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Your body, it’s rhythm framed
from proportion to persistence, creates a divine harmony, it is so finely composed.
I shall be silent for my love does not interpret you well in crude songs; to your perfection you alone know the notation.
(Redonilla 87)
—
There is something peculiar about the way the roads wind to Penscombe at this hour of the evening, the wind walloping the trees.
Or maybe it’s the proximity that Taggie feels to Rupert in the car – a proximity she hasn’t felt to him in months – as he pulls into the gravel driveway.
When he helps her out of the car and her warm hand envelopes his, the sun is setting low on the horizon that the sky blossoms with a gorgeous orange and pink hue. Rupert smiles at her, a handsome smile, and she cannot resist smiling back.
It’s like coming home.
Her hand still in his, Rupert looks down at their joined hands and lightly grazes the skin of her ring finger.
I can bear it no longer, Tag, he said at the airport, I just want to be near you. I love you too much. Please let me be near you.
She wouldn’t have imagined it months ago– all that turmoil. All that endless longing and needless suffering. Trying to fill the ache with the presence of another man who did not even compare to the love she’s garnered for Rupert over the last year.
I don’t care about your past, Taggie insisted through sobs, Just let me be your future.
And she was to become Rupert’s future – he had no qualms or doubts about it. He wouldn’t anymore. She was to become his spring and his summer, everything more and in between. How could have he been so stupid? She was standing here, his angel, ready to offer herself and more for his love. If she could only see how much Rupert truly loved her, how it overflowed in him so profoundly it once scared him.
It would no longer. He would spend the rest of his days making it known to her that he loved her most ardently. That he never intended to stop.
Rupert reached out to her face, brushing the fringe from her eyes. “I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me in wanting to become my wife, Tag.”
”It wasn’t hard to say yes,” Taggie says almost sheepishly, beaming up at him.
Was he always this happy? Surely not. He couldn’t help but gather her gorgeous face in his hands and kiss her lips with feverish passion.
He would have to ring the jeweller as quickly as possible. What was he thinking, asking to marry him on the spot without a ring? Perhaps it was the lucidity of actually seeing her there, standing alone as she longingly searched the crowd of incoming arrivals with hopeful concentration. Then their eyes met in the distance, and Rupert knew that he was to ask her right then and there.
It comes back to him like a beautiful dream, and when he pulls away from their kiss he takes a moment to admire the blush of Taggie’s perfect lips, the glossiness in her gorgeous blue eyes, and the disheveled strays of hair clinging to her freckled cheeks. It’s enough to almost make him fall to his knees with how much he wants her.
Rupert cannot fathom the amount of sleepless nights he’s endured, or the drags of cigarettes and glasses of booze he’s had to drink to drown his sorrows of never having her. And yet she beckons to him like a beautiful flower, almost melting in his touch.
There is momentary silence of the evening, birds singing their song and the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. He gathers her soft hands in his, trembling with want.
“I mean what I said earlier, Tag,” Rupert whispers, bringing her knuckles to his lips to kiss them tenderly. “You are my whole heart. My whole life. Please never let me be without you again.”
Taggie trembles, tears beginning to brim in her eyes for what feels like the hundredth time in the last hour. “I won’t let you. I promise.”
And she means it – they are tethered to one another. There is simply no other way to be.
She wantonly gazes up at him, watches the slow but delicate pull of her face to his.
“Rupert?” Taggie begins, and then says in almost whisper, “Please take me inside.”
It doesn’t take more than a single moment for him to oblige.
(*)
Clothes fall like silk to the floor of Penscombe’s kitchen tiles. Cutlery clatters haphazardly around them as Rupert hungrily kisses Taggie, pushing her back into the marble countertop. She reaches clumsily for the zipper in her cowboy boots to take them off, but Rupert is quick to gently take ahold of her hand before she can do so.
”Don’t,” he pants in between kisses, the hardness of him insistently pressing up against the thin material of her panties. “Always wanted to fuck you in these, angel.”
Taggie mewls with pleasure and drives her fingers further into Rupert’s hair. He groans, burying his face into her breasts as he sucks and laps hungrily at her soft flesh. And already knowing to her desires, he peels her underwear down, down, down her gorgeous legs to kneel and worship the most sensitive part of her with his mouth.
She wreathes and squirms, merciless to the way that he is ravishing her as he always intended to. He is like a dream, and on her precipice with tears unabashedly streaming down her face, all Taggie can say is, “Rupert. Rupert. Rupert.”
Taggie is his unbecoming the first time he pushes inside her, and it seems he cannot fuck her hungrily enough as the word hunger has lost all meaning to him. It is more than hunger with Tag, and Rupert cannot begin to fathom that she has the capability to make him feel this way.
His fingers reach for her lips, and the clever girl she is, Taggie wraps her mouth around them and begins to suck with desperate moans. Her eyes are so wide with adoration Rupert feels as though he could fall into them and never look back.
When he spills into her, he breathes in the sweet scent of her and cradles her neck lovingly, endlessly murmuring, “Tag, my darling angel. My wife. My life and my world. I love you.”
(*)
The morning sun peeks through the curtains, an insisting light beaming on two lovers. Rupert wakes first, tenderly pressing kisses to Taggie’s face and down to the slope of her freckled shoulder.
When she wakes with a slight giggle and a smile that momentarily stops Rupert’s world, he knows that it will be a good day.
Taggie sits up, bed linens wrapped around her naked torso and auburn hair a mess.
Rupert thinks she’s the most beautiful thing in the world.
“Shall I get morning tea started darling?” He asks quietly, thumb on her chin.
”That would be very nice,” Tag smiles.
So their morning began.