Greetings from the center of the earth.

    You're so cold
    Keep your hand in mine
    Wise men wonder while
    Strong men die

    Show me how it ends it's alright
    Show me how defenseless you really are
    satisfied and empty inside
    Well, that's alright, let's give this another try

It's Saturday. Another blizzard, another list of errands a mile long. I need some groceries and a new watch strap before I lose my mind. Butterfield wrapped me around a tree last winter, breaking my watch and I replaced my strap and have hated it ever since. Ben has a meeting. Erin is beginning to pull her things together for moving on Monday. Andrew is coming for dinner tonight as prepayment for helping with said move and John will be by tonight as well for a boy's night thing. I'm going to steal away to my room to read, since it's spring and once again I find my night table stacked to the rafters with books I haven't cracked yet.

And last but not least, Joel called this morning to say hello and I answered, from bed where I lay in Ben's arm, pulled tight around me. Joel seemed surprised that I picked up, probably having rehearsed the message he would have left and instead we had a good long talk about life without meds and positive changes and betrayals and it seemed that our justifications and accusations were mirror images, he having chosen the less productive route as well in favor of instant gratification with no thought to the fallout down the road, which is exactly what he accuses me of. I told him life could stand this way if he wanted, since we disapproved of each other and he asked me if I wouldn't have been happier with different choices. I knew what he meant but I ignored that and told him instead to send me his new address information and such so I can send him postcards from heaven. He laughed forever.

And then I forgot my promise and I warned him to be very, very careful with Caleb because he seems like he has your best interests at heart all the while he is taking what he wants from you. Joel said he knew, and he had watched what happened to me and to Ben and that he was immune to being influenced. I pointed out that he was there, wasn't he? He was silent for a moment and then he quietly promised me he would watch out for himself if I promised to call him if I needed him. I repeated that back to Joel and Ben laughed out loud. Joel heard him and said to say hello (graciously, considering) and I passed my phone up to Ben's ear, and he opted to be gracious too.

Hello, Dr. J. How are things in hell?...she's fine...you don't need to worry about her...worry about yourself now...yes.........just watch your back, man...k, will do. You too.
He passed me back the phone and I said my goodbyes to Joel and then hung up and I asked Ben if they might have actually made up in that brief exchange. He told me it wasn't important and that we needed to get up and get going if we were going to get everything done before the blizzard hit.

Then he went back to sleep. Because he's not worried about me, and he's not worried about Joel. It's interesting that the earthquakes hit, the shakiest walls are the ones that are still standing. In a million years I wouldn't have picked Ben as the one to stand fast and hold it together but he seems to have done a better job than the rest of us.

It brings a new sort of regret for me on this grey and snowy morning. I wish, over the years, that I had given Ben a little more credit. I didn't and I really wish I had.

Not safe.

    What did you say to me
    I'm not a novelty
    You're playing revelry
    But no one's listening
Emotionally things are different now.

I woke up at four-thirty this morning inside of a firework, explosions going off as synapses fired inside my little head, sleepily realizing that I was naked and sitting up, sitting in Ben's lap, my head lazing on his shoulder, his arms lifting me gently, over and over while he kissed up and down my collarbone. He has no qualms about touching me when I am sleeping, taking me out of whatever I'm sleeping in and doing whatever he wants to me. It doesn't surprise me anymore. I like it.

I didn't struggle. I dug in with my nails on his back instead. I sighed. He put his hand over my mouth, pushing me down onto my back again. In case I made a sound. I bit his hand and he grinned.

There are things about life now I haven't talked about. Things that are probably none of anyone's business. But things that keep drifting to the forefront of my mind and sticking there.

Ben is a lot like Cole. Way more like Cole than I let on.

Don't think I don't understand this. That Jacob was a wild tangent and I was meant to be not rushed and just admired and played with and appreciated for what I can achieve in Ben's arms and where I can get him. His best way of blowing off steam and being dark. His muse. Always his muse even though he denied it until last fall.

    Beautiful enemy,
    I'll fix your broken wings.
    I'll let you lie here till you
    fly away from me.
He's rather...dark overall. His passion just erupts in a rage of barely controlled strength and vulnerabilities of his own. He's gloriously cut and dried. I can work with this. He's predictable and beautifully depraved.

