We had fallen asleep during a movie and I only woke up because a series of thunderclaps began booming across the sky. The contained force is like an explosion, propelling air towards all the houses on our street, rattling windows and gently tremoring through floorboards. During these storms, sometimes each roar in the sky seems to hum through my bones. From the couch, I see a blurry silhouette of the night as my eyes adjust. It's nothing but constant sheets of rain pouring from billowing dark clouds and strobing flashes of jagged white-blue light, like electric veins racing across the sky.

The television's random digital glows bathe the living room in faint rainbow light. Little bits of our night surge through my mind. Lazily snuggling and flipping through channels; your laughter at some joke during the film that I can't recall; a small smile arcing your lips and your hand squeezing mine. My attention was more focused on you then. How beautiful you looked with the screen's glow covering your skin, eyes shimmering like jewels, like the rings around a mysterious planet that I wanted to reach.

I love those little instances in time. They are all blinks, once tangible frames that will fade as most things do even if I cling tightly to preserve, them like fragile artifacts. All we can really do to fight time's passage is to carve what we can into memory. I treasure these with you. We have our responsibilities day to day that keep us apart. And, like any two that have been together for a long time, we have our squabbles, jealousies, and misunderstandings. But, we also have the solidarity of one another, a certainty that we can always find a safe haven together by the day's end.

You startle me now when stirring a bit, head slightly turning, body still against mine beneath the comforter we brought downstairs with us to combat the cold. I ask if you're okay and you say yes, but you don't want me to go. I remind you it's the middle of the night, that I'm not going anywhere. Your answer is simple, beautiful - Good, hold me.

They're the only words I need to snuggle closer, to completely spoon my body with yours. Time passes in a sleepy haze. I stroke through your locks, each strand of hair fragrant and silky, my fingers wandering to your neck. I love gradually waking you with my fingertips, as bits of your consciousness gently come to life. Fingertips roam lower now before my entire hand contours to you.

Your back arches, a pale curve, a bridge forming for my attentive palm to travel along. Every motion and reaction is perfect to me. The arching allows me access to the softest areas of your back, that specific sensitive plane of skin you have to have touched. Your lips finally part to exhale the most quiet and sleepy moan. Eyelids narrow, revealing no other expression than a hidden simmering need that will soon no longer be contained. They're all perfect subtleties of you. They all assemble in any order to build the most beautiful person to me and are proof of the way the many aspects of us have had such a wonderful sync from early on.

This is the primal cartography of us here unfolding, smoothing out. I've assigned titles before to your eyes, the loops of your fingerprints, the little area on the wrist where your pulse quickens from my initiation. I can attach words to them, descriptions of sacred territories, the regions that await my careful exploration. Such primal places, though, cannot ever be described with unfailing accuracy. It is better to let such lands remain nameless, to navigate and lose yourself in them rather than worry so much about how to describe what is both complex and simple.

Your sleepy sighs are this way too, as I continue down your back. Complex, in the sense that out of the billions of people populating the planet, the billions of specific preferences our cells and nerves formulate and whisper for, I found my one match. You have found yours. That's also the simple part; how two just naturally go together and how your sounds and brief motions give me consent.

I always want to wander, though. Down to the small of your back near the waistband of your pajama pants and higher up, under your shirt, where your shoulder becomes the soft recess of your collarbone. I want you to know how much I adore every curve, every expanse of skin. I glide along, embedding every pore with heat from the friction I'm mapping your form with. I feel the tangles of your muscles relaxing beneath my touch, your body craving more as you wake up. You know what moves to telegraph, what will trigger me into more action.

Your neck signals for my kiss by craning, and you slightly grind against me when my lips meet that curve. Your hand suddenly closes over mine, guiding it to your waist. My nails trail the skin below your stomach, back and forth. Never enough to leave a mark, but enough to soothe and warm you before slipping under your waistband.

Between your legs, there's already so much heat emanating from within as I massage that delicate area through your panties. You push back harder against me this time, the sudden pressure of your cheeks making me realize how much I'm throbbing. We always make the other escalate. Your slow grinds swelling the place I always ache for you. My hand rubs you faster through the soft and thin material covering your sex, your slickness already beginning to seep through.

Your moves are a controlled slow dance that is almost too much to take, driving me to have more of you, my hand slipping beneath your panties. I want to tease you with one of the slow dances I know.

