Human

"I just hoped the little imps kept their mouths shut enough." Ben actually laughed. "Guess they managed it somehow."

"Managed...?" Barbara opened her befuddled eyes and saw that the envelope was open too. The contents weren't legal paperwork, but... photos. Pretty ones. "What the hell?"

"Our story was junk." Ben looked away, out a window as he spoke. "It wasn't just fiction, it was bad fiction. The setting was too idyllic, the characters were too flawless, and the real plot was ignored because it made you squirm in your seat."

"I know." Barbara leaned back, letting herself lose a bit of the tension that'd gripped her. "It was happy and sunny, and the first dark cloud ruined the whole picture."

"So we start writing a new one. Illustrate a new book with detail. Characters with shitty personality traits that piss off everyone around them, and illustrations with... um, y'know... detail. Like, dark... lines?" That goofy, wide grin of his that Barb had missed with everything in her made an appearance as her husband shrugged. "Crap. I'm not good at metaphors and stuff."

She touched his cheek. "Ben... you kinda are." She laughed too loud, she couldn't help it. She felt like someone had brought her back to life. "Hell, I feel like I'm at a poetry jam right now."

He grinned at her some more, then it faded and he let out a big breath. "Barb, I won't apologize. For leaving. I had to. It was too much to be around you after..."

Barbara sat up straight again and skootched over next to him, pressing her leg on his. "I know. You shouldn't be sorry, but... fuck, I must be crazy to say this..." Despite her resolve, she could only look down at his chest. "I'm not sorry either." She felt him go rigid, and she plowed on. "Not for laying it all out that morning you left. I could have thrown myself on your mercy, claimed that I was the worst scum alive, didn't deserve you, and that I'd do anything debasing to just be in your presence... but that would have just been more lies."

"You're not wrong." Ben still wasn't moving, despite the admission.

"We do deserve each other." She began to raise her gaze, venturing a few centimeters. "I know with all of me that there's no one out there better for either of us, and I wouldn't want there to be. What happened..." She froze, then shook her head. "Shit, I'll just say it. It was good. It was necessary for us to be honest, and to keep something worse from happening. Something like us waking up one day a decade from now and realizing everything was just... hollow. Flimsy. If that happened, one of us would screw up, and who knows if we could have come back from it at that point." Barbara rallied, twisted her body to finally take him in fully again, and cupped his beautiful face in her hands. "I mean, we're not young anymore..."

"But we're not old." Ben put his palms over the backs of her hands. "And... what happened... was bad, but endurable. If it'd been worse, later, we might have run out the clock bitter and wasted."

"Might have." Barbara gave a hiccupping little laugh suffused with glee. "Because it won't happen now? Please tell me that's what you're saying."

Ben raised the photos in his hands, the ones depicting a lone cabin in a picturesque forest. "The girls loved the idea when I ran it past them, and Cynthia hates it... but is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt." He gave a light snort. "She thinks I'm a coward, I know it, but I also know she feels guilty, and I leveraged that to get her to set this up."

Barb rubbed her shoulder again. "Probably not so much guilty anymore."

Ignoring that, Ben went on. "We leave. For a month. We go to this place I've, uh, already rented..." He watched her, and she could tell he was waiting for her indignant outburst at his assumption.

Her response was to lean into him and curl a leg over his. "I think I get it. A place where it's just us. Where we have to live without anyone running interference." She smiled. "A test."

"Cynthia will take the girls." Ben rubbed the back of his head. "After seeing them in the pool when I came in... I think the real problem will be prying them out of here when we get back."

"There'll be two of us to do it. I have no doubt." Barbara was rubbing his chest now, not in a sexual way whatsoever, but with a need. A need to feel him again. To know he was real, and with her. "When do we leave?"

Ben kissed the top of her head. "I can't get enough of your bravery."

"I live for your confidence." She kissed his chin.

"I hate your giggle."

"I loathe that mole on your forehead."

"When you kiss me, my cock hardens every time. And when you try to get creative, I know I'll probably have to massage your ego for a week after."

"Every time you use the word cock, I cringe. And every time you get creative, I float on air for a week after."

Ben tilted his wife's chin upward. "I'm going to become an impatient moron again one of these days. Probably a day soon, whether I want to or not."

Barbara swung over and nestled into her husband's lap. "I'm going to be an oblivious idiot, and I'm going to keep being one way past the point when I should have wised up."

When his lips crashed into hers, each one melted. They made out like they did on their first date, decades ago, for a good--very good--ten minutes. Then, for three times that long they... broke in Cynthia's husband's new sofa. If Barbara felt guilty about that, well, it just one more thing on the list by that point.

After, disheveled and mostly disrobed, Ben and Barbara looked at each other, and he was the one to break the spell, though by deepening the magic, ironically.

"I hate everything about you that's hate-worthy, my beloved bride. Lucky for me, I think I'm about to find out that the things I can love about you, I mean the actual, true things that I'm going to discover, are gonna bury the others pretty damned deep."

Barb put his cock in her mouth.

Words. Sometimes they were just pointless.