The morning sun eased into the dark night like a yolk river of light, spilling from the horizon where the darkness ran to hide.  Still laying in bed,  our bed.  The hazy dimness of night became a ghost as that yolk light seeped inside,  brightening the glass window on the east wall.  I look at my husband.  

He always looks the most beautiful, illuminated by the sunrise. The naked of his skin vulnerable and unashamed next to me,  the blanket tangled around his legs, exposing the pale of his chest,  the dips of his hips leading down to his sex, soft and exhausted from the night before, already fattening up as his body eases closer to wakefulness.  

Blonde hair  smashed and pokey, from tossing and turning on the pillows.  I feel like Psyche gazing upon Eros.  My husband is frowning in his sleep. He always frowns.  Not out of anger but out of pension.  Even at rest, his face is frowning. But as he sleeps, it is a bit less.  But only just.  His body rising and falling with his breath.   

The room smells like us.  Our bodies,  our breath.  The sex we had the night before still haunts and lingers in fragrance alone, like a watchful ghost, clinging to the shadows as the world grows more yellow and bright and less like the  comforting shadows of night hugging us in the sweaty silence  as we hold each other, while being inside each other. 

I raise my hand to hover over his skin,  offering my own paleness to the yolk light. I want to touch him, but I don’t want to wake him.  He looks so peaceful sleeping.  But it will be the last time I can touch him.  He ships out tonight. I glance at his bag packed by the door. I ironed his clothes and hung them by the door as well.  His best boots were also polished and ready.  It is selfish of me to want to steal what could be his last night of restful sleep in our bed.  I keep my hand steady, watching the light particles  flutter around my hand in the shard of light quickly filling the room. 

As I am focused on looking at my hand, I feel him wake, as he stirs in bed,  I glance back at him, and his eyes are open.  I love his eyes,  whiskey brown with the orange of sunset.  He’s frowning at the light now. The light catches in the stubble on his face. His facial hair is still something I am getting used to, but am learning it is one of my favorite differences.  My skin, being soft enough for the both of us. His skin has the ability to grow hard, and have hair in different places than where hair grows in my places.

He doesn’t speak, nor do I.  Him being awake changes the emotional temperature of the room.  And it feels as if  time moves faster, or becomes heavier. My heart constricts with tears like overcast clouds preparing for a rainstorm at any moment.  The blue of my eyes, probably reveal the storm building in my heart, because he reaches up and caresses the side of my face. 

His hand is warm, calloused, and comforting.  It sends a shiver down my body that sprouts gooseflesh like fault lines quaking down and through me. I am trembling.  And I lay down next to him, cuddled into the curve of his body. My belly taut with life still growing.  I feel his hand leave my face to caress my arm and then press a reassuring palm on my abdomen.  

Still, neither one of us is speaking.  Like some sort of spell, if we speak,  then everything will fall apart in the emotional tide rising in both of us. Instead,  our hands reach and caress and touch and stroke.  I let my fingers sink into the warmth of his scalp, his lashes flutter closed and I watch his Adam's apple bob as he swallows his sounds to silence. I feel his hand grip my hip, and his frown changes.  I read his face like a favorite book.  Kneading his scalp, watching him swallow his sounds to silence, but deepening his frown more and more.  It feels good; his face tells me.

We have learned to read each other’s silences. The early mornings and late nights are our favorite time,  the liminal changes from day to night and night to day.  It is the most beautiful  time of day for me.  It is like I can see all of him,  even the parts  that he wants to hide, the parts he likes to hide,  and the parts he feels he needs to hide, I can see them fully in the liminal yolk light.  The threshold’s truth is so brief,  it has no choice but to be honest.

I can see the bestial energy he loves me with when his passion is full.  I can taste the magic sleeping in his blood when his hands touch me.   I can smell the wind in his name even if no one is speaking it.  It is sewn there. And in moments like this, it is laid bare for all to see, even if that all is just me. His wife, his best friend. The mother of his children. 

His hand is running against my thigh and I let my hand caress down too.  Touching his ear, his neck, rubbing his stubble jawline briefly.  I like him just slightly scruffy, that stubble,  the way the slightly red in the blonde catches the light. I feel the strong slightly freckled frame of his shoulders,  and his chest, fuzzy with hair also, not a lot,  and too blonde to be really visible without your hands  to confirm it being there.  It wasn’t til my fingers brushed across his nipple that he made an involuntary sound.  I looked up at his eyes again,  and that subtle softness was there flickering sunset light in the whiskey shore of his gaze.  

He nodded.  And I rubbed my thumb across his nipple again, harder, and he swallowed the sound this time. But only barely. I could still hear the way his breath hitched as his eyes closed and he frowned hard enough for the lines to furrow valleys between his eyes.  He turned toward me, and I felt his manhood press against my thigh.  And it made my body alert in a way that it had become accustomed  -  to be ready for his touch, for his depth.  

I wanted to nod for it too, but  he kept curling against me with how I was thumb-pressing, kneading his nipple. His mouth opened and exhaled a heated breath against my shoulder. He was trembling now, and  he lifted a leg to rest atop mine. A kind of sleepy, pouty groan rumbled deep out of him,  like a growl of a beast.  It made my sex anoint itself with the amount of ‘yes’  I felt toward him. 

I reached for it.  His manhood pressed against him, and he sucked in a breath so sharply and so strong, it felt like fear, combined with how it made him go still and just look at me.  Wondering what I was going to do next.  I didn’t touch it often with my hands. It was probably a new sensation  to have my hand on that part of his body,  and not his own.  

It was harder than I knew it to feel when it was inside me in other ways.  And he was so still.  He kept swallowing his sounds back,  I could feel his pulse going so fast.  It made me frown.  I didn’t know why,  but he felt too afraid or unsure.  I let him go.  And he frowned, and reached to replace my hand to his hard length. 

I felt my eyes go wide then, I stroked him and he nodded.  His eyes started to slit as I stroked him again, and again, and his body went tense, so I took that as a cue to go faster, and it wasn’t long before he exhaled hard, groaning , his body melting into the pillows and me.  My wrist splattered with the wet of his seed,  that kept going  - there was more of it than I thought there would be.   It puddled onto the quilt beneath and between us.  

He moved his raised leg between mine and I gasped softly, and immediately covered my mouth with my hand, stained with the splash of him. My hips rubbed against his leg,like riding a horse,  he watched me, held me,  until I was creaming into his skin and the pleasure  weeping out of me. He rolled closer to hold me to his chest.  

Tears fell finally,  I was angry,  I didn’t want his last memory of me to be my tears,  I tried to turn it to laughter, I tried to think of some happy memory to remind him about but all it did was summon more tears.  And the more that flowed out of me into him, the tighter he held onto me. 

My skin would hold onto the memory of that tight embrace, long after he was gone; off to fight in a war that would rage across the world for years. I was left behind, not able to follow him along those shores.  I would keep his gentle spirit, and his humanity. I would keep it folded like a puddle of liminal yolk light,  in the quilt of our marriage bed. And every night, I would hold him close, watching the sunset, like his eyes, fold the world into nights of restless sleep.