Monday, Jun. 30, 2003
I think 10:30 in the morning is the latest I've ever woken up with Amy. She mentioned this is probably why I've been so horny for her all morning.

With our regular Sunday night family dinner at her dad's house being a potluck this week, she decided she'd make her own special baked beans and apricot lemon pound cake for all of us. As she and I were getting ready for bed last night, the apartment filled with the rich aroma of maple, molasses and brown sugar while the beans slowly baked in a cast-iron pot. The trick is to let them bake slowly for eight hours, so during this weekend heatwave we're having in this part of the state, eight hours of baking during daylight hours is just too much to ask.

While I slept through the night, she got out of bed and tended to the pot at 5:30 in the morning. She told me later as we stretched under the sheets, adjusting to the morning, that at 5:30 they needed only another hour to bake but that she'd over-slept three hours and by the time she'd gotten to them, they had already begun to mush.

I'd woken up with Cello, her 18-pound cat lying in the crook of my knees, pinning me in the curled position he'd found me. I am becoming more and more used to this. I haven't had that happen since maybe the eighth grade when my mother's cat would find a cradle above the covers between my feet and get pissed at me whenever I tried to turn over. Cello, on the other hand, has the most even-tempered disposition and true to the very essence of The Cat, he sufferes my presence as if I were a free-loader squatting in Amy's apartment rent-free. Resisting my efforts to move the fat beast off my legs, he digs in his claws to steady his postion, through the sheets and into my thighs. He seems to have learned that sleeping next to my feet, as he know he's "supposed" to do (as if there were ever a rule for a cat that could be enforced), gets him catapulted onto the floor every time I try to turn over. Gripping the tops of the sheets I would jerk my legs upward and fling Cello from his midnight or 3 a.m. snooze. Cello and I are gradually moving past that stage of toleration for one another. He still greets me first thing in the morning with his typical deadpan gaze as if to say Are you still here...?

(Amy's other cat, the twenty-pound Adagio, who is about ten pounds of mixed Persian fluff, doesn't even bother trying to sleep on the bed with us anymore. In the mornings, I find him sprawled about the living room within the same five-foot radius of carpet that he's spent most of the sweltering hot summer indulging his shoe fetish. I've never seen such a thing in a cat before, the way Adagio seeks out our shoes, by the front door or under the coffee table, and drapes his frontal half over the toes so that his face floats in a sleepy daze above the mouths of the shoes. Amy says it's the smell of feet that he loves to sleep on as if it were kronick Bolivian catnip.)

After I'd convinced Cello that he'd be much more comfortable sleeping undisturbed in the splendor of the living room or hallway, I rolled over and draped my arm and leg over Amy. Often, as a workday ritual, I like to bring us both into the morning by rubbing her lower back, shoulders and butt. She moans sleepily when I drag my fingertips through her hair. Sometimes it takes five or ten minutes of soft kisses across her shoulders and neck before she rolls over and smiles at me.

This morning the allergies started up early. "It's because you were messing with the cat," she said, "and stirred up all that dander in his fur that makes you sneeze like crazy." I hate it when she's right about something foolish I've done. My alergenic sniffling and snorting never fails to dampen a sexual interlude with my girlfriend - at least for me. A runny nose during sex somehow reduces my manly prowess to the prepubescent fumblings of a ten-year-old boy. Amy laughs every time, although it's certainly not one of her major turn-ons to have her upper lip wetted by sticky nasal drippings.

Ah, true love....

After I've noisily soiled the tillionth Kleenex she's right back in my face with eager kisses and an insistant tongue. Suddenly I'm frozen with an expression as if a gust of wind has taken my breath. I explode with a sneeze and Cello turns in disgust out the door.

"Whew," I said trying to catch my breath. "That one sent Cello all the way across the room." Amy laughed quietly.

"Yeah, well.... Sometimes Cello needs to be sent across the room."

I leaned back on my elbow and looked at her lying there on her stomach with her head turned the other way. The flannel sheets clung to her naked body accentuating the width of her hips and the roundedness of her ass. I rubbed my palm in circles over her, taking a handfull now and them and squeezing every ounce of delight from her soft flesh. I felt energetic this morning, playful, aroused by her bare skin yet not really in the mood for nookie. We had played in bed for nearly three hours yesterday and although sex in the morning with Amy is one of the highlights of my life, this morning I was animated with a sense of wonder and excitement that she and I are now sharing our days together doing constructive and practicle things like laundry and dishwashing.

To be honest, there's not a whole lot of involvement for me in the household duties while we're in her apartment. The rules are her's. The responsibilities are her's. I just sit over here at the coffee table with my portable 1950s Smith-Corona pretending I'm working on a very important piece. I guess I shouldn't say it like that. For all I know, this may turn out, someday, to be a very important piece.

We spent almost an hour this morning without getting dressed, she gathering clothes in lights and darks for washing; me checking the online listings for film- and video-related production jobs. I called Caleb at cable access to get a progress update on the projects he and I are booked on this summer. It looks like two of them are a Go even without outside funding.

I was practicing a wonderful sort of mild masochism by restraining myself from taking my lover in a grip of primal bodily urge, to contain her torso between my chest and arms, cradle the back of her head at my fingertips. Amy strode from the bedroom to the hallway, her long legs sweeping through space with the gentle grace that only the wonders of Nature could bring to life. I watched her saunter back and forth collecting shirts and pants and underwear, placing on the desk scraps of paper that had fallen on the floor. With each step her hips would shift and form a firm mound of flesh out of first one cheek and then the other. The smile of her ass draws broad over the tops of her thighs, leaving me quite short of breath and fully aroused.

