Love's Continuation

"I want you to take me back," Adam said. We were sitting on the couch. He was holding my hands in his hands. He was staring at me intently. His eyes were a bit glassy. His palms, sweaty, like a fourteen year old boy’s. He was nervous.

I wasn't nervous. Not really. For the first time in weeks, I almost felt calm.

It's not that I'd been "waiting for this." It's not that I'd expected that "he'd come back around." I mean, that's the shit that's in romantic comedies. And while Adam and I have certainly been romantic, and on occasion, quite comedic—we are not made of the stuff that makes a Nora Ephron film.

Thankfully.

But when he walked into my apartment that night, freshly shaven, dressed in a fancy shirt, with a bag full of clothes, when he kissed me softly on the lips, tentatively, and cleared his throat a few times in my kitchen while I was arranging our plates for dinner—let’s say I’d had a feeling.

Later on, after dinner—collard greens, salmon, salted caramels, honey wine—when we were lying in bed, naked under flannel sheets, tangled up in a hug so tight I could hardly breathe, Adam said three words that floored me, just floored me:

“You are mine.”

We can make this relationship untraditional. We can make this relationship open. We can make this relationship exactly what we want it to be. I’m hoping we do.

But “You are mine.”

For the moment, that’s all I want—or need—to be.

His.