Part 2: His

I spent so much time loving her that I forgot how to. I watched her eyes roll every time I made a joke, and I found that odd - she always told me my sense of humor drew her to me as if we were two magnets clinging to one another. When I cooked, she ate as little as possible, tossing away everything left on her plate before wandering off to the bedroom. Nothing I did mattered. I knew how much she loved when I kissed her thighs before going down on her, but she reacts emptily to both. I try to imagine the way she would sigh when my lips pressed against her thighs, the way she would moan when my head finally fell between her legs, but I fail in doing this because she will not let me remember. Her blank expressions when we make love tell me more than the emptiness hanging between the most special three words. I thought moving here would take away the strain on our relationship. Hell, for a short time, it did. But now she works late, comes home when she wants, and I never say anything but I've seen the condoms in her purse. There seems to be a different kind every time I look. I know something is wrong when I kiss her and she doesn't kiss back. I knew before that something was really wrong when she started to break from her comfort zone in sex, so much so that it made me uncomfortable. I loved to look at her lingerie as much as any guy would, but the way she was so uncomfortable always made me want to just hold her. So I'd try, and she'd insist that I didn't think she was beautiful anymore, but she would never let me tell her how wrong she was. I always thought she was beautiful. I forgot how to look at other women and feel the same way about them. She was always sunlight, and I was always hidden behind shadows. She thought I didn't think she was beautiful, and I thought she loved someone else. What else could explain her crossing her boundaries, becoming a person full of faux seduction when all I wanted was the girl I loved three years ago?

Part 2: Hers

The first time I told him I loved him, I had spent weeks making sure I did. He said it early in the relationship, and because of the distance, everyone thought that it was unlikely that we could love each other. But I did, and when I said it, I knew. It took awhile for us to start saying it naturally, just like it took us forever to call each other anything other than our names. It's weird, though, because the first day we ever met was full of "I love you" and names we never even thought to call one another before. The wall had fallen down. Every visit after that happened in the same way. We never stopped letting one another know. Now it's three years into our relationship and he has moved here, for good, and it was so nice at first. We took advantage of our space. We made love to one another in every which way that we could. We cooked for one another, cleaned for one another, constantly did things for one another. Like all good things, the niceness wore itself out. I find myself growing annoyed with his little habits, such as leaving his toothpaste messes in the sink, and I seem to believe I can escape all of this. I can escape by telling him I'm working a little late, when in all reality, I'm at the store scoping out the condom and lube section as if sex can save us from growing tired of one another. But he has grown tired of sex, grown tired of peeling my shorts from my legs and kissing his way up my thighs. He's grown tired of missionary, cowgirl, everything. Lingerie doesn't help; he doesn't like it. New positions don't help; he doesn't want them. It's like I've run out of things to say and do, and it's almost like he's in love with someone else, but how could that be if we've devoted so much time to maintaining this relationship - healthy or not? How many times do I have to tell him I'm tired of waiting for us to love the way we used to before we do something about it? "I love you" is full of nothing. I feel it all over but now coughing it up from the depths of my throat seems useless. I just want to know if this is worth fixing.

Part I: His

I never saw a girl so beautiful in my life. She had a face so bright you'd think it was sunshine. Her eyes, gold like that heart of hers, sent tremors all the way down the lengths of my body. I knew them well, at least from pictures; never did I think they could be more pleasing to the eyes than they were before. The thing about getting to know someone from afar is that you never really know what to expect. Parents always warn their kids about the dangers of internet predators, but she was no predator - though, I have to admit, that girl spent months preying on my heart before she let me come see her. I was never worried about waking up with a knife to my throat. What I did worry about was that we wouldn't care for each other as much, that the sight of one another would take away the thrill of expectations. And what did we really expect? We had talked every day for weeks about this moment, how it would play out, and the plan we settled on was going well. That is, until her body was so close to mine that I could feel the heat radiating off of it. The girl was the sun, and the moment I touched her, it burned me. So I didn't let that gentle kiss happen as planned, I didn't go with the whole "our lips will brush gently together and mold together until there's a masterpiece trapped between the pair". I took her mouth and made it mine, claimed her tongue and let her know that she didn't need to speak. I let her know this was real, and that my fears were not coming true; that she was more beautiful than I thought she'd be, and I loved her a little more now that I could feel her.

Part I: Hers

The first time I saw him, I thought my knees were going to bend and snap from the way they started to shake. "Love at first sight" never applied to this; it couldn't, not really. We'd known each other for months, but somehow, it felt like the first time I ever felt anything. His face was lighter than the rest of him, so much so that I could see the red rush to his face when he finally looked up at me. I watched his shoulders as the stress fell away from them. Mine relaxed in the same way. The world went quiet as he walked towards me. His footsteps echoed, and the closer he got, the more I wanted to run to him. But we had planned this out. We wanted our meeting to come slowly. I thought that it had already come slow enough - he didn't. I leaned against my car impatiently, chewing on my lips to signal what I was waiting for. He smirked. When he finally reached me, he dropped his bags and pressed me fully against the car. His hands went directly to my face, which he kissed all around until he met my lips. His lips. The moment they pressed against mine, I could feel my stomach flutter in the same way butterflies fly away; I felt my heart go directly to my mouth, which was caught up in his, and his tongue and my tongue were tying in knots and I felt everything times two. "Internet relationships" brought more intensity than any ordinary relationship I had ever seen. Had we not been in the airport parking lot, I would have let his tongue invade more than just my mouth. When he pulled away from me, he smiled, said "hi" before planting a kiss on my nose. His hands were full of the heat from my cheeks. He never pulled away.