Being with her was as close to heaven as he would ever get. She wasn’t his, but he liked to pretend that she was. It was easy. She smiled so sweetly up at him, with her brown eyes filled with laughter and he let himself drown in her innocence.

It was the only time he allowed himself to hope.

He would drag her close to him, pulling her down onto her pillows and let the passion flair between them. When he was spent and her skin was slick with sweat, he would wrap his arms around her and kiss her tenderly. In her bed, with her hair fanned out around them and her small frame press against him, his mind was able to relax, to stop worrying about tomorrow and simply enjoy the promise in her touch.

There was something soothing in the feel of her breath on his chest and the way she murmured his name in her sleep. He had been with other women before, but none had ever had this touched him like this. None made him feel so unworthy, or so blessed.

He didn’t have to hide himself with her, didn’t have to play games or pretend.

In her bed the rest of the world faded into white noise. All his goals and ambitions vanished the moment he crossed her threshold. Nothing mattered but the look in her eyes and the way her arms tightened around him when they kissed.

She didn’t say she loved him; he wouldn’t believe her if she did. Still, these moments with her where what helped him make it through another day. Sometime he thought that if he ever lost this he would cease to be. It was foolish to think so. Whenever he did his mouth twisted into a self-deprecating smirk and he was tempted to avoid her just to prove that he still could. But he never did. In fact, he never managed to stay away for longer than a week. He was afraid that if he did she wouldn’t be there when he came back.

She loved the way his arms wrapped around her as she slept. It comforted her to know that she was sheltered in the long hours of the night and she slept easier knowing that anything trying to reach her would have to go through him first. It was the only time she truly felt safe.

When she woke, with his hands tangled in her hair and her leg between his, she knew there was no place she would rather be. She would smile with her eyes squeezed shut and her nose filled with the scent of him, more content then she ever thought possible.

On mornings like these she could lay for hours in his warm embrace, forgetting that she lived in a cramped flat with sagging furniture and a mattress on the floor. Sometime she would snuggle her check against his chest and marvel in the difference between their skin.

It hadn’t always been this way. There had been a time when her life had not involved him. But that was a part of her past she didn’t like to dwell on. Back then she had had a future and a family to share it with. And she would have rather died then spend the night wrapped in the enemy’s arms. But long years separated her from the girl she was then with such an idealized view of black and white.

She couldn’t remember when she had changed, when her losses had outweighed the teachings of her youth. All she knew was that one day she had looked up from her misery into a pair of burning grey eyes and it hadn’t mattered one bit that he was forbidden.

Then, like now, all that mattered was that his smile and the knowledge that somewhere in his eyes she smiled back.