Home❤️

You brush a stray strand of hair from Mina's face. She looks so beautiful and peaceful like this. Sleeping like an angel wrapped up in a large blanket. Her hair is sprawled out on the pillow, messy, long and oh so gorgeous. There is this serenity on her features that doesn't exist when she is awake. Not that you've had the chance to check recently. Her lips are slightly parted to allow for soft breaths to escape. Her skin is all white and pristine apart from the few freckles that you dearly love kissing. She is beauty and calm incarnate - all in your bed with your ring on her finger.

Your heart swells, you could look at her like this forever and it still wouldn't be enough. You kiss her cheek, careful to not wake her, and she stirs slightly, coos in unconscious appreciation of your affection.

"I love you, Mina. Have a good day at work," you whisper as you do every morning and off to work you go.

Life with Mina was a blessing. Having this woman around, seeing her decorate the couch with her long legs, illuminate the kitchen with her smile, fill the bedroom with her moans, is the best thing a man could ever ask for.

Stress on was a blessing.

Mina is an ambitious woman, it's one of the million things that drew you to her in the first place. But ambition comes with a price. Late meetings, emergency phone calls, weekends at the office, the work never ends.

You wake up early, go to work early, head to bed alone. You wake up wrapped around her, running too hot but smiling like a teenager in love. You kiss her before you get up from bed, when she stirs, before you leave for work and at least a couple dozen times in between. Because she comes home late, goes to bed wrapped around you, hoping to warm up from the coldness of the outside world, and wakes up when you're gone. She probably kisses you just as sweetly when you sleep too. She looks at you the same way before huddling up next to you and sighing blissfully that she is finally home - in your arms.

Weekends are the saving grace. It's when you're together again, like it was always meant to be. You cuddle in the morning, read next to each other while enjoying the hums of each other's breaths, eat meals in pyjamas - together - and finally talk like you once used to. When life was simpler.

Though, lately even that is slipping between your fingers. You aren't exactly sure you can live only off of these quiet mornings and stolen kisses, but every time you look at her you think you'll be okay. You have to be - you love each other so much.

Here is how your day continues after the last moments you get to spend with her in the morning:

You spend the next 10 hours at a mediocre job, away from home so you can provide for your family. Maybe soon it won't be just you and Mina and you'll have to be ready for that day.

She'd be a wonderful mother; you're sure of it. Besides, having a mini-Mina running around with her laugh and eyes, calling you dad, might be the single greatest thing a man could ever wish for.

You get home to a dark apartment that still faintly smells of her vanilla perfume. You prepare dinner for both of you only to eat it alone. The empty dishes in the sink are reward enough - it warms your heart to know she still enjoys your cooking, reminds you that things between you are still fundamentally the same, only with less time to spare. You sit on your chair and stare at the one opposite it. You know she does the same - same longing and unshed tears in her eyes.

You finish dinner and prepare for bed. You read a bit - alone, no one to share funny phrasing or surprisingly sweet scenes with. Mina was always there with a loving, although tired, smile and a quiet voice appropriate for the late hours.

It hurts, it really does, to have her so close yet so far away every day. To look at her smiling face only through your phone screen as you scroll through photos of you together. This one's from your honeymoon in Paris - she had ripped her stockings on the Eifel Tower, you'd think it'd be safer. You wrapped your jacket around her legs then and told her she was beautiful no matter what because it's true and took a photo on top of the world while looking at your whole world, her tiny waist fitting comfortably in your arms.

This one's from your wedding, her cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk from the cake. The look in her eyes is loving and sweet as the glaze on her lips, you remember it like it was yesterday. You could never forget her in that white dress, walking down the aisle, taking your hands, looking into your eyes and saying "I do".

So you have to endure these days and nights. You have to put your phone down and wipe your quiet tiers because she works hard for you. For both of you. For the eventual third or even fourth of you. And you have to go to sleep in a cold, large, empty bedroom that was once filled with her warmth and scent.

Only for it to repeat the next day. And every day, for that matter. You find yourself in front of the familiar door to your apartment for yet another night of feeling the key to your home heavier than it should be. All's going according to well-established routine of heartache and hanging on by a thread of hope and blissful memories.

It's torturous, really. That you have to brace yourself with a deep breath when you turn the key to stifle the disappointment that somehow still accompanies darkness spilling from your apartment when you push the door. It has been a year and some change - not that you're counting (is what you keep telling yourself) - and it still hurts. Less, but enough.

