Page 60 of Given Our History

He breathes a laugh, but it’s swallowed up as our mouths meet again, open and hungry. He rolls on the condom and notches himself inside me and we both suck in a breath. He draws his head back just far enough to look back and forth between my eyes. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Because we don’t need to rush into this.”

I answer by kissing him and rocking my hips against his, nudging him deeper, and he releases a groan. “God, you feel amazing.” He thrusts home, slow and purposeful, and the sensation is almost too much. I clench around him.

“No, don’t—” He closes his eyes and exhales, his body tensing over me. “I need to focus.” Slowly, torturously, he draws back and sinks into me again, resting his forehead against mine, his face screwed up as he tries to concentrate.

My body moves against my will, hips rolling beneath him. “Don’t hold back.”

“I’ll come too fast.”

“Don’t care. Please,” I whine. “Want you to mean it.”

“I do mean it,” he says through gritted teeth. “But I’ve wanted you for too fucking long. There’s no way I’m going to last.”

Despite his words, though, the undeniable need for release seems to command his body for him. He moves in and out of me again, and then again. Before I know what’s happening, my legs are hooked around his back and his thrusts quicken. If there was any lingering concern as to whether we both wanted this, our bodies are more than happy to hash it out for us. After a moment, he pushes himself up onto his knees so that he can watch my face, and the shift in angle is almost too much. My fingers scrabble for purchase.

He’s almost breathless, his brow knit in careful concentration, but he manages to ask, “You sure you don’t want me to—?”

I shake my head, because no, I’m not sure, before realizing that could be interpreted either way. “Silver,” I sputter. “In the pocket.”

He reaches for my purse, clumsily, and manages to grab the small silver vibrator out of the front pocket. I expect him to stop and ask questions, but he only inspects it for a brief moment before twisting the end to turn it on—I am immensely relieved to discover that I must have put batteries in it at some point, and that they still work—and lowers it to me, his hips all the while maintaining a steady pace. Tension threads through my body until my legs constrict around him, slowing his hips. I bite my lip, trying to muffle the strangled cry that escapes me, but he catches my mouth in a rough kiss instead.

“Don’t hold back,” he says, nipping my bottom lip. “I want to watch you come undone.”

It’s the same authoritative voice I’ve heard him use before, only its effect right now is entirely different. Pleasure racks me until I’m seeing stars, seeing nothing, but I feel his pace speed up again and then falter. A groan rips from his throat. The vibrator is abandoned somewhere off to the side. Shuddering to a stop, he collapses on top of me, chest heaving against mine.

We lie like that for a long moment in a sort of reverent silence. Finally, still winded, I say, “That was—” But I’m at a loss for words, so I don’t bother finishing.

“Overdue.” Teddy kisses me one more time before heading to the kitchen to throw away the condom. Still dazed, I search for my clothes and try to re-dress myself on teetering, wobbly legs, but the zipper on my dress is caught and I can’t seem to get it working again. Teddy comes up behind me and takes over, zipping me up. He brushes my hair to one side and plants a feather-light kiss on the back of my neck. I turn to face him.

There are still questions buzzing around my head—what does this mean, and where do we go from here?—but I elect to ignore them, at least for now. Instead, I ask, “Do you want to come back to my place for the night?”

CHAPTER22

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO

People have a way of convincing themselves that they’re the exception, not the rule.

Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s a self-preservation thing—we have to believe that we’re not doomed to repeat everyone else’s mistake, or else we’d be paralyzed into inaction, too scared to take the leap. Or maybe it’s a strange form of solipsism, where you convince yourself that everyone else is running on autopilot, and you’re different because your decisions are deliberate, informed; you know what you’re doing. You can share firsts, learn to bare your soul to someone without it having to be at the expense of your friendship. All those other people, the people who fell in love, who made things messy, who woke up one day and realized they could never go back to the way things were—those people were nothing like the two of you.

Except in all the ways you were exactly the same: in the way he looked at you every time he saw you, like you were the first rain after a long drought—palms turned up, catching droplets, because to have some small part of you was better than having none of you at all. In the way your pulse raced beneath your skin whenever he touched you. And in the drifting apart, that moment when you realized you were no longer on the same page. That you wanted two different things.

I think maybe it’s best if we go back to just being friends.

What he was asking wasn’t possible.

As much as I didn’t want a relationship, we couldn’t go back to the way things were. Our conversations became awkward, stilted. With little happening in my life to distract me, I dove headfirst into that first semester of college, volunteering in the food cupboard on campus and joining the Sigma Tau Delta book club to keep myself occupied between classes. Teddy seemed all too willing to fade into the background—or maybe we were both just busy, but I resented it all a little more for every week we went without a phone call, every time a text message came through with a one-word answer or a thumbs-up. When neither of us called the other on Christmas that year, a part of me mourned the loss of our friendship. But I told myself that I understood: life went on.

Determined to get out of my funk, I applied to a semester abroad program, and the following year I packed my bags for Queen Mary University in London, where I fell in love with the city and its history. Maryland had a long history of its own, but everything in England felt so much older, like walking every gum-riddled sidewalk and zebra crossing was walking in the footsteps of ghosts. It was easy to romanticize it all, being so far from home. The heavy gong of the bells at Westminster Abbey; the colossal plaster cast of Trajan’s Column in the Victoria and Albert Museum; touring the cold sepulcher of the royal tombs in the Lady Chapel, footsteps echoing off the high ceiling as I stared into the gilded faces of long-dead royals, lying in repose. Back home, history had felt like something contained, bound in books full of names and dates. But here, it bloomed outward like a spiderweb of veins running beneath the city—living, pulsating.

Despite my efforts to distract myself, I wanted to call Teddy, to share this sense of wonder with him, because I knew that he would understand it. I’d downloaded WhatsApp so that I could keep in touch with my parents and Izzy without racking up my phone bill, but messages from Teddy were few and far between—wishing me a happy Easter, or sending a picture of a textbook beneath a yellow lamp in the library, accompanied by a short message lamenting a deadline—and I’d left half of them on read. After a while, the messages stopped altogether.

Plans for Izzy to come visit me over spring break fell through when she failed to renew her passport on time, so I spent a week sightseeing by myself, on quiet bus rides with my earbuds in, the English countryside zipping past my window. It was raining when I visited Stonehenge, the grass slick beneath my tennis shoes and the snaps on my raincoat buttoned up to my chin, but I traipsed all the way from the drop-off point despite the weather—my mom had a coffee table book of famous landmarks with Stonehenge on the cover, and she always swore she’d visit one day, so I was determined to get a picture for her.

The stones were dark with water and freckled in lichen, and I was forced to stand a good fifteen yards away behind a cordon, hugging myself in the rain. Meanwhile, a crow landed on one of the lintel stones, preening feathers as wet and black as oil. I dug my phone out of the pocket of my raincoat, hoping to be quick about this. Raindrops speckled the screen as I pulled up the camera and snapped a few quick selfies.

“Do you want me to take one for you?” a man’s voice called across the grass.

I looked over. He was standing a ways away, wearing a large and structured raincoat, and behind the stiff collar, a square jawline peeked over a turtleneck. I recognized him from the tour bus.