything I did, since that muggy day in the middle of May, was for her and her alone. It's magic, and I think it was that same magic that had made time stop, that had made the clock seize and pause in it's midnight ticking. There are speculations that time is irrelevant. And in that moment, that long minute was when I knew that if I had anything to say about it, she'd be mine forever. I wanted time to stay still, hanging on the soft cupcake-sweet of her mouth. I wanted an eternity with her.

"I love you, too.." I whispered against her mouth, and the lids of my eyes swept downward to half mast as I breathed her in. Hanging by a moment here with you.. the song played softly in my head that moment, and it was over all too soon, and the last thing I heard as I drifted off into that same lipstick dreamworld was the clock catching it's breath like I'd caught mine only seconds earlier.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.