Page 139 of Casanova LLC

She chortled. “No.”

“Well, that sounded like singing to me.”

“Well, maybe I’ve been practicing.”

“Practicing? You know it better than me.”

“Sorry, would you like to warm up?”

I tapped the guitar four times while saying, in my Jacopo voice, “Oh, shut up your face and sing.” Then we joined each other for the chorus: “Because I want to be with you forever. Because I want to be with you right now. Because I want to be with you, to eat with you, to sleep with you. Because I want to be with you forever.”

I couldn’t stop looking at her as I sang the second verse. “An open heart so full of joy, and capable of caring for a gentle man with gentle hands to hold her close and take her in.”

She took over as if she had always done so: “If she could wake up in his arms and whisper words that never end?—”

I had to join her; had to. “There’d be no fear there’d be no shame, again my love, again, again.”

She got bolder in the chorus this time through. So much so that I wanted to do it again. So I said, “Again.”

She closed her eyes and complied.

At the end, in the final reiteration of the chorus, I changed Because I want to be with you forever to Because I want and want and want forever.

Grinning, she sang it back to me.

The final line we sang quietly, slowly. Like a vow. Because I want to be with you forever.

In the silence, the memory of the final note lingered between us.

I set the guitar aside.

“Come here.”

She did.

We kissed. We kissed without hurry, without agenda, without destination.

We kissed as if we had all the time in the world.

As if we had a lifetime ahead of us. An actual one.

Claire

The light of early day was busying itself at the window. My eyes did their best to keep it from intruding on one of the deepest (if shortest) sleeps I’d ever had. But eventually, they succumbed.

I took in the blurry room, reassuring myself I was where I hoped I was, that the night I had just experienced wasn’t a dream.

My thoughts were interrupted by a gentle tapping across the room and I lifted my head.

He was at his easel, in front of the painting of me, lightly tapping water off a brush and dipping it back into paint.

He was naked.

A painter, my painter, whose hand moved across a canvas the way a lover, my lover, moved across my body.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds and then reopened them, half expecting it all to have disappeared.

But it was here to stay. I was here to stay.

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