On board

Our journeys end

"Hmm."

Joe smiled contently as he laid there in the soft, cool nature of his white bed sheets. His arms wrapped sleepily around her waist under the covers as her head rested on his arm. The soft skin of her tanned, muscular back in front of his body providing a sense of warmth which most wouldn't want when sleeping in the hot midnight air of the Mediterranean summer. Yet that morning it was a warmth he opened with welcomed arms, quite literally - or so he thought as he took in the way the pair remained clung onto one another in the same way they had done when they fell asleep a few hours before. The unprecedented turn of their evening activities having worn the two of them out in the best way possible.

The sounds of her gentle hums of sleep where soft. The sort of sounds which he had heard all night long as he drifted into the first true night of content sleep he had on the tour thus far. The gentle sounds of air passing through her soft lips echoing the gentle sway of the sea that he heard through the open, round windows to his room which where gently pouring a golden light onto their features.

He had never felt like this.

Never felt so content whilst a woman was in his arms the morning after a night of passion. It was no secret by this point that the redheaded Australian next to him was not the first woman with whom he had woken up naked next to. Nor was she the tenth, and as much as he hated to admit it, she probably wasn't even the hundredth woman who he had shared such a night with. Yet she was the first in so many other ways. The key notion being that she was most definitely the first woman who had woken up naked in his bed who he wasn't desperate to wake up and get to leave his room, making sure that the pin neatness and organisation of his quarters suggested that it, nor that she, had ever happened.

Instead this time the brunette found himself willing the time to move slower. Willing that it was still the very early hours of the morning and that she didn't need to leave. No... He had never felt this way before. Never felt so in need of a woman's company for more than just physical reasons. Emotions where something he had never dabbled with much. The fast paced nature to his job not leaving time for such nuisances or so he had thought. But over the past two weeks it was possible to argue that the brunette had been wrong. That emotions should in fact have played the biggest role in his job, rather than the blind ignorance he had shown them before.

There was an irony to it, or so Joe was able to conclude as he picked a strand of his counterparts ruby red hair from off of her shoulder and ran it through his fingers. That as a man who presented himself on stage as someone who could take anything in his stride and sing his way through every genre imaginable, that when it came to his private life he never knew where he stood. The difference that that blue jacket seemed to make was something he had never thought about until the redhead had asked him about it at one in the morning on the deserted deck of the ship. Yet now that he had thought about it, the notion had been in his head for nearly a week. A week that had most definitely brought his life into perspective.

"What are you thinking about?"

The voice had come from out of nowhere. A small, soft, yet equally gravely mewl that had taken him by surprise. Unlocking his gaze from the small strand of red hair which he continued to play with, twisting it through his fingers, and instead onto the face of the woman it belonged to, not having realised she had turned over before. The steely hazel stare that he had met for the first time two weeks before, having now turned soft as she looked up at him.

"Huh?" He questioned, dropping her hair and swivelling his arm free from underneath her head, allowing his hand to rest delicately on the curve of her jaw with a slow blink and a smile.

"I asked what you where thinking about?"

"How do you know I was thinking about something?" He questioned back in return.