With You (Without You #2)

by Marley Valentine

There’s a reason we don’t have eyes on the backs of our heads, because we can’t look back. We can’t change the past, we can only live in the moment. Here and now.

Her words stun me, especially after our earlier conversation, and I feel my hands instinctively tighten around Julian’s. His gaze bores into mine, reassuring me, because he knows without the exact words just how muddled up I can sometimes feel inside. But I trust him. Holding his gaze, breathing in and out, I give my fears and anxieties to the man I love, because I trust him to take care of me when I need it most. And like all those years ago, when we were navigating our initial feelings, I trust us. I trust what we have, what we’ve built, and what we’ve promised. Implicitly.

“I love you,” I say simply. “It’s funny how easy those words are to say now. In fact, they almost never feel enough. I can remember when those words first left my mouth…” My voice trails off as I remember those hours in that hotel room, the tears, the sweat, the sex—the love between us and just how life changing those three words became. “I hadn’t really felt love before you,” I continue. “Not in that all-consuming way.” Pulling my hands away from his, I raise them to his cheeks, cupping his jaw. “And you consume me, Julian. My whole world is you, and there isn’t a single thing about that I want to change.” I catch the tear that falls from his lashes with my thumb, and talk directly to him. From my heart to his.

“Falling in love with you…” Deacon shakes his head. “I never saw it coming. I never saw you coming. But there you were, so open and honest and vulnerable, all the things that were so foreign to me; all the reasons that made me want to stay. In your orbit, in your life. Once I had you by my side, there was nowhere else in this world I wanted to be.”

“On paper we are nothing more than roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. But in reality?” I watch a smile filled with confidence and adoration stretch across his face, despite his unshed tears. “In reality, loving you is living.”

“I promise to love you when it’s quiet and love you when it’s loud. I promise to love you in the light and in the dark. When you need me and even when you don’t.”

“There isn’t a world or a lifetime where I won’t need you,” I interject, not caring about the order or the formalities or anything else but making today about him and my love for him. “I guess I’ll love you in every world and every lifetime, then, huh?” He brings my hand up to his lips, kissing my newly adorned finger, his gaze never leaving mine. “It’s you and me. Always.”

“There aren’t enough words in the English language to convey just how grateful I am for you choosing me, for loving me and allowing me to love you.” I bring our interlaced hands to my lips and kiss his fingers. “You continue to be the steady rhythm of my heartbeat. You are worthy and you are special, and I’ve never been more grateful to call someone mine.”

“I promise to love you always and unconditionally,” I tell him. “In the good times and the bad times. But I promise to love you the most when we’re knee deep, too busy, and messily wading through everything in between.

“I love you, Deacon. You own me,” I choke out. “My heart is yours till the day you say you don’t want it anymore.” And just like all those years ago, Deacon shakes his head, face streaked with tears. Stepping closer to me, he raises his hands to cradle my face. “Never,” he says hoarsely. “I will never not want you.”

The sound of Dermott Kennedy’s “What Have I Done” fills the room, the lyrics hitting me just as hard this time as they did the first time I heard them.

“I love you,” he says against my lips, our bodies flush, his cock buried deep. “I love being so wrapped up in you that your heart beats for us and my lungs breathe for us. There is no beginning and no end, there’s just you and me.”

I can’t give him my opinion or sway him. In good times and bad, when it’s hard and easy, this is the exact moment marriages are made of.

He’s patient and protective in a way that reminds me that your family is beyond what you were born into, it’s beyond blood and beyond lineage, and very much blossoms from the simpler, more overlooked things in life: love, adoration, and respect.

I know tonight will be a night they will both remember fondly. In a way that I could not explain, both our kids are in love with our love. And I don’t know if it’s because we love loud and proud or because we make them feel safe enough to love loud and proud too.