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I decided to give that a go.

“Your neck tastes good,” I said as I sampled there. So did his nipples. I had a little trepidation about moving lower but I went for it, kind of drawn there. He moaned, too, which was such a boost when you were stroking someone’s erection, and his hands cupping my breasts massaged just the same way I touched him. Then I licked there and found that he tasted delicious.

But he pulled away and kissed me again, panting just as hard as I was. “Let me,” he said. He did a lot of the same things that I had done, but I thought that he showed a level of dexterity in his tongue that was kind of remarkable. Maybe it was from playing all those instruments? When he flicked it across my nipples and then suckled them, I got lost in a haze and then the tingling pleasure that I’d felt in my core exploded when he started to stroke my clitoris. First he used his fingers and then he put my knees over his shoulders and used that skillful tongue.

Obviously, I’d never had anyone do any of this to me but it felt totally normal and natural, like we should have been doing it all along. It also felt incredible and suddenly, a torrent of tingles swirled out from there and my body clenched and released in waves of orgasm.

“I have condoms. Somewhere.” I heard his jeans rattle. “Do you want me?”

Did I? “Yes!” I said, reaching for him and his birth control. I wanted him immediately, overwhelmingly, like there was a need that only Oliver was going to be able to fill.

He did fill me, but carefully. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he breathed. He turned us onto our sides and with my leg over his hips, he slowly eased into me. It didn’t hurt—but it was even more overwhelming. I pulled him closer and he went all the way.

“Oh,” I moaned. “Do that more.”

He did. He moved back and then nuzzled himself forward again, and then again but harder and with an increasing rhythm. And it was so good that when the both of us came, together this time, I didn’t think that there could be anything better.

But there was.

“I don’t want to be like the woodcock,” I said. I sighed with happiness as I snuggled against his body. “I don’t really want to do that anymore.”

“The…pardon me?”

I reminded him about the story I’d heard in the La Grieta library, the one where the bird had made a cake on her own. “I never went back to read it again, not after what happened with the earthquake. But I had always thought that she had the perfect life, totally by herself. I want to be self-sufficient but I also want people. I want you,” I said.

“I think that’s the story of the little red hen,” he told me. “She got screwed by all her friends who wouldn’t help her make a loaf of bread and at the end, she wouldn’t share with them. They deserved that. But I’ll help you make bread, or cake, or anything you want. Like the song. Our song.” He sang a little of it. “When the things you've planned, need a helping hand, I will understand, always.”

“Always,” I repeated.

“Always. Because, uh, Kat?” I felt his chest rise under my cheek as he breathed in. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. Always.”

I thought that was when it happened. A little while later, he went to the kitchen to get me a glass of water. But I heard him call my name, so I joined him there.

“Oh,” I said when I saw the sink. It was what I didn’t see, and what I didn’t hear: the glitter was fading, there were no hearts floating up, and the song got quieter and quieter until it stopped. “I guess it’s over,” I said. “This is it.”

Oliver turned off the tap. “Are you disappointed?” he asked. “So much more is just beginning.”

It wasn’t the end, not at all.

Epilogue

There. It was finished.

“This looks great,” Oliver said. He swung open the door and watched it gently shut. “Are these soft-close hinges?”

“Yes, they’re better for us. Look at the corners,” I told him, pulling out one of the drawers. “I dove-tailed them.”

“You made this pantry look like the day it was built in 1920. It’s beautiful,” he said. “Do you remember putting together the furniture in your old apartment in the Milaflores Building? Gramps told me that you were trying to hit screws in with a hammer.”

“I don’t think that I was ever that bad,” I disagreed. “We still use some of that furniture.”

“Your old bed. The couch,” he said. “We use them differently now.”

That was true. He and I had a bigger bed on the first floor, in the room that had been only his when he’d first moved into this Tudor-style house. It hadn’t taken too long after we’d said “I love you” that I’d let Mrs. McGlothen know that I was going to have to break my lease, and I had moved in here.

“I knew it,” she’d said with satisfaction. We had never fully determined how much she really did know, or how much we were imagining (particularly me). And despite how she had seemed pleased about the progression of my romance, she still had a long list of damage that I’d done to the apartment and there was also a significant penalty for moving out early.