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She has a moment to catch her breath in the morning light. Then she rolls over and it is the way Caitlyn looks at her that sweeps the air from her lungs.
“I've never told you this,” Caitlyn says. “But when we first met I must admit that your actions didn't quite contradict the rather unfair stereotype.”
Vi raises her eyebrows.
She also wiggles a little closer so that Cait can run a hand on the soft of her tummy, fingers brushing their way up to her chest, the touch firm and grounding as it always is.
“But now we know better, don't we?”
Vi waits, waits as Caitlyn's hand sweeps up the column of her throat, knuckles running in that firm yet gentle touch under her chin. She tilts her head up for better access, for better scritches. Caitlyn understands as she always does.
“You're not one of those types who only leers at people and doesn't care for their feelings. What's the phrase you mentioned when I told you about the Thompson cousin?”
Vi chuckles. “Toxic dudebro?”
Caitlyn's nose scrunches but her hand does not cease the scritching; Vi resists the urge to purr. Then she thinks about why she resists the urge, and doesn't.
Caitlyn's smile could light up the world, she thinks. She might be biased.
They might be married for way too long.
“You're not one of those,” Caitlyn says. “You're not bad at putting up that front if need be but that's not you.”
Vi nuzzles into the touch that has now migrated up past her jaw and to her cheek.
“No,” says Caitlyn as the tip of her thumb presses to Vi's lips.
They part now as they always do but today instead of pressing slowly in to rest on her tongue, to fuck slowly into her mouth just the way they both love, Caitlyn's thumb runs along the sharp of her teeth, the soft flesh a gentle pressure on her incisors, drifting further back. Vi's tongue flicks out in a lick and in that response lives all the sweetness of the years they have spent together.
“You're actually a puppy,” Caitlyn says with her thumb in a canine, on a canine. “My best boi.”
Vi grins and pulls her down to bed, pulls Caitlyn by the edge of her nightshirt until she comes tumbling down onto her; she scoops all the sharp edges and soft muscle into herself, gathers as much of her as one person can possibly hold, wraps her arms around those longer limbs, that slimmer waist, that wriggly butt. She squeezes them together, squeezes all the weird funny bony bits and the wonderfully squishy tense muscly bits together until it’s really quite hard to tell where one of them begins and the other ends, whose elbow is in whose gut and whose shoulder is squished into what.
All through this Caitlyn laughs that one breathless laugh that Vi loves the most, the puffs of air tickling her neck where Caitlyn’s nose nuzzles, rubs so soft with each shake of her head, with each thump of an invisible tail. Caitlyn nips with her teeth, then presses a wet, silly, sloppy kiss to the curve of her neck.
It tickles.
It takes her heart and stirs it the wild kind of crazy, a disbelieving sort of buoyant like if she closes her eyes she’ll open them to see that she’s soaring in the sky, the world laid down beneath her feet, clouds in her hands, everything possible.
Stars, Vi thinks, she’s so in love.
She’s never known a love like this. It’s not come easy, it’s been something they’ve made, piece by piece, brick by brick, been knocked down in the storms, returned to after the winds have calmed. They’ve met each other’s eyes over the wreckage, shared a wry smile and reached for the mortar and the trowels, picked up the pieces and built it up stronger, stronger, always stronger but no less beautiful because it is theirs.
It is theirs.
It’s their space to breathe, their space to smile, their space to laugh, their space to cry, their space to simply be.
Here on their sheets, under their canopy, in their bedchamber, shielded only partially from the sun by their curtains, squashed into their mattress by the love of her life who is being an absolute menace with those wandering hands and nippy puppy teeth, Vi is herself as much as she has ever been and as much as she will always be.
There’s a pause.
Caitlyn’s eye emerges from the messy curtain of her hair, her cheek rising only to rest on the soft of Vi’s chest, on the tender parts that don’t hide her heart in the slightest.
“You’re thinking—” her lips curve into a smile on Vi’s skin that she can feel deep in her soul “—I can feel you thinking.”
A devious twinkle in that one eye.
“It shall cause a disturbance in the fabric of the universe,” her asshole of a wife says, “you must cease this tomfoolery immediately.”
Vi laughs, deep in her belly newly grown soft with the good fortune of love.
“Make me,” she growls.
A slowly rising eyebrow.
“Oh,” Caitlyn’s voice rises languidly as does she, the soft of her cheek leaving and taking the warmth with it, loose strands of her hair brushing against bare skin. “Is that how you’d like to play today, pup?”
Vi bares her canines.
“Takes one to know one.”