So I say to hell with it, and I cross the space between us.
This is the part I’m most ashamed of, the part I conveniently edit out in my recollection of the night.Imake the first move. Everything fromhere on out happens the way it happens because I start it. Alex is just enthusiastically along for the ride.
Our lips crash together a little too forcefully at first, but we find our rhythm, and before I know it, I’m lost to the sensation of howrightthis feels.
He pulls me over the center console until I straddle him in the driver’s seat, only barely able to make myself fit. It’s cramped and uncomfortable and altogether perfect. As we continue our kiss, I glide my hands down his chest, into his waistband, and yank out his shirt so I can get my hands on his skin. He grabs my hips, pulling me closer until I feel how hard he is beneath me. I gasp at the sensation, and he trails kisses down my jaw, neck, shoulder.
“Do you want to…” He pauses. Waiting. Allowing me to lead.
“Let’s go inside,” I say, and once the words are out there, my impatience builds. I needoutof this car. I reach to open the door, then pull back when I can’t find the handle. Right. Buttons. We went through this dance at House of Pies. Which was it again?
“It’s this one.” He presses one of the buttons on the door and helps me out of the car. I glare as he shuts the door behind him.
“What was so wrong with door handles?”
He laughs and cups my chin in his hand. He leans forward and brushes his lips over mine in a soft kiss, and I forget everything but this feeling.
I guide him to my apartment, and the moment the door closes behind us, he’s back on me, pushing me against the wall. In a frenzy, I yank off his tie. He rips off my dress. His shirt, my bra. Until there’s nothing but the two of us pressed against each other in the dark.
He murmurs my full name, “Josephina,” and for the first time, it feels right. He kisses me as he gets down on his knees, hitches my leg over hisshoulder, and licks me until I’m a shaking, gasping mess, unable to hold myself up, grasping at the wall for balance.
In my room, I push him onto the bed, turn on a lamp, and grab a condom from my drawer. A natural pause in the rhythm. An easy place to stop.
That’s the thing about torrid affairs. In retrospect, they feel like they happened in a flurry. A snowball of passion that couldn’t have been stopped once it got rolling. You refer to your actions in the passive voice. Yougotcarried away. Youwereswept up.
But in reality, there are pauses. Places where you have to think. Where you have no choice but to make an active decision, whether you acknowledge it or not: The moment you have to figure out which button functions as the door handle. The seconds spent fishing your keys out of your purse. The time it takes to grab a condom from a drawer. The time to put it on.
He flips me over so he’s on top, lines himself up. Pauses and looks me in the eye.
“Tell me you feel this too,” he murmurs. “Tell me it’s not just me.”
“I feel it too,” I say, ending on a gasp as he pushes into me.
We move in tandem, the rhythm hard and fast, overwhelming in the best way. We don’t speak, the air around us filled with nothing but the sounds of our gasps and moans and skin slapping against skin. It’s what we both need, to feel like we’re nothing but bodies, sensations.
My orgasm builds fast, crests before I’ve had time to fully process it, and his follows shortly after. We lie there, catching our breath. He turns to me, and we kiss slowly, languidly.
To think, tonight easily could have never happened. If I hadn’t snuck out that side door. If I’d gone back inside to take Ellie up on that dance. If I hadn’t said, “Sure, why not invite him?” when Ellie and Cat had been deliberating on it all those months ago.
It shouldn’t be possible, I think, to have such chemistry with a person and never know it. Would it always have been this good, or did the pieces need to fall exactly as they did? Years of indifference, one night of connection, and then—
We start again, this time slower, lazy, almost sleepy.
No less overwhelming.
Afterward, he gets up to grab a washcloth. We clean up, and he returns to my bed. Neither of us brings up the option of him leaving. We fall asleep in each other’s arms.
In the middle of the night, his phone rings. I grumble for him to turn it off, thinking it’s an alarm, though of course I later realize that no one sets an alarm for three a.m.
“It’s just work,” he explains, and tells me to go back to sleep. But I’m awake now. When he turns to find me watching him, he asks, “What are you thinking?”
I’m thinking I want to keep you.
“I’m thinking I want to do it again,” I say. So we do.
“Say it’s not the last time,” he murmurs as my orgasm starts to crescendo.
“It’s not the last time,” I gasp.