In that first moment of contact, it's like there's a burning heartbeat between your legs, each pulse thrumming through your petals as a message to soothe you. Juices have already trickled out, coating lips, as you adjust a little to allow me further passage. My heart hammers harder when you utter a hushed gasp, fingers instantly sliding inside you, thumb swirling your clit each time my fingers withdraw and carefully plunge deep within again.

Fingers run through my hair when your head turns to initiate a kiss, your tongue probing. Each grind makes me want to lose more control now. While we both love when we can take our time, we also love being enmeshed in one another's inescapable frenzy.

You reach back and I shiver in the best way when you squeeze through my boxers, trying to pull them down even though your position makes it difficult. I take over, both of us chuckling from the fumbling, impatient attempt to disrobe me. Slipping them off, I pull off your top, pajama bottoms, and panties next. We are spooned again in seconds, skin rippled in goosebumps from need, from such sudden exposure.

I throw the comforter back over us, even our heads, trapping our heat inside this intimate and safe cocoon, entombing your alluring scents with us. Your hair and warm fragrant skin intermingle with the familiar aroma of your sex, perfuming the dark air. The breath exiting your body becomes the only air my lungs pull in.

Your kisses grow more feverish now as you grip and stroke me, moving me up and down, teasing my sensitive head between your cheeks. I'm throbbing harder than ever in your skilled grip. I swear I can even feel you smiling through your kiss.

You pause to adjust your angle before pushing back. I tremble against your entire body from the sudden sensation of your fiery sex devouring, enveloping my entire length with its pulsing velvet. I stay still for a moment before I start slowly pumping in and out, while you follow my every rhythm with little pushes and hip swivels against me whenever I slide forward. I'm absolutely lost in the feel of your sex sheathing me, your tongue tangling with mine, your cheeks cushioning my every thrust.

There is no sense of time here, just what we're doing. I'm oblivious to the rain and thunder, the night's cold and steady wind howling outside through trees, between houses, between cracks in the earth. There's only a universe constricted, narrowed down to you and I, to your heat and scent. My hand sneaks down again to play with the tender little nub of your clit, fingertips swirling as I go faster. As more of your juices coat me with their hot slick sheen, your kisses become a chorus of moans trembling through my mouth.

Even though our movements are sleepy, we know each other all too well. We carry our own animal instincts that play off one another, regardless of what energy or speed is between us.

Your body carries premonitions of touch inside the knowledge of where I will reach, always ready. You've always known me in capacities no other could reach the depths of. My words, moods, expressions, and even my silences are codes you've deciphered with little effort over time. The dialects we share extend to our joinings, to all the movements before and after. Your instincts are both animal, and guided with a true lover's patience, always aware when to take with a sweeping frenzy or a sleepy and sweet dance.

I can feel it nearing from the change in your breath and moans, subtle shifts that make me thrust harder, massage you deeper. I can feel it in your rising heat, in your little shakes, as if tectonic plates rest inside your bones, inevitably colliding and quaking. Little spasms flood more juices around me before they grow longer, more forceful. You clench and pulse almost painfully tightly around me as release begins to overtake you.

I can barely hold on with this delirious pressure gripping and squeezing my length, coaxing me to join you. Moments later, I erupt deep inside you, my own release overwhelming now, while you keep squeezing, milking the life out of me and into you. I'm holding on to you so tight, your hand finding mine and holding it, your touch the one certain beacon during any kind of storm. I moan your name over and over in a deep whisper near the curve of your earlobe, the syllables like a unique chant, a cadence only reserved for rituals this private and sacred. A prayer for you to never let me go - to always keep me inside of you.

The time after is always echoes and snapshots to me. It's wisps and flashes of heat from when our eyes locked in the dark before kissing. Our hearts calm from thunder, in tune with erratic stormy skies, to soft drums, thumping below skin and bone. We embrace as we did when spooning before, just unclothed now, the television off. Both of us are too sleepy to get up and go to our bed but we never say so, as if snuggling forms a silent agreement to just stay this way tonight. We'll sleep tonight with the music of our hearts calmly beating and the rain falling outside.

There have been times after when we'll talk for hours. Causal things - joking, hopes, plans, our darkest secrets and deepest thoughts that we entrust no other with. We always unravel the mysteries in one another. But I cherish this too, just as much. Telling you I love you, and hearing those three words pass through your lips, just for me. There's nothing better to hear when one is slowly descending into sleep, holding the one person they want to see when they wake up in the morning.