When it comes to sex, he is on. There is never off. He's never awkward or quiet like he is in regular Ben-mode. Ben is Ben all the time until the lights go out.

He is who I would pick to play off my predilections and I won't be made to feel sorry for saying that. He can match what I bring and then some. He leaves me hurting and physically ruined and breathless for more of the same. We match on a level I never expected to. Sexually he'll go anywhere I ask him to go and two past. We needed a safe word. He will pause and wait for me to invoke it, breathless, teeth gritted, hands shaking and I won't say a thing and he loves me to death. It took him all of three seconds for him to come to grips with my fragility inside his head versus my reality in his arms.

We traded fetishes. A match made in hell.

He evoked the word first, before I did.

And then we knew exactly where we lie.

He'll hold me down and force me out and not let me up. He'll match whatever I have inside my head and he'll find the dark and exploit it on my behalf. He is everything I ever wanted in that regard but I don't have to be afraid I might wind up dead in the process. He takes my goosebumps and my cries and forces me silent and still and then winds me out with his wants and then tells me he loves me more than he possibly thought he could ever love someone. We don't have to plan or ask or wish for anything. He knows of my issues and he'll indulge me in everything and anything. And I him.

Is it healthy? It depends who you ask. And when I am face-down with my hands behind my back I'm not your sweet princess and I'm not in a position to ask anyone anything. Half the time I'm not in a position to consent and that's just the way I want it.

The trust we broke there once before came back in mountains and eternities of faith in something I never looked for in Ben and found in spades after all.

Love, for love's sake. Love without fear, and love firmly grounded in reality. The perfect blend of Cole's fire and Jacob's romance, well-mixed and presented to me on a human form.

Had we not spent so many years learning each other from the ground up this would have gone a lot more slowly. Had we not had epic uncensored discussions on sex and fetishes and needs and wants and forbidden scenarios and half-assed invitations it might have been a less-spectacular coupling. Had we had any sense of common decency, I wouldn't have anything to share with you that makes my toes curl just like..that.

The echo of that is like music, isn't it? The promise of that warms my heart. That tiny fragment of twisted heart beating inside my chest in a cage made of bone and fight.

And it makes me so very happy.

Fighting for peanuts.

Okay I lied.

I have something for you.

This morning when I got out of the shower, I threw on a robe and ran down to Ben's closet hoping to snag the coveted Snoopy shirt. Long story but he has a t-shirt with snoopy playing guitar on the front. It's the dumbest, cutest shirt in the whole world and especially in the past year, if it's clean, he'll put it on. Which means we see it five days a week pretty much. Every now and then he lets me wear it but it's been a long time. He even said no when I asked if I could wear it home when I left him in New York after my visit. He wouldn't give it up.

So this morning he saw me coming a mile away and came around through the kitchen, down the other hallway and I flew into his room and grabbed for the knob and he actually lunged across the bed, grabbing me and pulling me down in the process, opening my robe (which was distracting!) and said he really really wanted to wear that shirt today and maybe I can wear it on the weekend.

I asked him why he never let me wear the shirt anymore and he finally told me. He said he didn't know how I do it, but even after I've washed a T-shirt I've borrowed from him, he still sees protrusions in the front of this shirt where my breasts stretched the fabric. Somehow stretching a Men's XL shirt. Right.

Nice, Ben.

Thanks.
I told him I'd never borrow his shirts again and he laughed and told me I look much better without a shirt on anyway, staring at all my exposed flesh, no longer covered by my robe.

Of course he's right.

(I didn't actually have to throw that in, did I?)

So.

The only thing I have for the internet today is a hearty fuck you for the recent slew of hate mail.

That is all.

Maybe tomorrow things will be different.

Just a little tiny bit of something.

At the very last moment, we canceled. Everyone else will still go, nothing will fall apart, they can catch up and talk and maybe our ears will burn but maybe it will be more of a wishful thought that we could join them all but just for tonight we looked at each other and couldn't. Couldn't put on a coat and walk outside again, couldn't find the energy to put forth a social face and couldn't bear to let go of each other long enough to sit in a truck or in a restaurant and instead we're going to get the kids settled and then curl up early together and fall asleep and not talk or dream or move or be anyone other than ourselves.

