The Road to Complacency

He would stay up late at night and watch old movies where love appeared like fireworks on the Fourth of July: From Here to Eternity, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind. Movies where love screamed into the room and was all-consuming and the lovers loved exclusively, forsaking all others. The kind of love that was an illusion.

At least that's what he thought - until the day he held Lauren. At that moment, he realized everything the poets had prophesied was coming true: the forsaking, the excitement, the fireworks; they were all there in a single moment. He knew the instant he held her that he would give up everything to be with her: his career, his lifestyle, his family, even his own wife...

A simple outstretched hand and a simple touch mark the beginning of a love story that becomes both timeless and tragic...

Robert St. James never asked to fall in love. His life was content, filled with books, art, culture, and of course, his beautiful wife. His calm warmth was the balm that soothed her sharp intellect. His affection was the candle that lit the long, dark corridors of her ever-consuming corporate life.

He never asked to meet the young mother across the street, or her pleasant husband and two beautiful children. He never guessed that a single moment, a single touch, would ransack his world and descend it into a ruin of ashes and embers - but amidst them, more beauty and passion than any man could ever hope to endure.

Robert and Lauren's love came on suddenly, burning unabashedly, without control. But sometimes, the spark that flames into a blaze, rages against all it touches, burning so hot it blights all those who get too close.

Promises left for ashes, sacred oaths billowing up in smoke.

Yet, despite all the conflagration, like the moth drawn to the flame, Robert would go through it all again, burn his very soul, if only to hold her in his arms one last time...

And then the kiss. It had been years, maybe a decade since she'd been kissed like that. All-encompassing kisses. Dangerous kisses that led nowhere, but reached out to everywhere. Kisses that existed only for the sheer enjoyment of exploring each other's mouth.