Tucked into your arms.
My heart sighs
and then softens.
Settling in to rest.
Home at last.

How could ever sit across from you with a coffee and watch you look at me with those eyes? The ones that see me, past everything else. The ones where time slips away and everyone else in the room disappears. Where we fall into our own personal secret bliss. The ones who knew me before they really knew me. The ones that scan me gently and remind me I am the delicate thing I yearn to be. Eyes staring down at me from above filled with tenderness and awe. Eyes tracking my movement across a room, studying me, committing every inch of me to memory. Those eyes that crease and close when you laugh at my jokes. Eyes lingering ever on mine just a little too long that say, "you are mine."

Watch you smile at me as we catch up on life? With those lips that whispered light kisses across my body. Murmurs of professed love pressed into my ear lobe. In sync sighs of satisfaction and contentment. That grin, smiling down at me, teeth just peaking over the edge. Those teeth grazing and nipping. Claiming me and saying "you are mine."

How could I watch you pick up your drink with those hands. And not feel the ghost of every fingertip ran across my skin. A thumbstroke across my thigh under the bar table. A firm grip on my wrist checking my pulse for signs I am alive, that I am real. Catching my chin and cupping my cheek, tucking my hair behind my ear. Hands that claim me and say, "you are mine."

We would hug goodbye.
And we would go our separate ways.
Inside I would scream
I am yours.

You asked for my biggest secret. I later told you that I look like my father. That is not my biggest secret, but it approaches the truth. I have his hazel eyes. He's the reason that I can carry a note. The smirk on my face belongs to him.

I wear it shamefully as my mother always told me she hated that I inherited his mannerisms. What I know that she does not, is that I inherited worse.

I call my biggest secret my "father's rage."

I can see my father's rage in those hazel eyes, pooling around my pupils. I can hear it in the notes I sing, an airy whisper from my lungs. I can see it when I turn to the mirror and scowl back at his face.
The truth is I carry my father's rage like a trapped scream in the back of my throat. A festering wound that does not scab over. Bubbling under the surface of my skin.

I plead with myself every day
to try to keep it at bay. Control the pain, control what I say.

Protect my children from the fate of inheriting my father's rage.