A Coffin For Two

55

I felt as if I had been away for a long time. I suppose I had.

She was awake when finally I made it home. She stood in the open doorway, looking out across the balcony at the rosy autumn dawn.

She could have seen me approach from where she was standing. She might have heard my key as I stabbed at the lock with my trembling hand. But she must have heard the front door as it closed with a bang. She must have heard me climb the stairs, two at a time. Yet as I crossed the room she stayed there with her back towards me, gazing eastwards, until the moment when I put my hands on her hips, on the silk of her dressing gown. Gently, I turned her round to face me.

She wasn’t startled, not at all. She just looked at me solemnly, almost eye to eye, as it all came tumbling out.

‘I love you more than I have words to say,’ I blurted breathlessly. ‘I can’t conceive of a world without you, and I sure wouldn’t want to live in it. Please, please marry me and be with me until it’s time to place the lid on my coffin.’

My declaration made, I waited, aware of the heavy thump of my heart. She gazed at me for an unmeasured time, inscrutable, offering me nothing in her expression. Until, finally …

‘Since you put it that way …’ she said, with her deep, raunchy chuckle. ‘Okay.’

As I looked at her, a lock of her hair fell across her forehead, over one eye. And at last she smiled, and kissed me. ‘I hoped that’s how it would be,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t be sure.’

‘How could you not?’ I rebuked her, as I drew her to me in a rustle of silk, and as the first rays of morning sun shone on us both. ‘I’m Oz, and I haven’t changed either.’