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Before Eva, his bedroom was just a place for sleep—an unnatural, deathlike form of sleep, but sleep nonetheless.
No need for decoration or comfort, nothing beyond utility and the small bit of safety an extra locked door can provide. A bed built for one and four walls to keep out the night—that’s all he needed, after all. He never intended to bring anyone back here; there was no reason to dress it up to impress another set of eyes.
And then there was Eva, who reminded him a bedroom was meant for so much more than simply being a place to pass out at sunrise.
Bedrooms were for waking up to the smell of roses and incense. Bedrooms were for cuddling, for lounging, for holding and being held. Bedrooms were for soft voices and lovely words and quiet affection. Bedrooms were for secrets and confessions and laughter, all of it shared. Bedrooms were for extra blankets and soft pillows.
Eva meant finding a nightstand so she’d have somewhere to place her jewelry before bed and somewhere stack their books after another chapter was read aloud. Eva meant adding one of the tapestries from her haven to one of his walls, because rooms where time is spent should be enjoyable to look at. Eva meant considering getting a bigger bed but always forgetting to actually look for one.
She reminded him that bedrooms were for kissing, for caressing, for sex.
He’d all but forgotten what it felt like to be pressed down into a mattress by another person, to press back and be welcomed into that intimacy. Bedroom floors were meant for clothing discarded in a rush, for shoes kicked off on the way to bed. Being wanted and desired were feelings he had long since forgotten until she floated into his life, but she reminds him. With her, he relearns that bedrooms are meant for pleasure, for the heat of two bodies pressed together, for moans and gasps and delicious sighs.
And bedrooms were perhaps not meant for the drinking of blood—eating in bed is a very bad habit, after all—but theirs becomes the site of welcomed requests and careful bites and an ecstasy beyond words. A hunger, deep and dark, sated in the comforting embrace of a warm bed and a cold body.
Bedrooms were a place to spend the entire night if one chose to, if one had an interesting book and pleasant company and nowhere else to be. So, with her by his side and a whole city stretching out beyond the walls of their haven, he spends warm fall evenings tangled up in sheets, letting his hands wander as her gentle voice fills the room.
With each kiss, each laugh, each small addition to this space, she teaches him that bedrooms were never meant for sleep alone. He learns, slowly but surely, that they are meant to be a sanctuary within a sanctuary, a place of comfort and rest in all its forms. And when one loves someone—and he does love her, dearly and without end—a bedroom is meant to be shared.
Eva means never waking up alone and always wanting to stay under the covers for just a little while longer. He never asks her, at least not in so many words, but when her body curls closer into his after the sun sets, when her hands fit just below his ribs or trail along the curve of his spine, when her head rests on his chest like she’s never known a softer place to land—in those quiet contented moments, he knows. And that is more than enough.