Page 76 of Beehive

Until the headboard smacked the wall.

Thomas froze.

“Shit!” I hissed.

“Fuck it,” he said, shoving a pillow between the headboard and the wall.

Once the pillow and headboard were secure, he drove me all the way home.

“Do you think we’ll ever get to live a normal life?”

My head rested in the crook between Thomas’s chin and his chest, the safest, most peaceful place in my world. His arms were draped around me, squeezing occasionally. The fingers of one hand caressed my skin.

We were still sweaty, sticky, and probably smelled worse than Berlin after a good rain, but neither of us cared.

He seemed content, his breathing slow. I simply couldn’t move.

“Normal isn’t really what we signed up for,” he said, his hand rising from my back to stroke my hair.

“Still, I can’t help but wish we could . . .”

He waited as I struggled to figure out what I wished we could do. Finally, he asked, “What would you want to do if we weren’t married to the OSS?”

“I’d rather be married to you.”

My head bobbed as he chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be something? I’m not sure my family’s strong enough. We’d be the cause of at least a few heart failures.”

“The US government might have a fainting spell, too.”

“And everyone who lives in the States.”

I grinned and nuzzled deeper into the muscle of his chest.

“It’s still a pleasant dream,” he said, his voice suddenly far away.

A quiet moment passed.

His fingers massaged my scalp.

I breathed in his scent, wishing I could inhale his very essence, hold it like a breath, and never exhale. “I think I’d want to live somewhere far from cities, as far from people as we could. Maybe we could live on a farm with horses and pigs and cows . . . and a whole pack of dogs. I always wanted an Australian shepherd. We could have a whole litter.”

“You never had a dog growing up?”

I sighed. “No. We lived in urban Chicago. The only dogs my parents would let me have were little fluffy things that would’ve gotten me beat up in school.”

Thomas’s hand squeezed the back of my head. “I can just see you walking some fluffy ball of fur as it yipped its way down the street. My big, strong man and his homosexual beacon.”

“As a great philosopher once said, if it’s smaller than a football, it’s not a dog.”

“Right you are,” he agreed. After another moment, he asked, “What else is in your dream for us?”

“If the world ever stopped burning, I’d want to travel. At the very least, I want to see every state. Other than traveling back and forth to Harvard, I never really got to see much of the country, much less the world.”

“We’ve seen a good amount of Europe.”

Now it was my turn to chuckle. “I prefer my travel with a little less war and intrigue and a lot more wine and pastries.”

Thomas grunted. “Getting kind of specific, aren’t we?”