Golden Hour

Golden rays of warm light bathed the bedroom, washed over her soft skin where it was exposed above the tangle of sheets that wrapped us together. She breathed in, and out, eyelashes fluttering against a still-rosy cheek, lips parted and puffy from when I kissed every inch of her. I watched from beside her, breathing in the smell of her, her shampoo on the pillow and the scent that lingered with the sweat on her skin from the night before that was uniquely hers.

I counted the rise and fall of her breast with every breath, I would touch her if it wouldn't wake her from her sleep.

It didn't matter that it was well past 4:30 in the afternoon, or that the pair of us hadn't left the bedroom since the night before, the steady ticking of the clock on the wall, faceless in the gleam of afternoon sun, played as nothing more than a metronome counting the beats of our hearts.

The sounds of our roommates downstairs stirring in the kitchen, banging cupboards shut and running tapwater through the creaky old plumbing, was all muted, muffled by the walls painted ablaze with the gold and pink of the setting sun.

We'd have to leave our little private paradise eventually, return to our jobs and our friends and lives outside in the real world, but for now, we could just lie there, sunlight warming our skin through the glass, not a care in the world.

Her eyes fluttered open, still drowsy and clouded with dreaming. A perfect swirl of muddy oak and mossy green, eyes that crinkled in the corners with a shy smile and a laugh that cut through the silence of the room like a knife through warm butter. Rich and smooth and easy.

Everything about her was easy, even the parts that weren't. I thought back to the day before, how red hot and full of anger we'd been, arguing about this and that, exploding with all of the problems that had been building between us over the past few months, it was oh so easy to fight. To scream, to cry, to open up. It was also far too easy to hurt, a deep ache that pulled on the chest weighing us down. And then, it was far too easy to forgive. To forgive everything, my problems, hers, any and all mistakes no matter the severity or the effect could be washed away by the sight of tears pooling in her eyes.

That was our love, easy to feel, no matter what that feeling may be.

But then after hours the yelling had stopped, around this same golden hour when afternoon fades to evening, that hour when everything is on fire with the radiance of early summer sunlight, when the light could catch her eyes and make them burning amber.

It was after that hour that we had stopped fighting, stopped crying and instead fell into each other's arms with a kiss. An open mouthed, lazy, toothy, bruising kiss.

We'd fallen into bed slowly, like the gravity had left with the daylight, undressing each other carefully, touching and feeling and loving every part of each other. We moved in a rythym only we could, at a pace so slow and quick and strong that the metronome of the clock on the wall couldn't dare to match. We swelled and broke like waves on the rocks, breaths mingled together between us, hot on the pulse of each other's necks. I held her strong as I could, bracing her body against mine where she lied below me, marking her with fingerprints and blossoms of red from my lips, as she did to me. We were entirely each other's with the walls and the early rising moon as our witness, no two souls had ever fit together in the same way that ours had in those moments. No other's could.

When starlight replaced the sun, we went again, and again until our legs shook beneath us and the sheets were sweat damp and tangled around our bodies. Even then, once we'd sunken in to the divets of the bed, we didn't sleep, we just watched each other, memorizing the freckles and curves and dimples of each other's bodies, replaying the hours that had led up to this. Sometimes I'd catch her blushing at the thoughts of what we had done.

Time didn't seem to pass as we spent the night. I only knew it had as the sun rose once more in the window. Only then, had the pair of us had settled into a still sleep.

Now, back at the start of that golden hour an entire day and an eternity later, we watched each other again, sleepy and sated and completely at peace.

"What time is it?" she asked, her voice was rough from sleep, she turned onto her back to look out at the orange and pink and yellow sky outside. She didn't cover herself with the sheet like people did in the movies, there was no need, she lay completely open and vulnerable, an angel bathed in her halo of sunlight. How I would worship her again and again and again. How it would be oh so easy to devote my life to her and her alone.

I barely even registered what she'd said, I was so taken with the sight of the golden light on the skin of her chest, with how I could paint her with the color and it wouldn't do the scene before me any justice.

She looked back to me and smiled again, pink colored her face, spreading down to her neck and collar bones as it often did when she caught me staring.

I smiled and reached to touch her again, tucking a springy lock of hair behind her ear. She was so warm.

It didn't matter what time it was, not to me. I felt that an eternity had passed during that night, starting and ending with an hour that contained every night of the rest of my life within it.

My golden hour.