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All her life, Audrey has wondered what heaven was like.
As a girl, she grew under the understanding that if she attended enough services and did enough good to God's world, she might one day know. She imagined clouds and angels and eternal, rejoicing song. Endless happiness. Cake and friends and her beloved grandmother.
When she was a young mother, she imagined heaven to be resting by the water. The grass, lush and verdant underneath her. The sound of her son’s laughter and happy babbles, the arms of her husband who was already so distant in the waking world around her, her eyes closed but the feeling of being perfectly rested settled deep in her bones.
In recent years, heaven looked like forgiveness. From God, for whatever wickedness she did to deserve the cruelty of Robert – his words, his hands, his viciousness. It would have been Edward's words on a page. Edward's hands tight in her own. Edward eating her shortbread. Edward's voice in her ear – “I forgive you, Mam.”
Now – at forty three years old, she understands implicitly what heaven is.
Heaven is this bed – big enough for two and enough space besides. Heaven is these warm sheets. Heaven is her hair free from its eternal pins, her head aching in relief, curls tumbling on the pillow.
Heaven is Siegfried's hand in hers and his love in her heart. Heaven is the scrape of his beard against the sensitive skin of her fingers, the inside of her wrist, up her arm. Heaven is fighting against the delicious fatigue tugging at her eyelids and her bones whilst she does her best to stay awake, to stay in the moment and take her full of her beloved veterinarian. Heaven is feeling the gentle vibration of whatever he’s mumbling against her.
“What’re you saying?” She mumbles into the pillow, when vague interest gives way to a fuller curiosity.
“I'm revising, Mrs Hall," he tells her, lifting away from her hand enough to press kisses against her cheeks, her eyelids, the bridge of her nose. He can’t seem to stop kissing her, to stop touching her. This is also heaven, too.
Siegfried returns to his task, picking up her hand, nosing up the sleeve of his shirt that she’s pulled on to sleep in.
“Ulna,” he mutters, kissing against one side of her arm. Gently, he turns it in his grasp. Her eyes feel heavy with bliss and impending sleep, but even as her eyelids droop they remain on his unwavering gaze as his lips press reverently against her once again.
“Radius.” he says, against the other side of her arm.
Then his lips travel, the scrape of his beard as ticklish as it is arousing. Audrey wriggles against the sheets as subtly as possible, trying not to be too obvious. From Siegfried's grin, from the glitter in his eye, she doesn’t think she’s been successful at all.
“Scaphoid, Trapzium, Trapezoid.” He lists off the bones of her body, all already known to him through his studies that spanned years before they knew of each other, each punctuated with a kiss. She has never been known so well in all her life.
So it continues. He doesn’t miss a single part of her – travelling across her wrist, over the metacarpals of her hand, up each phalanx of every finger.
It occurs to her that he is sharing something with her as he does this – in his bed where they’ve spent all their nights together so far, he bathes her in all his knowledge and all of his love. It becomes a tangible thing between them, so rich that Audrey feels she could pluck it out of thin air and squeeze it – could feel the ripeness of it drip down onto her hands that he’s kissed and stain them with it.
All of it – their relationship, their history, where they find themselves right now – is made all the more poignant from how known they are to each other. They have faced every high and low that one or two people can face in this world, and made it out the other side all the more stronger. The adoration in his eyes that shine at her every day is so earned; the laughs he pulls out of her without trying are so deserved.
They have fought long and hard for this, and now they have found it – here in the heaven of Siegfried's bed where they’ll rest in each other’s arms before the day behinds anew again and all the mundanity of the world starts up once more.
Tomorrow – when everyone has gone about their respective days and she is able to find a moment – she will sequester herself in a corner of the pantry, in the quiet of the hallway, perch on a chair in the dining room. She will trace the contours and shapes of each of the bones in her hand and try and fail to replicate the bliss of Siegfried’s tender touch against the very bones of her body.
Right now, she sinks further into the mattress, melts herself against his lips and into his arms. She reaches for him, plucking at the cotton of his pyjama shirt so he can remove it and they can be as close as possible. She kisses him, opening her mouth against the beautiful slide of his own, and revels in the knowledge and the bliss that for this very moment, she knows what it is to be in heaven and that she is there.