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When my climax came, it ripped through me until I was nearly dizzy. I heard my voice scream his name and then I fell against him, my head on his shoulder, ecstasy crashing over me and through me and leaving me drained.
But his need was still burning hot, and he took my face in his hands and kissed me as if I had drowned and needed resuscitating. And it worked because his tongue in my mouth, demanding and desperate, started everything over again. I became as hungry for him as I had been moments before.
I kissed him back, tilting my head to deepen that kiss, savoring the taste of him as he bucked beneath me, thrusting up as I came down. But it wasn’t enough. He wrapped his arms around me and rolled me onto my back, and I cried out at the beautiful sensation of him sliding even deeper into me than I’d thought possible.
Like this, he let go, his gorgeous body pistoning against mine, so perfectly rough and hard. My body was still throbbing from before, and the pleasure began to build in me all over again.
“Are you close?” Noah managed. “Yes, I can feel that you are. You’re right there…”
I couldn’t speak because he was right. Another orgasm rocketed through me a split second later, and he groaned as if it were his release. It was what he’d been waiting for; he’d held back for me and now had let go, shuddering against me as his own climax surged through him and left him heavy and sated.
“I don’t ever want to be apart again,” I said, even before we’d caught our breath.
He shook his head. “I don’t either. But if we were, I know I’d find my way back to you. Always.”
And I knew then why he’d left. To make his words true. To create a partnership between us where there was nothing left in our way.
Love, real love, wasn’t empty, grasping hands or lies that felt like truths. And it wasn’t perfect or neat or always easy. It was a rising sun on a new day.
It was endless possibility.
epilogue one
November 1, 2015
My birthday. Charlotte leads me up the winding, leaf-choked path, the same that I walked alone four years ago. My hand is on her arm, but she walks slowly. It’s dark for her. Not yet dawn. I can feel her muscles tense under my fingers. She’s nervous in these strange surroundings, but she doesn’t stop. She’s brave, my Charlotte.
We walk to the peak, and I feel the open air. It’s hot and sticky, even though the sun has yet to rise. But it will, and she will be ready when it does.
I sit on the stony ground, my knees drawn up, while Charlotte crouches beside me. I hear theclickof her violin case and my chest tightens in anticipation.
And love.
God, I love her. I love Charlotte with every fiber of my being. I love her so much that the thought of going one more day without asking her to be my wife seems ridiculous; there’s a small box tucked into my luggage back at the hotel. I know we’re young, but as a wise man once told me, certainty is its own kind of peace. And I can ask her now because the anger and hate and raging sense of injustice have all been laid to rest. They will never rise up again to hurt her. I did what I set out to do and made myself someone who could be her partner in all things. I’ve left all the bitterness behind.
My life is very different from the one I’d led before. When I was first told that I would be blind forever, my mind concocted a list of things I would never see or do again. Now, I see beauty in other ways: I hear it in Charlotte’s laugh, her voice, her music. I smell it in a burned match, in ground coffee, at a barbecue at her parents’ house or mine. I feel it when I touch Charlotte, when I hold her and make love to her; when I dance with her, her head tucked under my chin, so perfectly…
I feel it in the Braille I’m painstakingly learning as I type my book, mymemoir.Is there a more pretentious word? I doubt it, but that’s what it is. A memoir of my accident and everything that’s come after. Of struggling across Europe on my own and of traveling the world with Charlotte as she plays to sold-out houses in gilded concert halls. Of our life together that is fuller and richer than anything I’d known before the accident.
Yuri wants my book, and I may give it to him, but right now I don’t care. It doesn’t even have a title yet, but it has a dedication. To Charlotte. Of course, to Charlotte.Without her, I’m hunched in a musty room, listening tootherpeople’s books and dying a little bit inside every day. I’d like to believe I might have found my own way out of that pain and grief, but I don’t want to think about it. I don’t need to. I don’t have to curse and scream and shake my angry fist at the big empty sky. Not anymore.
I have found my hope, my gradations of darkness. I don’t jump out of airplanes anymore, but I still fly. I feel the rush of adrenaline through my veins when my love for Charlotte overwhelms me. And I feel it now as she touches my hand.
“It’s almost time. Are you ready?”
I nod. I close my eyes, waiting, and with a small intake of breath, Charlotte begins to play.
Her violin sings a low but intense note, and she holds it, makes it simmer. In the black backdrop of my universe comes a faint glow, like an ember that shimmers on the cusp of a horizon. Her note rises, a soft vibrato, then holds again, and I see the light spread. I see it.
Charlotte’s violin paints the slow spill of light over the green forest, burnishing it with copper. I see the white, winding river coiling below, glowing where the light touches it. I see ruins revealed as the light creeps over them. Her violin holds a smooth, low note and then it bursts—her bow flurries over the strings—and I see the sun break free in a corona of fiery red and glowing yellow. My chest tightens and my heart aches with a pain so deep I can hardly breathe.
Charlotte plays the dawn, every rising note a brush stroke over a living painting. The notes flare and explode like fireworks around me, a riot of sound and light, and I feel tears sting my useless eyes. I see the dawn and know, with agonizing finality, that this is the only way I will ever see it again. Whatever was left of my old pain and bitterness is blown to dust forever.
The last note floats in the air as the sun’s light rises enough that the night is dispelled for the day, and I cover my eyes with my hand, my shoulders shuddering. I feel Charlotte’s arms around me. I raise my hand and find her heart-shaped face, her soft cheek and full lips.
“I saw it, Charlotte,” I whisper. “I saw it all.”
I feel her nod, and she releases a ragged breath, and I draw toward that sound, to the mouth that made it, and kiss her, because she has given me everything.
