He Loves Me

He said he loved me. It caught me off guard. It rolled off his tongue as if he had been saying it to me for years. I stammered for second, trying to wrap myself around it. It's been so long since a man has said that to me. Then, as Jill once said, “it slipped from my lips, dripped down my chin, and landed in his lap” and I repeated those same, beautiful words to him.