The Fairy Tale Lover Ch. 02

"I made the first move on you."

"True, but if I had known the way to your heart was open to me, I would have made the first move on you. Do you think that if I can have you that I can't have someone closer to my own age? But I choose you, not them."

"It's easy to say that now, but time has a way of making someone look different as they get older. When I'm sixty-seven and you're only forty-eight, what assurance will I have that you wouldn't walk in on me one day and tell me that you no longer love or need me?"

"You just told me earlier that your sister married someone who was twenty-two years older than her. What assurance does she have? And I must say this again. What assurance does any woman have?

"I know you feel as though your being older increases the risks, but if you left me now in order to ensure you would never be hurt later, what assurances would comfort you when you were an old woman living alone or with some old loser you settled for that I would not have been there to make your final years as happy as you could possibly imagine?

"Tell me you're willing to roll the dice and gamble on being better off as a lonely old lady who will never know how things would have turned out, and we can go our separate ways tonight. But could you be sure that the torture of not knowing if you were wrong or not wouldn't just bring you right back to me?"

"What you say makes sense. There are no crystal balls for me to look into to see whether or not you would still be with me when I'm truly old. And you're probably right that, especially after tonight, I would come running back to you for fear that I could be wrong in worrying you wouldn't be there.

"Steven, it took so much courage for me to invite you to the diner today, and even in light of that and what eventually happened there, I never imagined that things would turn out like this.

"To be honest, I was lured to you by the curiosity that the writer might be as good as the people he's writing about, but I never thought that it would all turn out this wonderful this soon. When I told you earlier that age difference didn't matter, that was before I realized that I love-" Tammy suddenly stopped.

After a few moments, her resistance ended and the tears started flowing freely as she broke down in uncontrolled crying.

"I'm sorry!" she said as she buried her head into my shoulders and held me tight. "I can't help it! I love you!"

I held her just as tightly as her tears quickly soaked through my shirt and began licking the skin underneath. The power of this moment was as surprising as it was moving.

"I guess this is as special a time as there could be," I said softly. "I love you, too, Tammy. I love you so much."

"Please don't ever forget your promise," she said as she pulled away from my shoulder and looked at me with a tear-soaked face and saturated eyes. "There's nothing more you could do or say that would win me any more than you already have. I have never, ever experienced anything like this before. If you ever left me, I don't know how I would deal with it. I could just see myself jumping right off a bridge."

"Don't ever talk like that," I said, now feeling the tears welling up in my own eyes. "You don't have to worry about that day because it will never come." I paused in order to kiss the tears from her face. "I love you," I said passionately as I looked straight into her eyes.

"I love you more," she replied with a slight smile.

"No," I said, also smiling. "I love you more, and you accept it.

"Not a chance, my prince."

We gave way to our longing and began to kiss. It was a slower kiss, a much more tender one. But the meaning and message of this kiss was not lost on either of us.

Our passion for each other having already been expressed, now we had confessed this deep, unyielding love for each other as well. Had the timing been right for this when only less than three hours had gone by since the conclusion of our first date? The only thing I knew for sure was that it had felt right for both of us.

Tammy and I were now officially a couple in a committed relationship. Our love for each other was more potent than anything she had experienced in all her years, something that her emotional responses had left no doubt about, and like all committed couples, we felt completely ready to begin facing the future together.

For her the things to worry about were simple. Time and age lingered as her enemies each time she would look in the mirror and see a slightly changed woman staring back at her.

For me the worries were different. How would a teacher and her student, though both of legal age, carry on their relationship in violation of the ethical rules she was supposed to adhere to? What if someone were to see us and give our secret away? And what kind of support from my parents could I look forward to once they eventually learned of the woman old enough to be my mother who was now both the love and the guiding star of my life?

As we both already knew, only time would reveal the answers to us. And because of our age difference, every second would be precious and irretrievable if wasted. A love affair that exceeded anything I could have dreamt up for my stories had begun, but unlike my stories, fate and not I would control every possible outcome. And as I had already learned from Tammy, fate can be waiting for people with some very unhappy surprises in store for them, everything from lost jobs to sudden death.

These were my fears as my mind's eye looked past Tammy and into the black abyss called the future, the place we had decided to roll the dice on and then step into together. It remained only for the results of our gamble to reveal themselves to us.