My Kind of Woman

35. Purgatory

AN; I contemplated on calling this one the calm before the storm...

Ironically, the more I was with Mio, the less I thought about what had happened. And I think it was the same for her. We started to properly depend on one another, and fell into an easy routine, one that kept us both from teetering into despair. I stayed home, she came over in her new car, I studied and she whisked around me; helping, cooking, sleeping, hugging. And in those hours, we were in a place between reality and falsity, a perfect balance that was distracting enough to work.

She tried not to cook me eggs every day and I tried not to neglect my work to touch her. We once spent a whole day lying on the living room floor, making study cards and revision resources.

"I'll have to go back soon," I said, stacking the cards in my palm. Across from me, Mio was still cutting through sheets of coloured card paper, coding them into subjects.

"Back for exams?"

I hummed in response.

"Are you nervous?" She asked, then added, "which colour for maths again?"

"Not really, and blue."

She smiled with eyebrows raised, "that confident in your intelligence?"

"Yes! Why? Don't you think I'm smart?" I grinned.

"Of course I think you're smart. I know you're smart," Mio said, and she said it almost proudly. Like she was proud of me. I decided I liked that feeling. I wanted to give her more reasons to praise me, lots more, so I'd live on her appraisal like fuel to my very being - that and her need for me.

Though it was only my first instance, I was sure I would never love like this again. In a way where I was understood, even through little to no words. I'd thought it since I'd met her, she could read me, she could really know me. And her progression through that was speedy.

We talked aimlessly, through most days, but I found our best conversations happened after the longest beats of silence. After napping, after eating, especially after sex (which was not always). I found that she was almost nocturnal, and it started to make a lot of sense why she was always awake in the night. She spent most of the day sleeping to the side of me, on the couch, or on the carpet, always by my hip. And if she didn't, her eyelashes fluttered as she kept herself awake, her smiles grew lazily, her limbs were slack and slightly heavy when she hugged me. She reminded me of the Dormouse from the Alice In Wonderland book at times. So, when she was awake, often waking with important things to say or heavy talking points, we conversed and kissed and she helped me study.

Studying with her was motivating and rewarding. Completely dissimilar to when I used to study with Jackie, who sat in concentrated silence and asked very serious questions. Mio sat cross-legged on the carpet, often right at my feet while I sat up on the couch, and tested me with the cards we'd made and bites of information from my textbooks. When I answered correctly, she raised her eyebrows like she was constantly surprised and rubbed my calf in encouragement. There were also the praises of 'very good!' and 'you're doing such a good job'. It was so simple, and frankly quite pathetic that I enjoyed it so much, but it made me so warm. It made my pulse skyrocket, it made me determined and I was sure I would remember those feelings when I finally did sit my exams. She played off my wrong answers coolly, by making an amused face and drumming the back of my leg with her fingers. Mistakes were okay. She found them quite funny, I thought, but only because she had the answers right in front of her eyes.

I'd noticed, now with all the time we had to be alone, that she always liked to touch me. Not always sexually. When we were close, she always had her hand on my leg, or the back of my arm, or in my hair. She rubbed my shoulders and my back, and laid against my thigh when she slept. She hugged my waist when she woke up, pulled at the waistband of my shorts so she could kiss my hip and my waist. She was affectionate like I'd never expected her to be when I had first met her. She was so herself it was admirable. She'd unfolded and blossomed in the months she'd spent knowing me. She was no longer a reserved housewife, feeling lonely in her own home, feeling miles away from everyone in her life. She had me. I was her undoing, her unravelling, a human sign that posed the question, 'are you really happy?'