Enough for you to rest your head on the door and to lament the -

A feeling hits you. Outright slams into your chest before the rest of your meagre senses could even catch up to the reality you find yourself in. You slam the door open and the rest of your body finally can catch up to what your heart already felt.

First, it's the way your apartment lights up the corridor, which usually goes the other way around. Next it's the smell of spices and the feeling of moisture on your skin. But there is something underneath it all, something you would have missed had you not learnt to pick it out in any room you've walked into for the last decade. It's the sweet scent of vanilla. Just a lick, but unmistakable flowing from your home. You walk in, not even taking your shoes off, turn the corner to your kitchen and freeze in front of the fairy tale spinning before your very eyes.

It's Mina. Just Mina swimming in one of your old T-shirts, humming a song quietly and looking over a pot of boiling water.

Your eyes sting with tears but you can't close them, lest she disappears at once.

"Mina?" You croak out, breathing in every single detail of the scene before you.

She looks up at you, smiles and suddenly all the lights in your home feel dimmer.

"Surprise!" Her voice is sweet and bright.

Gun to your head you couldn't remember how or when you crossed the distance from the door to the stove. All you would ever be able to say is how wonderful Mina's body feels against yours. How sweet her hair smells. How warm her breath is on your neck. How real she is in your arms.

"You're here," you exclaim through budding tears.

"Where else would I be?" But even her attempt at a joke here drowns out in a soft sob against your chest. She digs her face deeper and you gladly let her wet your shirt. You'll drown in tears if you have to before you let go of her.

You do that for a while. You hold each other like the other is made of sand, tears and wishes spoken through sighs. You cry into her hair and she shakes against your torso. You feel where her silky hair reaches the curve of her spine, and it feels real.

You take your sweet time, water boiling behind your back and still infinitely cooler than the sensation of Mina in your arms.

Eventually your breathing stabilises and you pull your head back to look at her.
And she is still there - she's still here - looking up at you with the whole galaxy in her eyes. They are red and glassy, tears still running down her pink cheeks.

You wipe the tears away, savouring the way her skin feels under your thumbs. You press your forehead to hers and whisper into her lips.

"My beautiful Mina."

"I'm here," she sobs again.

"Really here?"

"Really here."

And she is. She really is - on your lips, in your arms - home. Finally home.

You kiss her as if you've never kissed her before. Raw, passionate and maybe too eager, but caution is thrown to the wind when the woman you love more than life itself is finally home.

And that lasts an eternity again. And it is still somehow too little. That water's been boiling for at least two heat deaths by now and Mina will have to add more to cook you that pasta dish, but the whole world could be ending right now and you would not break the kiss.

However, you do need to breathe and actually look at her again. You look down at her, lips now swollen from your deep kiss and scraping teeth, eyes so soft and still housing tears that didn't get the memo about this being a happy moment. At least her smile did because it is doing everything correctly - pointing right at you, dazzling as can be, and most importantly - really here.

"I missed you so much," you whisper.

"You saw me this morning."

"You know what I mean."

"I do. I know too well," She whispers back.

You take a couple more eternities to look at her face in your hands before Mina speaks with a soft smile and noticeably less tears down her cheeks.

"I was cooking dinner."

"I'll help."

And that was a bold faced lie. You were completely useless in that kitchen. Worse than that actually. It was as if you were trying to convince Mina to spare the poor produce of the horrible fate of being cut and cooked.

She told you to dice peppers and garlic; you butchered the fuck out of all of it because you were too busy staring at her. You were making hearts with your eyes and horrible attempt at a vegetable papier-collé with the knife in your hand.

She reached up for a cup; you ran your greedy fingers over the dip of her hips, pulled her into your body, and made her burn the sauce.
She turned around to ask you a question; you lifted her up, placed her almost naked butt on the kitchen counter and kissed her until she was giggling prettily and tightening her legs around your waist.

Suffice to say Mina's bolognese did not turn out the way it was supposed to. Vegetables that were cut with the cunning precision of a fool in love, spaghetti that had stuck together due to being boiled for a passionate make-out session too long and sauce that would be too bitter and salty if the context of its taste were different.

You now find yourself on your usual chair with that abomination of pasta on the dining table and Mina on your lap - still wearing only your T-shirt and her panties and pressing her entire body against yours. Her head's on your shoulder as she places lazy kisses on your jaw and murmurs against your skin.

"This is the worst pasta I've ever cooked."

"It's weird, yeah." You wrap one arm across her stomach as you speak. "When did you even add sugar? I've never tasted anything so sweet."

