That brought me closer to being awake. Still, I burry my face into the pillow and speak until I realize she can’t hear me. I turn my face to face her. “Yeah, I was in and out of bed a lot. I didn’t sleep at all last night. I stayed up and wrote.”

A big smile graces her face, “Are you finally going to let me read it?”

I think for a moment. “My laptop is all the way over there.” And I point in the general direction of the couch. I’m hoping she is as lazy as I am and not willing to get up to get it.

She jumps up like a jack-in-the-box. My story apparently winded her up. She jumps over me and to the floor, collects the laptop and comes back to bed. She reads the first three chapters, laughing at the parts that were funny, but otherwise completely enthralled.

“You have to let me read more next time I’m over.” She says. I think for a moment that she actually feels as though she is on a cliffhanger of her own life and mine. To be fair, she is reading of events from my perspective. I usually don’t let friends read my stories – only strangers or cross-country friends. She knows that I had just let her into a huge part of my mind and my heart. She has seen my inner workings. She has seen my thought process. I wonder briefly if that changed anything for her.

She kisses me on the lips as she gets out of bed. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

“Okay,” I say as I situate myself in bed preparing for sleep. “Towels are in the hall closet, you know how everything works. I’ll be right here sleeping.”

She leaves the room and it only seems like a moment later that I hear her coming back in. Had it not been for the smell of shampoo, I would have thought she had forgotten something. But time only passed so quickly because I was asleep.

I feel her very close to me, next to me, standing at the edge of the bed. I open my eyes and see her leaning in to kiss me. I smile and kiss her, expecting it to just be a peck. And that is how it started out. As she pulled away, I noticed that she was clad in only a towel. Her hair was soaking wet, falling on her shoulders in tendrils and waves of dark amber.