I can count on one little hand the number of times I have ever not made good on plans made and it kind of feels alien at first, and then it feels forbidden and finally it feels liberating. That I could run upstairs before cooking dinner here and change into plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved t-shirt and make a huge platter of fruit and vegetables and toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and we took them to the TV to eat while we watched an old movie and didn't talk so much at all, numb and mindless and comforted.

Ben's eyes are closing. The flash of brown where he rests, alert but sacrificed to fatigue is beginning to catch up with him, overtaking him at this point. He's on the verge of getting sick. He always gets sick at the end and earlier he laughed so incredulously and came to point out to me how, less than a year ago we had called it quits and he tried so valiantly to move on and failed and how dumb we were but how damned sure. And look where we are now.

And if I wanted to know something he has never told anyone before, then would I find it interesting to know that never once has he ever said I love You to anyone out loud in his entire life before saying it to me? He said it to me from the get-go as friends because it was true, only I used it as a greeting and as a goodbye and as a reminder and love for Bridget is sometimes everything and the kitchen sink but for Ben it is a sacred, beautiful declaration that is reserved only for the one you really do love that deeply and I had to think really hard because Christ, he's had a ton of girlfriends and some of them have been around in the past and I was convinced he had said it in front of us but he knew he hadn't and I couldn't come up with any examples at all.

I asked him if they had ever noticed or been bothered by that and he said all of them were, they had all noticed, and he didn't really care because he didn't love them so why would he say he did and now I knew why there were so many of them. No one would stay.

Huh.

It was supposed to be a quiet night of going to bed early and doing little but it's hard to relax when you're covered in goosebumps. For a decidedly unromantic guy, he's really good at this stuff.

Citrus snow.

The best way to eat a grapefruit is outside on the front steps.

First you have to put a pinch of white sugar in a bowl. Then peel the grapefruit and separate into sections, breaking each section in half to remove any seeds. Discard the peel and the seeds and then toss the bowl a few times to land sugar on each piece. Eat voraciously while shivering and then lick the remaining juice off your fingers while smiling, because someone watched you from beginning to end with sleepy amusement.

Then if you feel so inclined you can wander down to the wrought iron gate and get the newspaper to take inside where you will be relieved of it before you can slip out of your boots. In exchange for the paper you're offered a steaming hot cup of coffee and a kiss and then an unexpected hour alone to jot down ideas and do a little bit of writing.

It would be perfect except you are checked on every ten minutes or so, which seems strange when the amount of time you have spent alone in the past two weeks is considered, but you opt to call it charming and give up on writing in favor of reading.

There is a big dinner planned for this evening, and not at home. Out at a place where we'll leave our shoes by the door and go inside and sit on the floor around a big low table and they'll close the rice paper doors and come inside in little groups to replenish things and it's a lot like the interruptions you have this morning but you don't mind those either.

Not today.

    Too alarming now to talk about
    Take your pictures down
    and shake it out
    Truth or consequence, say it aloud
    Use that evidence race it around

    There goes my hero
    Watch him as he goes
    There goes my hero
    He's ordinary

Icing on the cake.

There's cake. I no longer need cake. I'm getting a little pudgy.

Shhh.

I need to run but the sidewalks are sheets of ice and it's too wet to run on the road so as soon as I get my act together I'm going to be using the elliptical and the weight bench thingie which is always not as fun as running but probably better than sitting around licking the knife from cutting said cake.

Almost forgot what I popped in to mention.

I was given my present this afternoon. After Ben almost lost it, since he had emptied out his suitcase and it wasn't there. No, it was under a guitar because that's where you put the important stuff.

A vintage music box. A very tiny little hinged box that plays Fur Elise (haltingly) when you open it. I found that funny because it's one of the few songs I can't seem to play all the way through from memory on the piano.

And inside?

His six month medallion. Six months sober. So very important, this is.

To thine own self be true, it says. Indeed.

Just perfect.

    Sacrifice yourself and let me have what's left.

