Zach remains silent but his grip on my waist goes tight and his thumb hooks into my belly button.
One time I told him about the vein that runs just behind my navel. I told him how I feel something move inside my belly whenever he’s close, and how when he presses against it, my body goes crazy. I didn’t have to tell him the latter because he’s spent countless hours kissing and licking that spot himself but still.
Now, it makes me moan, the pressure he’s putting using his thumb.
“I have something for you too,” he rasps, instead of saying I love you too.
He doesn’t say the words often. Or at least, not as often as I do. I say it all the time: before going to sleep every night, rushing out the door for work in the morning, when we finish a phone conversation. When he’s inside of me.
And every time I say it, I feel him absorb those words. I feel them move through his body. I feel his love radiating back in the way he presses a kiss on my mouth, in the way his eyes turn glassy.
So, I guess, he doesn’t need to. He shows me.
I caress his harshly angled jaw. “For me?”
His Adam’s apple bobs as he nods. Then, without taking his eyes off me, he reaches back and fishes something out of his pocket.
It’s a piece of paper, folded once.
“I wanna read it to you,” he says and my heart jumps in my chest.
Zach’s reading has improved so much in the past months. His writing, as well. He puts an effort into it every day. In fact, we’re thinking about him getting his GED soon.
And I know whatever he wrote for me, it’s important to him. It’s probably more important than all the words he’ll ever say to me, and maybe that’s why he wrote them down.
To impart their gravity, their worth.
“Okay,” I whisper, fisting his damp t-shirt.
Frowning and clearing his throat, he begins,
“Blue,
I know I’ve fucked up a lot. I haven’t wronged anyone the way I’ve wronged you.
No amount of Sorrys will ever make up for that fact.
But still, I’m sorry. About everything.
For all the times I could’ve saved you but I didn’t. For all the times I made you cry and wasn’t there to wipe off your tears. For all the times I made you bitter and angry enough that you started to hate yourself a little bit.
Words have always been hard to come by for me. I’m not good with them. I probably never will be. But I want you to know that I feel it.
I feel you.
Right in my chest, with every breath I take.
You saved me when I least deserved it. And I’ll spend the rest of my life proving to you that you did the right thing in choosing me.
But more than that, I want you to know that I’m gonna marry you one day. I’m gonna give you your future.
When I’m wiser and better and not too much of an asshole.
When I’m really the prince you think I am.
Yours,
Prince.”