Our relationship has progressed along a distorted timescale for which one month seems to hold the experiences that would fill any other ordinary year. Between ourselves, she and I have been in love for two years. In the three years since Amy and I have been a pair I've learned to understand what it is to appreciate another human being as a distinct individual. For all the masses of bodies and minds that wander across the face of this earth, only through knowing Amy has my consciousness been receptive to the ideal that each of us so-called humans really is a universe unto ourselves, whatever our place in the conglomerated mass of humanity.

As I sat hacking away at my mechanical typewriter this morning, she brought to me (fully dressed in t-shirt and cotton shorts) two saucers, one with toast and one with slices of white peach. Amy's favorite brand of poppyseed toast and coffee out of one of her thriftstore sets of miniature mugs is becoming my favorite breakfast, as much for the pleasure of the tastes as for the comforting fact that this is what I eat at her place in the mornings. Coffee and toast. While hacking away at my typewriter. How romantic....

Yet the preview of my ideal life - our ideal life - is almost painful for it's incompleteness. We don't live together. I'm not being published. There are no paying production jobs in this town (therefore anything else is depressingly discouraging and necessary to good mental health to avoid...). Then again our lives have only just been introduced and since we've determined that we are in every way compatible (and more than willing to work together on the discrepencies) the building and creating of a singular life between us is yet to begin.

Amy carried the laundry basket under one arm as she came through the front door. I was still sat at the coffee table, hacking away at this very piece. After she'd put the basket down on the far couch, she stood in front of me watching. I looked up at her and said that if this keeps up, the noise might drive one of us crazy.

"I like it," she said. I was genuinely suprised. "I could hear it through the window as I was coming up the steps."

That's a relief. And an inspiration, that she would be so pleased with all the racket I've been making. She let on with that gentle firmness in her voice that she was pleased that I'm applying myself to my hopeful livlihood.

She leaned in toward me, bent at the waist, her knees together, her face expectantly poised in front of me. I straightened my neck and back and kissed her. For a moment we remained that way, lip-locked, breathing each other's scent until I pulled her down onto the couch next to me. I wrapped my left arm around her rib cage and slid my right hand up her thigh, over her t-shirt and cupped my hand under her breast. The feel of her body under my hand and her hair between my fingers released a gush of excitement. Instantly my head and neck were hot. We opened our eyes and I sat back on the couch relishing her taste in my mouth. As she silently stood up to return to her laundry she noticed the bulge at the inseam of my shorts. She sighed with a short laugh of suprise and delight, almost blushing as she reached out to grip my volunteer erection. I quivered and gasped in rapid succession as Amy playfully massaged me.

The intensly concentrated pleasure of her thumbs on my tip jolted my body with electric pulses that escaped through my fingertips into her back muscles. After a moment my mind became tensly concentrated on pulling our shorts off and sliding into her, holding her half-naked body in my arms. I fought the urge to recreate the scene of our moderate-impact love-making from last night, the urge to turn her over onto the couch and thrust into her from behind; to watch the muscles in her shoulders and back stiffen and relax; to see her heart-shaped ass bouncing against me and the happiness in her smile as she cranes her neck to look at me, mouthing "I love you" while I fire warm spurts of cum inside her.

I fought that urge because as incredibly exilerating as it was for my mind and spirit and for my heart and body, I'm finding, with Amy, a new kind of love-making, a sort of telepathic style that emanates from the heart, to be every bit as satisfying as merging our bodies together.

I laid her down on the couch and covered her with my body, nuzzling my face into the crook of her neck. I held my palm to the side of her face as I hungrily kissed her cheeks, her mouth, her chin, her throat. For all my focus on her, my knee slipped over the edge of the couch and the quiet was broken with giggles.

I sat up straight with her right leg bent behind me and her left in my lap. Cello had been watching us from the end of the coffee table, with his characteristic flat gaze. As I took Amy's foot in my hand and pressed my thumb into the arch I couldn't take my eyes from her as total relaxation melted across her face. Cello moved with determination to the side of the couch. Amy's joyful grin faded evenly as she gave in to my foot massage and allowed herself to float on my circulating thumbs. Cello lept onto her stomach. He looked her directly in the eye like an aristocrat soarly disrespected for having not recieved every bit of affection to be given within his kingdom.

"He's more like the spoiled prince," said Amy. "He's not happy unless he's always at the very center of attention."

Necessary to his understanding that occasionally he is not allowed on the couch because he is not wanted, we forcefully removed Cello from the couch three or four times before I had finished massaging Amy's other foot. The little things that distract our mutual absorbtion in this relationship are getting to be more and more intersting as they too become elements of this relationship. Sharing one's life with another person with whom one is irreversably in love is a course in pragmatism as well as patience.

Life and love are so much greater in every capacity when we learn that neither exist as we once would have liked them to in a childhood fairy tale or horomonal teenage fantasy.

In fact they do not even exist in any preconcieved, attainable, definable form. Life and love are what we create within ourselves and share amongst each other. To me, this is that dual essence that makes Dan'n'Amy.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Requests? Beuler? Respond to this entry...