There were wild bunny tracks all over the lawn this morning, defined in a thick white layer of new fallen snow. They're happy spring is here too, and they probably don't enjoy this most recent blizzard, one that saw Ben fly into the city with his knuckles most likely white in their deathgrip on his armrests. He said the flight was awful but he didn't care because he was home and because he was with me.

Is it so bad that when I see him I get goosebumps all over? All that and still he knows he's been handed the box of cookies with mere crumbled bits in the bottom. What was left. The part no one wanted. His favorite part. He has me all to himself now. Sometimes I can look at him and smile and then burst into tears and he knows why and it's okay and someday I won't do that, hopefully.

I bet he hopes that a little more often than he says he does.

Sometimes I wish I had been able to give him everything right off the bat. Instead of getting a survivor, weakened and broken and still vaguely unsteady, that he could have had Bridget when he met Bridget. New and fresh and happy and young and full of promise, plans and 'good' nervous tension.

The bad tension drains away when he touches me.

The unsteadiness evaporates when I am tucked into his arms.

The broken parts heal with his words or his touch.

He is a patient man. Whenever I bring up memories or disparaging things to talk about he steers the subject to hopeful things or funny things. Whenever I feel like I can't quite get my hands to stop or my mouth to cooperate he holds them or kisses me as if he can take some of it away or at least kill the bad stuff with a new moment, a good moment.

Since he came home last night he's been very close by. I won't even tell you how close he is right now. I just poked him, did you see that? I barely had to move. He's smiled more in the past twelve hours than he did when I joined him for the last epic visit on the road. He's as relaxed as I have ever seen him. Doesn't argue, even when I put the jam knife in the peanut butter to provoke him, which is usually cause for cries of Fail! and repetition of why messing the two up is bad and it's okay if it's for a peanut butter and jam sandwich but what if I'm having jam on a crumpet? Or peanut butter and banana and you just blended it all, messy girl. What am I supposed to do now?

Only he's usually kidding and today he didn't even care. And I didn't care when he fell asleep ON my hair instead of pulling it up out of the way like he usually does when we go to sleep. It's like we're just ourselves and there's nothing that can kill the mood.

Nothing.

I just pinched him to make sure and he grabbed my hand and pulled me in for a kiss and repeated what I just wrote. Nothing can kill this mood, little bee.

I didn't think he was watching that closely, but he was, with his customary white-knuckle approach. Holding tight in case of turbulence. Only the skies have cleared and all I see is the sun.

HOME.

He's home! He's home! He's HOME!

And you all suck for playing along with his ruse, though I should have known better. Was I always this gullib-

Who cares? Ben is home. I can breathe. I didn't even realize I wasn't.

More bunnies, more letters.

Ben had three very large chocolate bunnies delivered to the house this morning. Included was a note to 'check email'. I checked email as instructed and he had written me a letter. I won't share it with you but for sake of partial disclosure, it contained some very soothing reassurances that he has talked to Sam, and that Sam's allegiances no longer lie with Jacob and that Sam would tell me as much if I didn't go out of my way to avoid talking to him. The other surprise was that when Ben is back for good, or rather, in a little over two weeks, we'll be starting therapy. Together. With someone new that came highly recommended from someone Ben knows. So that we don't begin a new season on the wrong foot, so we don't fall, so we don't forget what we're doing here. So we make it, or at least have a better shot at something than we might if we wing it alone.

This smacks of fixing things, doesn't it? It makes me glad, though. I told him I would think about it, not because I want to risk everything but because I have heard it all before and I think it's amazing that he wants to play peacemaker and it's completely hilarious that he finally acknowledges how much we argue.

Sometimes I feel so much deeper, slower and more exposed than everyone else. Like I'm the burn victim and you're all the candy-striped volunteers and you can't help me with the pain but just for a little while I am distracted long enough to make it count.

Yuck. That comparison sucked. Shelve it, would you?

This morning I was looking around the internet to see what has become of people I used to talk with or comment back and forth with years ago, people who have all but disappeared now. I couldn't find any of them but life goes on. Life always goes on.

    Words are my promises, carved into stone. Words are the light by which we fight back the night. Words are the stick by which we measure each other. Words are the only gift I have for you that will ever be enough. I love you. Don't you ever forget that, princess.