She chuckles, her body shaking softly against yours.

"There is no way you missed a single ingredient, you were watching me the entire time."

"I think I missed every ingredient because I was only watching you the entire time." You kiss her cheek and feed her a fork of barely edible pasta between her giggles

The biohazard has been successfully disposed of into your stomachs and now you are just playing with Mina's hair as she's sinking into your frame. You're pretty sure it's more the prospect of the question you're about to ask rather than the pasta that makes bile rise in your throat.

"So," you begin carefully, "is this like a special occasion thing, or..."

It brings you dread to ask but the way her eyes light up makes it all fade to warmth instead.

"I got another promotion," she says in the softest voice ever. So content and dreamy at what her next words entail. "Comes with the perk of being able to work from home."

You instantly kiss her again and feel her smile rise against yours. You hug her as close as you possibly can and feel every part of where your bodies meet.

This will be your new normal. Your new routine of melodious laughs, elegant legs peaking under old shirts and nasty pasta. What more could a man ever ask for?

Here're a couple of things:

Mina deepening the kiss with some sort of purpose.

Mina turning around to straddle you properly.

Mina pulling the whisper of underwear she was rubbing into your hard cock for the better part of an hour to the side and sinking into you.

Her soft moans against your lips, the way her hands grip your shoulder as you grab her hips, her wet heat spreading all the way to each and every nook and cranny of your being.

You could wish for all of it and you'd get it in an instant.

"Oh, fuck." You breathe into her lips.

"This is - fuck," Mina moans on a downstroke and this time even without staring at her eyes you can see stars.

"This is uncomfortable, baby." She complains and it is true. Her legs are forced in awkward position because, who would have thought, your almost Ikea chair is not the best place to have sex.

"Sorry, let me just..." You say and you stand up with her in your arms.
She offers an adorable yelp followed by a hot gasp against your lips when your cock digs deeper into her at the new angle.

You've never sympathised with Atlas more then when you started walking towards you bedroom.

It doesn't even have to be Zeus coming down to condemn you to an eternity of holding your entire world up. You would do it right now if you had to only so Mina doesn't fall on her butt from a meter away from the ground. Hell, you could probably do it two eternities in a row if she required you to.

Fortunately for you, your bedroom is just a few thrusts away.

You lay Mina down gently on the bed and pin her hands to the sheets. You kiss her, you thrust deeper, you press your body against her lithe frame and fall into bliss.

She is so wet and tight and real beneath you.

It's embarrassing really. It all is. From the way you looked at her like you're seeing a woman for the first time when you walked through the door. To the almost teenager-esque lack of foreplay. To the words that spill out of your lips too quickly.

"Mina, I'm -"

"Me too. Please, inside, please." She begs for a second before her lips go back on yours

You breathe each other's moans as your bodies become one. Scorching skin melts together, air becomes fervid and shared in your lungs - never enough to fuel the flame of your passion. She grips you like you were always meant to be there. Because you were. From the moment you laid eyes on her in that lecture hall all of those lifetimes ago you were really meant to be there. Here. Home. Where you're still meant to be.

You hold each other for yet another millennium or so until your heartbeats return to their baseline rhythm together. You kiss her cheek so softly as you lift her up and carry her to the shower, clothes falling somewhere; who cares, Mina's naked and looking up at you.

"Hello, love," you speak to the whole cosmos in her eyes.

"Wow, you are so real," she responds in the same mesmerised way and you know what she means. Too well.

You rub shampoo in her hair, massaging her roots and feeling her bones turn to jelly under your touch. You wash her body and divert too much attention then strictly necessary to her hips and waist and breasts and stomach and thighs and neck and ...

You crouch down a little so she can shampoo you back. You feel her delicate fingers run their gamut over your muscles and kiss her when you catch her enjoying herself too much. Which thankfully is often.

You wrap her in her penguin bath robe and smile dumbly at how cute she is in it. You're staring through the mirror even at the way she brushes her teeth as she leans against your frame.

Now you find yourself like the way you used to. All the way back, before everything was fucked to high hell. Back home. You read next to each other, sharing passages like secrets. Sharing giggles and kisses with the person you love most. Sharing a blanket, underneath which your limbs are tangled beyond recognition of where one of you ends and the other begins.

Eventually you have to go to sleep and Mina rests her head on your chest, listens to your heartbeat and wraps around you like she's afraid you'll disappear by tomorrow morning.
You'd rather die an infinite number of deaths two times over before you'd rather be somewhere else. Somewhere other than home.