I stare into your ever-changing eyes, deeper by far than oceans of light, shadows of darkness occasionally flickering into the brightness, and the depth of your thoughts weaken me. I cannot read your face, and your eyes, expressive to the point of overbearance, bewilder me.

I am sure my own face is a plain statement of all these thoughts fluttering through my mind; butterfly-winged, half-frightened, half basking in the happiness that you seemed to drop so carelessly around me, cloaking me in a confusion of sunlight and ghostly whispering what-ifs.

I feel the rise and fall of your chest, your muscles taught and hard beneath my body, your warmth pervading my chilled flesh (gentle, uninvasive, yet insistent and unending heat, seeping slowly into my bones and settling there like a protective shield against the cold air surrounding me and threatening to take away the sheer magic of this hovering moment). Your breathing, the slow faint sound of your heart beating, is comforting; my body is too tense, pressed against yours, vaguely registering everything environing us, but caught up completely in an instant in which time has (in it's ever-deceiving manner) seemed to pause.

I still gaze; flecks of color in your eyes shifting, and I know you're thinking (Butterflies? No, those are mine - painfully fluttering, a few thoughts, wildly against the nets of emotional clarity and brilliance tossed over them, fighting to surface. Your thoughts appear more to me as waves, strong, connected, crashing and breaking on the shores that are the surface of your mind; fading back into eternity once spreading themselves like liquid blue-green-greys into your eyes; controlled, no wild tremors of emotion battling against themselves). The utter lack of knowledge of what it is you are thinking, adds a ever-so-slightly distraught butterfly to the battle, and it flickers a moment across my face.

I feel your fingers tighten on mine, soothing, gentle, powerful; your steady eyes still holding me, and I feel...

The word that I have not thought for so many years. It snaps harshly in a soft quiet might at the butterflies threatening to break through my thin-veiled layer of comfort in this happiness, quelling them to submission; I feel my body relax itself against yours, submerging myself in a wave of realization that no loosely netted butterfly thoughts could ever war with this, filled with a sense of calm and strength, my fears and questions and doubts chased into hidden black corners to hide.