Then she smiled. Smiled and, with her hands on my face, her wedding ring shining in the light, she brought me down to her soft lips. I groaned into her mouth, then pulled back to hush out, “I love you.”
Maddie blushed and replied, “I love you too,” she smiled, and added, “my husband.”
I rolled over to lie on my back, Maddie shifting to rest her back against the new sofa she’d had put in. Maddie had redecorated the entire place. We had furniture, a large king sized bed… and I’d had the hatch boarded up.
For the first time in my fucking life, I had a real home.
A real home, for me and Maddie.
Needing to be closer still, I laid my head on her bare lap, Maddie immediately stroking through my hair. I closed my eyes at the feel of her fingers on my scalp, feeling so damn happy I could barely fucking stand it.
“Are you okay?” Maddie asked.
Opening my eyes, I held her left hand, and rasped, “Yeah. Too fucking good. Never knew people could feel like this.”
Maddie smiled at me, and her soft gaze became lost in the flames. But I looked up higher. I always looked up higher. I did it every night. Every morning when I woke. I looked up to Maddie’s sketches, now framed above the fire. She’d told me that these sketches were the life she used to dream she could have. The life she wished she led. And she broke my fucking heart when I asked if I could frame them and put them on the wall above our fire—the only bit of decorating I’d had a part in.
Maddie had gone real quiet for a while, then handed me the old sketchpad that she’d stopped using a while ago, in favor of a new one. As she handed it to me, she told me, “You can take those sketches, Flame. It will make me happy to see my old dreams on our wall. It would make me happy, as nearly all of them have come true. It will forever remind me that I am the luckiest girl in the entire world.”
And so I put them up. New ones along the bottom: of her sisters, my bike, Little Ash on my Harley as I taught him how to ride, Little Ash sitting beside me in my workshop, “Prospect” cut on his back as I started to build him his bike.
And then there were old ones on top: sketches of our joined hands, the sketch of my face looking up to Maddie from the page, the sketch of her eldest sister, Bella, her sister who’d looked just like Mae… and then at the very top, the biggest sketch of all—the one that held pride of fucking place, the one that fucking owned my soul, and the one that was my entire fucking heart—Maddie’s sketch of us. The one she believed couldn’t ever come true. The one that told me, without needing any words to explain, what she’d wanted for us both, back when I was still locked under the flames. The sketch I knew by memory—every stroke, every detail. The one of me holding her, and her holding me back. My arms around her waist, her tiny fucking hand on my chest and her eyes closed in happiness.
The one that fucking started it all.
The one burned forever onto my dark soul.
Opening my eyes, I stared at that picture, as I did all the time, and my heart felt like it might explode.
Then she started to sing.
My wife quietly sang as I stared at my favorite sketch.
At us.
My Maddie.
Her Flame.
The End