I bought some hyacinths the other day.

Last weekend I lay wrapped in the cocoon of my lover’s arms. It was Sunday, the last night I had Peyton with me and my babe slept soundly in the room across the hall. With a warm body beneath me and an orgasm or two under my belt I sighed into the wavy love beams emanating from The Neighbor.

“If you’re ever up for it, I’d really like to cross something off my Sexual Bucket List.”

“Mmmhmm,” he said, his hands on my skin traced secret letters.

“Yeah, I’d like to have sex every day for a week.” He looked over at me, intrigued. “I’ve never done that before.”

His answer was immediate, “Ok. Wanna start now? Does tonight count as 1 or 0?”

“Zero!” I laughed back, not quite believing my ears. I never thought my wishful week would start right away. But it did.

Like Heidi on her mountainside I played with my neighbor — the man I love — and floated on meadows of orgasms and drank from ejaculating streams. The sun bore down on me and my sexual heart and we became golden and gleamed together like a setting sun into the ocean. Passersby could see my sparkle from a distance and wondered over the happy little beauty smiling into trees and whispering to butterflies as if she were a winged creature herself.

Each night he came to me, no matter how exhausted we were, and we capped off our labors with a labor of love. Me loving him. Him loving me. Our bodies locked together.

My darker moments were spent in the shadow of disbelief. This couldn’t really be happening to me. I knew how badly he needed to be alone, to recharge. Yet there he was, every night. Day 4, Day 5, Day 6…

This flippant goal of mine to connect with another body every day for a week transformed us like a spell. We weren’t TN and Hy. We were Him and Her, a couple. A real live couple. Geppetto would have cried fat salty tears as he saw our hearts pound together and our breaths mingle into each others’ mouths and organs.

Friday, Day 5, I made dinner for him and my girlfriend — asparagus soup and roasted red-pepper and sun-dried tomato pasta. We laughed and drank and wore my grandmother’s aprons. Downstairs Neighbor soon joined us and the four of us lay on the floor like school children and played The Book of Questions.

Someone asked a question wherein I revealed some of my dusty insecurities at not being slender. “I have never been slim a day of my life,” I explained. “Even when I was my fittest my thighs touched and I looked robust.”

My friends misunderstood me and thought I was feeling badly about my shape; they all leapt to my defense. They told me how beautiful I was, how unbelievably sexy, how shapely I was. TN’s voice was clear and strong when he said, “Hy, you are by the far the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever dated or been with. You’re better looking than Anna, my exgirlfriend, and better looking than 4 am girl.” He turned to our friends and added, “And she kills it in the sack.”

That night he invited me to stay the night and we made sure that my friend and DN could hear us down below. In the morning we awoke to dreadful hangovers and TN triumphantly declared, “See! Staying the night isn’t a thing anymore!!”

Day 6 we donned our running gear and did a fun run 5k. We painted our faces and raced through the crowds laughing and panting. Through the finish line we went and tumbled into a dance party of runners and strobe lights. The room pulsed with music and lights were softened by human steam.

I beamed at him and we kissed, covered in sweat and surrounded by thousands. I was a beacon of unadulterated happiness. I was a real boy.

We drove home and tangled ourselves into each other, scrubbed clean; shiny, happy people living a dream. Too tired for anything vigorous, I suggested he “slip it in and hold still.”

He began to protest until I dropped my voice and told him to listen — really listen — to what he was saying. He giggled at his own absurdity and I felt the helmet of his giant erection butt against my warm, plump skin.

He slipped in and held there. I lay still on my side, his arm on my hip. He moved just a little and I told him not to. He didn’t listen.

He pulled out and slid back in and I felt every millimeter, like a carrot in my hands it felt abrasive, alive and stiff.

He thrust deeply into my core and I gasped and pushed onto on him. With minimal movement we felt each other as though we were on a deep space odyssey; every instrument tuned to the outside, plugged into the inside.

Eight, 10, 12 more thrusts and he stopped, told me to grab my vibrator. Soon, with his magical penis buried deep inside my equally magical cunt, I came like a banshee and quivered down around him.

And as I caught my breath I felt the animal between us alight with passion. He hammered into me with a methodical rhythm, deliberate and punishing, slow.

His breath caught in his throat and 15 seconds later he was crying out and dumping his seed inside of me. Our cumless streak was broken. “We’ll have to resent the calendar with that one,” he chuckled as I rolled over to nestle in his nook.

And on the 7th day, he invited me to his friend’s BBQ. We found ourselves in Stepford playing the “Who do you think is kinky?” game and surreptitiously rubbing each others’ fun parts. I decided the man in his late thirties wearing plaid shorts, flip-flops, and an unbuttoned Polo shirt was a dirty motherfucker. He thought it was the woman in a navy blue Polo dress who had a look in her eye that liked to get naughty.

We both agreed we were likely the only two people there who were so perfectly sexually matched. We were also the only couple there who wasn’t “together.”

We left early to our host’s dismay and I stroked him as his car purred home in the sunshine.

We climbed the stairs and he sneaked inside his apartment and I went to mine. I peeled off my clothes and slipped on a figure-hugging negligee. I felt silly and awkward and all too deliberate.

I wrapped myself like a piece of melted candy in a lemon-drop robe and waited. He waltzed in wrapped in marshmallow white, naked as the day he was born beneath the terrycloth.

We both exclaimed at our little gifts to one another and touched and fondled our treats.

He tugged me back into my room and he told me over and over how hot I was in my lingerie, his cock buried deep inside of me, my heart clearly on my sleeve.

When we were done, we both agreed we were having more fun than anyone else back at the Stepford BBQ.

In all, Day 7 was really Day 8 if we renumbered Day 0 to be 1. It was the most glorious 8 days with any lover/partner/boyfriend/fuckbuddy/whatever of my life. I felt desirable and wanted. Above all else, I felt accepted.

Underneath it all, I was keenly aware that it was a blip on the radar, unsustainable. He was faltering under the strain of daily and/or nightly contact; he needed his space to recoup. But he was a trouper and for that I am eternally grateful. We did something spectacular together.

This wasn’t his first week of continuous sex (his exgirlfriend, Anna, was “a nympho” when they first got together), but it was the first week with him where I got to see his boyfriend side, the side that puts my needs first and who goes out of his way to show how much he cares.

Today, two days after the life raft of sex in a sea of uncertainty, he has retreated and is licking the wounds incurred by contact to such constant, bright sunlight: me. He’s earned it.

I have never been happier with anyone in my life. Not my exhusband, not any old boyfriend. They all professed to love me and they committed their lives to me, yet they all failed to make me feel as special, needed, and desired as this man, The Neighbor, does.

So, I’ve come to terms — again — with my life with him. I will forgo holding hands in return for his acceptance of me . I will give up introducing him as my partner in exchange for the knowledge that he prefers my company above all others’. I will give up waking up in his arms for the dozens of little kindnesses he does for me in a week. And I will let go of hearing I love you because I know in my marrow that he treats me as one treats a love, a true love, and I can live with that.

The “nature of our relationship” is predicated on the idea that it could suddenly end. I am beginning to view this just one of many different approaches to affairs of the heart. Indeed, any relationship can end at a moment’s notice despite proclamations of devotion and loyalty. Perhaps knowing I am borrowing him makes our life together that much sweeter.

I don’t know if I want him in my life long-term, but for now he makes me happier than anyone ever has before and so he has earned a spot in my Today. What Tomorrow holds, I don’t know, but hopefully it’s another 8 days.