Woke up around dawn this morning, with my boyfriend wrapped around me like a second skin. The mania having been mentally and physically exhausted* I felt warm and groggy and not much inclined to move.
There’s a row of windows facing east in that particular bedroom, and you can watch the salmon-grey light come up through the trees, which are still bare and dark. It looked very cold out this morning, but my companion was very warm, and dozing with a hand tucked neatly between my breasts and his lips against my shoulder, so that I could feel his breath along my collarbone, and every stirring earned a semi-conscious mumble and a sleepy kiss.
So I laid there for close to an hour, watching the sun rise, and listening to the growl at the bottom of his breathing, and feeling the occasional dreaming twitch, and thinking that life was really just about as good as life gets.
And then a very large border collie jumped on the bed and looked up at me with big tragic eyes that would indicate that he had never, ever been petted, in his entire life, not once, even though he was a very good dog, and perhaps I could rectify this oversight?
Not being made of stone, I put a hand into the dog’s ruff and scratched. There was a sigh and a mumble of “…do you need to go out…?” against my shoulder. The collie attempted to flatten himself through the mattress–possibly yes, he did need to go out, but there was petting, please don’t make him choose–!
“…attention whore…” came the mutter, and I’d be hard pressed to say which one sighed more heavily, the man or the dog.
And then there was some motion outside, and the collie’s head jerked up and he began barking furiously because oh my god there were DEER outside, and then the spastic beagle leaped to his feet, alerted by the barking, and began baying, which, if you’ve never heard a hunting dog bay, is nothing at all like a bark, but more resembles a howl with a job to do. I sat up. The boyfriend, used to this sort of morning wake-up-call, groaned into the pillow.
A pair of deer took off running through the woods, tails flagging white, and the collie gave up, and then his dutiful owner also gave up and took him outside, but the beagle continued bouncing on the bed and baying for another five minutes or so, determined to make sure that his owner did not join the statistics of those men killed in their beds by rogue deer.
And that wasn’t particularly restful or romantic, as moments go, but y’know, it was still pretty good, too.
*Mentally exhausted by a stimulating discussion of the theological problem of suffering. The source of the, um, physical exhaustion I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. My parents read this blog.
