His scent anchors me tous, and to my solid, secure fortress of memories built with him.
Like the night we made love for the first time.
Daniel and I didn’t sleep together the night we met, when I took him out to dinner for sushi. We spent that whole evening talking and, to be honest, falling in love with each other.
Didn’t take us long to reach that point, though. Went to church the next day, spent the afternoon together, invited him to stay for dinner, and it felt like he never left. How we played and made love, and for the first time in seven years, I fell asleep quickly and had the best sleep in years.
I remember almost everything about that night, how he sounded, the faces he made, the joy of his warm flesh pressed against mine.
Making love to him felt as perfect and easy as it had with Ward, although it wasn’t a conscious comparison, because Ward wasn’t on my mind at that moment.
Nothing was on my mind, except Daniel.
Daniel wanted all of me, the man and the Master, the sadist and the sexually starved lover.
The bastard and the broken-hearted.
The imperfect sinner who struggled to break free of the past.
He knew my weakness and didn’t fault me for it. We shared our grief and moved forward together into a then new-to-us world, building it from the ground up.
Looking into his blue eyes as he sucked my cock for the first time and stared up at me, my marks all over his ass, I realized I was already falling in love with him.
I know, I know.
The heart knows what it knows, the soul wants what it wants.
And what it wanted was to be out of pain and to feel joy again.
I’d vainly spent seven years searching for it in church, in God, in my Bible, and, finally, self-medicating with an insane workload to help me not think about how empty and off-balanced my soul was.
Suffering.
In one twenty-four hour period, it was like the sun broke through the clouds and painted a rainbow—no pun intended—across my world.
A promise of something better.
He beautifully suffered for me as I bound and beat him, as I reveled in his pain and rejoiced in his pleasure.
We wore each other out that night. Despite knowing his feelings against marriage, I was already wondering how I could lay a trail for him to follow to eventually coax him into taking my hand and my name for life.
I also remember thinking, as we drifted off to sleep together in my bed, that it was the first time I’d been with someone since losing Ward and I didn’t spend the entire time comparing him to Ward.
Or missing Ward.
It was the first night I realized that, maybe, healing was possible in some form.
From that moment on, I tried to focus everything I had and was on Daniel.
Except nothing could completely erase the missing man, or my memories of him, from my soul. Even as Daniel and I made new ones together.
Even as we built a shared life and moved forward through our respective emotional trauma.
Maybe the difference in our ages was a good thing. Daniel led me places in life I needed to experience. New music, new books and movies and TV shows. He was already involved in politics, and helped me navigate that world in a way that wasn’t always readily apparent to me.
He helped me prep for debates and town hall meetings. He invisibly directed my media campaign, and helped me swiftly capitalize on every gaffe and misstep my opponent made with eerie ease that bordered on spooky prescience.
He held me when I lost my parents, and was the glue that kept me and my brother together during those darkest periods of my life.
