I feel him. The hardness. The expectation. It makes me shudder.
He breathes hard, slowly, bringing his head back up to mine. He smiles at me, and I am grateful for the familiarity. I trust him. I want him.
‘How do you want it?’ he asks, pressing his hips into mine again so I can feel what’s coming, what is about to happen.
‘I don’t care. Just with you.’
My answer satisfies him and with a breath he plunges himself into me. I gasp, arch my back to accommodate him. He stays there for a moment, both of us catching our breath until he starts to move.
I have always enjoyed sex. I enjoy the initial awkwardness, how, the first time, we bare all to a relative stranger. How good sex is a levelling force, how bad sex will fuel the topic of girls’ night for months. This sex though is something different entirely.
I marvel at Florian, how brushing my hand against his cheek feels just as intimate as him inside me. He leans over me, his arms bracing beside my head. Sometimes, when he gets close, I watch as he closes his eyes, bites down hard on his lip and then his eyes shoot open, find mine and it’s like he is tuning into me, translating every single twitch and groan and ‘fuck’ into a language that his body acts upon until everything begins to tighten. It starts with a dull ache so deep that it is almost unpleasant until something else takes over and it begins to spread down, down to a depth I didn’t know my body could reach. I start to grip the sheets in my hands. My calls for him grow wilder. I know he feels it too because he becomes more frenetic, harder, giving me everything he has left. I watch him cracking, take in the beads of sweat on his forehead, the darkening of his eyes, the way he grabs on to my breast so hard in the final throes I think I might bruise, but I don’t care.
He waits for me, waits for my body to stop convulsing, waits until my calls for him have quietened, waits until my body goes limp beneath him like all of the life has been squeezed out of me. I watch as he lets go. How every muscle in his face tightens, his angular jaw pointing up to the ceiling. His eyes clenched shut. The way he lets out a ragged, guttural moan that is so fucking satisfying I wish I could do it all again immediately just to hear that specific sound again.
He slips from me, rolling to the side, his arm immediately winding itself around my shoulder. I adjust myself, rest my head on his chest, listen to his heart regulating back into its normal rhythm.
‘Was that okay?’ he asks although I know he knows the answer. I’m pretty sure that no one has enjoyed themselves during sex more than I have in that moment.
‘Yes,’ I nod and then let out a croaky laugh. ‘Yes, that will do.’
He kisses my cheek and it becomes apparent quite how hot and sweaty we are. He grins at me boyishly. ‘To think, I was almost going to give that up.’
I shake my head, still fighting to get my breath back. ‘That would have been a very unfortunate situation for both of us.’
I trace an invisible pattern on his skin, my fingernail winding its way from his torso all the way down his arms and up his neck. He lets me, looking at me as if I’m something that doesn’t quite belong to the earth, something he has never seen properly before.
‘I wasn’t just saying it for you to sleep with me,’ I say. ‘Or for you to not hate me as much.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I do love you.’
There is a silence, a momentary lapse of conversation that makes my heart plummet. I know you’re meant to say these things without the expectation of hearing them back, but the fact that he hasn’t said it once when I must have uttered it three times in the last hour has put me slightly on edge.
‘Come here.’ He gets out of the bed and offers me his hand. He pulls me to my feet where a delicious ache in my limbs greets me. It’s colder away from the mattress and I reach for the quilt, wrapping it around my body as Florian leads me to the bureau. He stands behind me, his hands wrapping across my waist, and points to the mirror.
‘Look,’ he insists. I stare at the reflection of us and the confusion sets in.
‘What exactly am I looking at?’
‘Look,’ he says again as he presses his lips into my neck. ‘Look, there, see it?’ He takes his thumb and traces my lip, the way my teeth have caught it in the corner, the way my cheeks are blushed and warm: exactly the way Florian had described that I used to look at Ettie.
‘I dothe thingwith you.’ It comes out as a statement. An obvious little declaration because of course I do; it figures that Florian would be able to uncover the deepest of my secrets before even I can admit to them.
‘When we talk, when we flirt, when we kiss, just then, sometimes even when I just catch you looking at me.’
For some maddening reason, I find myself blushing. Of course I love him, I’ve just made that abundantly clear but the fact I had made it all so obvious makes me feel like a teenager again, nursing a petty crush. ‘And how long have you noticed this?’
‘It started when we built that cairn.’ He looks almost bashful, admitting now that he had been reading me all along.
I turn to him, mouth hanging open. ‘That’s cheating.’
‘It’s notcheating.’He acts like the word leaves a sour taste in his mouth. ‘Just helped me stick around when everything else was telling me to run.’
‘Well, it’s not fair! Why do you get to know every little thing about me when you remain such a mystery?’ I pretend to be offended, pout a little for effect, and he just shakes his head and then holds me a little tighter than before.
‘I’m not a mystery to anybody but you.’ He strokes some hair behind my ear, his eyes moving across my face, mouth slightly open. ‘I think it’s clear to anyone who’s ever met us that I’m madly in love with you, Ava, and that I think I’m going to be for an awfully long time.’
