His heart beat strong beneath the soft resting of your ear against his chest, thumping like the clicking of horseshoes upon the cobbles, a lulling effect as you felt your own breaths tentatively begin to match his own. As his chest rose beneath your head, you found you took in a soft breath, exhaling just as his own inhale blew warmly down upon the top of your fly-away strands.
The heat of his breath, slowed by the sleep that had grasped tightly to his consciousness, soaked into the curls messed across his bare flesh. Expanding over your scalp, until not a single strand was left unscathed by the warmth that exuded from the man whose arm was loosely coiled around your waist. Holding you close, even through slumber, as if he feared that when he awoke to the new morning's light, you might not be there waiting for him.
The twilight hour that lingered beyond the windowpane, concealed by the sheer coverage of ivory lace and linen, fell silent. For not a howl of wind echoed down Watery Lane, nor did a single patter of rain fall upon the shingles above, resounding within the tightly closed walls that encompassed your entwined frames. The breath of autumn present and undeniable, as the threat of a winter's harsh frost lingered within the atmosphere like fighting words, hovering until the moment they clashed into reality and coated the Birmingham streets in the unrelenting clutch of December.
The chill enveloped the atmosphere without warning and without mercy, for it seeped through the cracks in the foundation and felt as if it radiated like rays of the once burning sun, through the window's thin glass. It crawled along the wooden paneling, meeting the bare touch of your toes when morning woke you, with a cruel bite. But in spite of the way autumn's bold presence descended down upon the souls of Small Heath's streets and melded its way into your bedroom, there was a warmth that exuded from Tommy Shelby that nearly had the strength to banish it all.
For the sheets, that cocooned your body like the tender morphing of a caterpillar to a butterfly in the wake of spring, were thinning and futile in its attempts to completely eradicate any trace of the changing seasons. The cotton worn and the threads hanging onto the little life left within their woven filaments. The once deep and rich toned teal sheets, now a lighter hue of blue, resembling that of a cloudless afternoon in the countryside. Even the quilt, handed down from your mother from her own, stitched from the fingertips of generations of kin layered on top of the faded sheets, provided only a breath of extra warmth.
It was only when a body, cramped beside your own within the nestling of a twin sized iron framed bed, resided beneath the aged sheets, that true warmth was felt.
It was unlike any fire that could ever flicker from waning candlelight or blister in a crackling hearth, for it spread its heat throughout your body from the inside out. It did not burn through the exterior of your flesh until you could feel it beaming through the pit of your chest, but rather it seeped out of the beating strings of your heart. With each pump of blood, with each inhale of oxygen, it spread warmth throughout your very soul until it was left palpable to your flesh.
You should've felt cold that evening. As the temperature beyond the obscured windowpane dipped down closer to the line separating the two seasons apart, as your body laid bare and exposed to the chilled evening's air, beneath a pitiful attempt for warm layers covering the bed, but you weren't. Even as the cold crawled its presence over your shoulders, peeking out from beneath the coverage of the sheets, until they only covered the flesh just above your chest, you didn't feel the sensitized sensation of goosebumps appearing on the skin of your shoulder blades.
You were aware of the lack of sensation in the very tips of your toes, that pressed their frozen pads flat against the warmth of the soft hair that covered his legs, and you could sense the way the cold revealed itself across your naked body. Firming and accentuating parts of yourself hidden away beneath the coverage of light blue and pressed safely against the warm tan of Tommy's own bare flesh. But as your head rested upon the muscle concealing his beating heart, with your left hand spread flat along the swell of his defined chest, you only felt Tommy and his inexplicable warmth.
