“My turn,” she said.
I nearly came apart on the spot.
She made good on it — down me the way I’d gone up her, her mouth finding the old scars one at a time without asking what they were, which undid me worse than anything lower could have. Then she went lower. She licked the tip of me, slow, and wrapped her hand around the shaft, and it was the singlemost sexual thing I’d ever watched a woman do — that forensic attention of hers turned all the way filthy, her eyes coming up the length of me the whole time. Then she took me in her mouth, the suction of it perfect, working the base with her hand in time with every pull, and I lost the thread of my own name. She had me close faster than I’d ever admit, and when I felt it start to climb I drew her up off me by the hair, gentle but certain. “Not like that.” My voice came out wrecked. “I want to be inside you when I come the first time.”
So I turned her onto her back and kissed her greedily, like I couldn’t get enough of her mouth either, and lined the head of my cock up at her entrance and pushed in slow — inch by inch, because she was small and tight and taking all of me was going to take time, and I wasn’t going to rush one second of the first time I was ever inside her. I felt every degree of her give, her breath catching higher with each inch, until I was seated all the way in and there was nowhere left to go.
I had to stop there. Had to hold still and get a grip on myself, jaw locked, every muscle strung tight, because she felt that good and this was not going to be over in a minute — not this one. When I trusted my own voice I put my mouth to her ear. “You feel like nothing else,” I told her. “Like you were made to take me. I’ve wanted to be right here since the first day you wouldn’t look at me.” She held still under me and took every word.
A beat. Then, on no breath at all: “Please.” Another. “Caleb.” Another. “Move.”
So I moved, and she rose to meet me, the two of us finding the same rhythm in the same breath — and after that there was nothing held back on either side of it. It was beautiful and it was unleashed, the lamp gold on her skin, her hands fisted in the sheets, my name coming out of her with no shame left in it. When I felt her start to chase it I got my hand between us and put my fingers on her clit, working her in time with every driveof my cock, and she came apart noisy and loud, every bit of her management gone, and took me with her — the two of us going over at the exact same time.
After that I stopped counting. We were loud and then laughing and then neither; somewhere in there she got the hiccups from laughing and I had to stop until they passed and we both nearly died of it.
Some hour with no name, starving and useless, I ordered a pizza off my phone with her draped over me vetoing my choices. When it came she made me stay put — “you’ll terrify the kid, you look like you’ve been in a fight and enjoyed it” — pulled my t-shirt on off the floor and paid at the door in it and nothing else, and I watched her come back swimming in cotton that had been on me an hour before, holding the box up like a trophy, and felt something I didn’t have a safe word for.
We ate it in her bed and talked about nothing — the best slice, whether pineapple is a personal insult to Italy (agreed: yes), the worst date either of us had sat through. She stole the last crust off my side when she thought I wasn’t watching. I was watching. I let her have it.
She licked the grease off her thumb slow, holding my eyes, doing nothing to pretend she didn’t know what it was doing to me, and the air in the room turned over like a thrown switch. She set the box on the floor herself this time, then settled over me, hair falling around us both, her mouth a breath off mine, and lifted one eyebrow.
“Again?” Plain as anything. Half a dare loaded into it.
“Fuck yeah,” I said, and rolled her under me before the word was all the way out.
This time we took it slower than the want in it deserved, laughing into each other at the start of it and not laughing at all by the end, and when it was done she fitted herself along my side like she’d found the one spot she’d been missing.
By three the cottage had gone quiet, no sound in it but the two of us breathing. Her cheek was on my chest, one hand on the ink on my forearm, her thumb moving over the names there without knowing they were names. Somewhere in the last hour we’d started saying true things out loud, the ones we both usually swallow, and neither of us had stopped.
“Favorite food,” she said into my skin.
“You first.”
“My mum’s pancakes.” No hesitation, then quieter, like she’d surprised herself: “She made them on Saturdays. I haven’t had them in eighteen years.” She didn’t take it back or laugh it off. She let it sit there, the years counted out plain.
I didn’t rush the quiet. I gave her mine back, the same weight, so she wasn’t out there alone with hers. “My mum’s chicken and dumplings. I haven’t had those in twenty-four.” Neither of us said the obvious thing. I put my mouth to her hair instead.
Somewhere in there I asked her, easy, just wanting to keep her talking: “What’s your perfect day look like?”
I felt her smile against my chest before she said it. “It starts on my porch. Early, coffee going cold in my hands because I’m too busy watching the light come up over the road. And it ends out at the ranch, in the saddle — a sunset ride with the whole sky gone orange.”
“That sounds about perfect,” I said into her hair.
“Your turn,” she said. “What’s yours.”
“You on the back of my bike. That’s the whole thing — a highway out in front of us, nowhere we have to be, nobody who needs either of us, just the road and the sky and your arms around me and the whole day to do nothing with.”
She was quiet a second. Then, soft: “That sounds perfect too.”
By four she was asleep on me, one hand gone slack in my hair, breathing slow and trusting in a way she couldn’t have managed against another body a week ago. I lay there listeningto the thing under my ribs, loudest now — louder for every good hour, because the better this got the more there was to lose, and the more I’d take from her when she learned what I’d held while she handed me her softest wants in the dark.
I have to tell her. Not tonight. I have to talk to my father first, know exactly what’s true before I put it in front of her. I’ll know it cold, and then I’ll find the time, and I’ll tell her myself, before anyone else does.
I’d find the time.
I did not yet know that I’ll find the time would be the sentence on my headstone.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep.
