Available Darkness Season 1

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    During his examination of the painting, John suggested that perhaps she was getting nervous with the looming milestone of their two years of dating. Two years was an impressive feat for either of them in the relationship department, and as the anniversary approached, she often felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop—the moment where things would go bad—as they always had before. It was almost as if she’d convinced herself that she wasn’t meant to have a “happily ever after.”
    “Look around you,” he’d said, squeezing her shoulder blades beneath his large, strong hands. He turned her around, then pulled her into his embrace, absorbing her tears. “See the world as it is, not the things you fear might happen. You deserve to be happy.”
    While other men in her life had analyzed her only to determine what was wrong with her , John didn’t search for what was wrong. He simply told her what was right—them and their love.
    He was right. She deserved to be happy. She had to stop worrying about things she had no control over.
    Even though they’d been together for two years—her longest relationship by at least 14 months—they had never settled into the mundane routine which seemed to poison the wells of so many other relationships around her. She sometimes wondered why John seemed so different from all the others. She was far too cynical to believe in things like fate or soulmates . However, the inner romantic in her, the one who existed at her core despite all the shit life had seen fit to throw her way, secretly believed John might be the closest thing to a soulmate she would ever know.
    They were poles apart, but their differences seemed to work in harmony. While she was anxious, frenetic, and prone to emotional flights and dives, he was calm, laid back, and perhaps the most evenly tempered person she’d ever known. He was like a human anti-anxiety pill, she often joked. They did have a few things in common, though, including a love for reading, art, and were equally at home discussing philosophy or why there would never be a better show on TV than Seinfeld .
    John was also the first person who ever took such a deep curiosity in knowing everything about her, from what she was like as a child (a clumsy, scrawny introvert), to the consistency of her dreams (incredibly rare), to her deepest fears (being unable to conceive a child), to what inspired every one of her paintings. John was often like a scholar with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the subject of her, no matter how uninteresting she felt that subject was.
    Perhaps the biggest reason their love was so intense, even after all this time, was that to her, John was still mostly a mystery.
    He worked as a cook at an upscale Italian restaurant just a short walk from Sergei’s gallery, and didn’t talk much about his life before moving to Florida. With any other man, she would suspect such reticence indicated an unseemly past filled with debauchery and selfish deeds.
    John was different, though.
    He grew up in more than 20 foster homes after his parents died, drifting from state to state, never really establishing roots in any of them. He spent his time working and reading and sometimes composing music on piano, though he never played for another soul. He had no friends, family, or meaningful relationships. John was, in some ways, a blank slate, a guy who seemed to have been waiting for some spark to bring him to life. Hope was that spark, he confessed during one of their few discussions of his past.
    Despite his claims to the ordinary, there were times, such as this, when she lay next to him in bed watching him sleep, that she felt there was far more to John than she would ever know. There was a deeper John somewhere inside, a John who had yet to look her in the eye. She suspected that perhaps he had suffered some great hurt which made him the way he was, so remote and distant to everyone other than her.
    She moved a bit closer to him in bed, wanting to touch him, but not wake him.
    John’s eyes opened and his left eyebrow arched.
    “Are you watching me sleep?” he asked, a smile breaking through the surface of his tired face. It wasn’t the first time she’d been busted.
    She slid towards him under the sheets, her hand sliding under his shirt and finding his warm chest as her leg wrapped around his groin. She felt his cock stiffen immediately. She smiled.
    “Well, good morning,” she said as she climbed on top