Page 6 of Light

We’ve woven our spirits.

Tangled our passion. Resealed our connection. Reaffirmed our love. Renewed our light.

And yeah…left behind the nightmares.

But even that’s not as perfect a gift as the one I get from this dream of a moment—as steady thumps emanate from inside my wife’s belly. Responding, with awestriking coordination, to the energy that still resonates from between our bodies.

Together, we gasp and then laugh.

At once, our bean kicks with twice his gusto.

“Holy shit.” My mutter is answered by Emma’s tinkling giggle and my son’s dancing footsteps. I swear, as I observe the pattern across the stretch of her belly, the little dude is doing a Texas two-step—or a bad grapevine. Hard to tell when I’ve got only my dimming fingertips and the filtered moonlight as illumination.

“Well.” She chuckles. “Holy something.”

“I’m not sure whether to be proud and fascinated or stunned and freaked out.”

Her laughter hitches. “Why freaked?” And then turns into a chiding huff. “What, because the beat our baby’s dancing to is all over your cock and not flowing in your veins?” Since I have no decent answer and she knows it, she charges on. “What’s the difference, really? It’s your life force, no matter how you look at it. The stuff that created him.”

I follow the path of my hand with a trail of reverent kisses. “But our love brought him to life.” Yeah, her matter-of-fact side always brings out the mush in me—but can I be blamed? The woman’s mind is even more enticing than her breasts and surges me with the most sickening need to compose greeting card lines.

“Yes,” she whispers. “He was created in love, and he’ll live in a world filled with as much of it that we can give.”

“Working on it every day, beautiful little bunny.”

“I know, incredible hunky man.”

Well, damn. While her voice is coated with sincerity, I’m just as aware of what she’s not conveying aloud. There’s something about the woman—some kind of frequency or vibration—that I alone have always been able to hear, since the night we first shook hands. From that moment on, I knew I wasn’t alone in our magnetic attraction—and right now, that insight is running on its highest setting. Alerting me that everything she speaks isn’t everything she’s saying…

“Velvet.” I sigh. “Listen. I’m—”

“Fine?” Her skeptical sneer proves the intuition isn’t always one-sided. “Sure you are. You’re having dreams so violent, I sometimes think you might rip the bed apart.”

I lean up and then in, sealing the deal with a gavel pound of a kiss. “Just my brain burning off some residual tension, which is completely gone now.” I go gentle with the amendment as well as my kisses, feathering her cheek with tiny circles until I get to the graceful shell of her ear. “So the solution here is simple…”

Emma snort-chuffs. “A blow job before bed every night?”

“And you thought I was the mind reader in the relationship.”

“Husband, a mosquito could’ve pulled that one out of you.”

“You’re evading the subject.”

“No, you’re evading the subject.” Her twist on my hair, pulling my sights back around to her, is a Little League bunt compared to the line drive of her voice. “Zeus. Talk to me.” She curls the fingertips of her other hand into the stubble along my jaw. “You were threatening Faline in ways I’ve never heard before.”

I scowl through a grunt. “Who says it was her in the dream?”

“Is there somebody else’s brain you want to open like a can of beans and remove spoonful by spoonful?”

“Huh.” I seesaw my head, thanking my joints for a couple of effective electrical cracks. “I said that? Well, that’s got to score me creativity points.”

She takes her turn at the scowl. “You really are going for that evasion gold medal, aren’t you?”

The woman always gives me the best reasons to change glowers into grins. But sometimes—like now—it’s an easier feat than usual. “Baby, I was grabbing gold from the second you came for me.”

She rolls her eyes before shoving away and leaving the bed. As she pushes to her feet, she stabs her arms into her robe. “Fine. If we’re really going to joke this away, for the third night in a row, maybe I do need some garlic ice cream.”

As her footsteps grow fainter down the hall and then the stairway, I entertain a caveman urge to go after her. To not stop until I’ve got her back in here and under me again, screaming twice as loud for me. But eventually, that would land us right back in this position. Her, demanding I spill more than my come for her. Me, going after the gold medal in evasion. Because one time a night to live through Faline’s soul evisceration, even subconsciously, is more than enough.