Prose: A Fiction (Pending a complete re-write)

As the conversation wound down, he felt her breathing begin to slow, even as his own words started to trail off with consistently more frequency. She used her feet to push off her plaid-patterned flats and rubbed her feet together as the shoes dropped to the floor, landing with one resting on top of the other. She reached up and pulled a fragment of off-colored lint from his shirt, very near to her face, and in her sleepy sense of humor, placed it in his shirt pocket, taking care to button it closed, thus keeping the lint safe so that he might come across it some time in the future and likely discard it at that time.

As she pulled her hand back and rested it next to her face, her palm down laying softly against his chest, she fell into a peaceful sleep. His eyes barely open, he looked across her hair, somewhat tousled from the time spent laying against each other. His gaze continued as he followed the folds of her delicately beautiful sundress, which somehow found a way to make this perfectly enchanting woman even more attractive; so much so, that he struggled to keep his eyes dry.

He leaned his head forward and, taking in the smell of her hair, kissed her softly atop her head as stray hairs tickled his face and stuck to his re-emerging beard. Before pulling back, he kissed her head once more and, in doing so, lost the ability to hold back his tears any longer. As he lay back, his arm holding her gently, secretly hoping to shroud her from any unhappiness that might ever come into her life, tears rolled over his face in perfect silence. She made a soft sound in her sleep, and he used his other hand to dry his face. Moments later, he took to sleep with him the acceptance that he would never know the love he had lived for since he had met her so many years before, when they were children, unmarred by life, and yet innocent.

Memories of their times together filled his dreams: the sight of her face as she laughed with her entire soul, and the way her eyes squinted ever so slightly from the resulting smile that could make anybody's day that much better. He dreamed of her running ahead of him in a race which always started with her taking off before a race had ever declared. As he ran to catch up, she would be laughing uncontrollably, while running with her dress pulled up enough to keep it from tripping her up, just barely revealing her soft and delicate legs, tapering off into her bare feet, which, even covered in dust, seemed to express flawlessness. The race would always end in her declaring herself the victor—her present position suddenly having become the unofficial finish line—and turning to watch him make his way to meet her as she laughed in delight.

After each such race, he detests himself for not having swept her into his arms upon catching up to her and kissing her in a way that would make her hope it might never end so that she could stand there kissing him forever. He had always wanted to kiss her like that, and he knew that there was no other person on earth who could ever kiss her in such a way. There was no other person who had shared with her that time together, who had talked with her for endless hours until both had fallen asleep, who had covered her up at the first hint of a shiver, though she had never been aware of either the cold, or of his act of caring.