Valentine's Day

I've been thinking about Valentine's Day a lot lately, because I want to do something special this year.

I remember the best V-Day the hubby and I have ever had. It was the second year of our marriage (when we were still living in the U.S.), we had an almost-yours-mine-and-ours situation: I'd come into the marriage with two children and I'd just had another baby 4 months before. Money, needless to say, was tight. We were still in the process of catching up with the post-baby bills, and didn't have a lot to spare. So even something as simple as going out to dinner was out of the question.

But I still wanted to do something that we'd both remember for a very long time. Something special that didn't cost a lot of money.

So I planned it all out. Dinner for the two of us after the children went to bed. No tv, no computer, no phone, no nothing. Hmm... but maybe I could get a new piece of lingerie, if I could find it cheap enough.

I went shopping after work, and managed to find a really nice babydoll negligee at Wal-Mart, of all places. A nice, dark burgundy color, spaghetti straps, and see-through. The sheerness of it made me a little nervous (I HAD just had a baby!!), but it looked like something he would like. Best of all, it was only around $10. (I don't remember the exact amount anymore, but I know it was somewhere around there.)

However, I conveniently "forgot" to get the food for dinner. And I "forgot" to tell him until I finished taking my shower and hiding my new nightie under my robe. So I sent him to the store to get what I needed, and while he was gone, I set to setting the scene I wanted.

Soft, fluffy white blanket in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by candles (I've always been a bit of a candle freak, so I've almost always had them on hand). I set up a playlist of love songs on the computer and let it play in a loop. And then I turned on the oven to heat it up while I waited for him to come back (I knew he'd only be gone 20 minutes, tops, but that was all the time I needed).

When I heard him pull into the driveway, I posed myself in the middle of the living room and untied my robe, letting it fall open to reveal me, in the new burgundy see-through nightie.

When he walked through the door, he literally dropped the bag he was carrying, breaking out into a big grin. (I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was definitely something along the lines of "wow.") Acting as nonchalantly as possible (though to be honest, my heart was about to burst out of my chest I was so nervous), I took the bag from him, telling him to go take a shower while I put dinner in the oven. By the time he got out of the shower, dinner would be done.

I'm not sure I ever saw him run up the stairs as fast as he did that day. ;)

I put dinner in the oven and then played solitaire on the computer to pass the time until the oven timer went off. He came downstairs just as I was bent over the oven, pulling our fully cooked dinner out. He came up behind me and put his arms around me, nuzzling my neck. "You better be careful," I warned him, "or this is going to end up all over the floor."

I put our food on plates, we each grabbed a drink, and sat down on the fluffy blanket to eat our dinner. He asked me if I wanted to put the tv on, and I told him no. "No television, no computer, no nothing tonight. Just me and you, and that's it."

"Okay," he said, smiling.

We made small talk as we ate, him asking about my day at work and me asking if the children had been unusually bad (or good!) for him. (He was a stay-at-home-dad at the time; I made more money than he did, and we couldn't afford childcare, so it was the most sensible solution.) But neither of us were really into the small talk. His eyes kept traveling down my body, as everything was on display in that see-through negligee. It left absolutely nothing to the imagination. My eyes kept wandering to the towel he had tied around his waist, wondering if he was getting hard under there.

Finished, we both set our plates aside and reached for each other. There was to be no pretense that night. We had one need and one need only: each other.

Unfortunately my idea of making love on the living room floor was better in theory than it was in practice. The floor hurt his knees and my back too much. So we ended up moving up to the bedroom.

But it was something so special that now, even 8 years later, I remember it in graphic detail. I remember how he turned me so that I was laying back against his legs, one arm behind my neck and the other roaming up and down my body, touching me everywhere as he kissed me senseless. I remember him bringing me to multiple orgasms, completely blowing my mind.

I remember how close I felt to him that night. If I were to make a flow chart of our marriage, that night would have definitely been one of the highest peaks. I felt so full of love - and so loved - that I literally felt as if I would burst.

I want to do something like that again. I want him to look at me like he did that night. I want to feel like I did that night. I want to make him feel the way I made him feel that night.

I don't know exactly how I'm going to do it, but I'm determined that it's going to happen.