More Little Things

Husband and I tend to speed through the mall. Those people who saunter annoy us. We both find ourselves making breaks to the sides, annoyed when we're held up to a slow crawl until we can make our ways around the three-abreast groups. The speed at which we make our way through the mall keeps my eyes always looking for that hole in the throngs. But sometimes, when we get held up, I look around....

I watched a man sitting next to a woman on one of the benches. They were close together. A middle aged couple, maybe husband and wife. He was holding her hand in his, caressing her arm lovingly. I gazed at what he was doing for a moment and wondered what that must be like, to be that adored woman. My eyes locked with his for a half second and I wondered if he could sense my jealousy.

A minute later we found ourselves boxed in, again. My eyes drifted around us. Another couple, standing together talking to someone. His hand rested possessively on the small of her back. Maybe a little on her ass. Intimate. I could feel his hand there on my own back for a moment. That intense awareness of a little thought of body part.

I stopped looking around so much after that.

A while after we got home I found myself overwhelmingly tired. I took my shiny new ipod upstairs, along with a new book and crawled into bed naked, curled up in hot blankets. I cued up all of my Hal Ketchum songs (mostly melancholy) and set to reading. Part way through I realized that what I was doing there was very much what I used to do when I was a teenager. The same author. The same musician. A different book. A different song. A different bed. And yet.. so familiar.

"This isn't how I thought my life would be," I thought to myself. And closed my eyes, imagining someone... Sam, Keith, anyone snuggled with me. Of course my imaginary man took on Keith's visage as they always do. My fantasies so fully taking over the reality that is him. I imagine the way he'd touch me and hold me. In real life he'd probably mock my choice of music and of book. But in my fantasy he understands. He curls himself around me and I inhale his scent, imagining the warmth of his nakedness against me as I find myself distracted from my book, music still in my ears. My lips finding his our bodies pressed close....

I think about Sam and about the way he and I talk. I haven't talked with someone the way I talk to him in a long time. We talk about nothing. And yet... it's something. He's becoming a friend. A beautiful, sexy... friend. Dammit. And yet, I value it. I forget how lonely I am, all my friends having moved so far away.

(I wrote that last paragraph and started to cry. I turned to husband and told him that last bit. And cried harder. He came to hold me and make me laugh a little. I'm still sad. But I feel a little better. Thank god that sometimes, every so often, husband really GETS it.)

This morning I woke up. Horny but dry. In my head I could see myself laying there, reaching out for Keith, who's not so far away. His body hot in sleep, relaxed, available. Mine. I'd uncover him slowly, enough to free his cock, taking it into my mouth, soft and pliant. He'd awaken as his cock hardens, his fingers slipping in my hair....

It's the little things. Always the little things....