“You feel so good,” I heard him mumble, as if to himself.
And yes, so good it was. The sheer force of him, striking such ineffable pleasure from me that I could feel the stream of my own wetness trickling down my inner thighs.
“Kai,” I cried out, feeling the shift of him inside me. Painful, almost, and transcendent.
“I know,” he panted, his hands at my hipbones, holding me up, pulling me to him. Hard. Harder. “I know.”
A flash of white rocketed behind my closed eyelids, and in my body something unfurled, a jolting, liquid sensation. “I think I… I think I’m…”
With his mouth on mine, he breathed, “Don’t close your eyes. Look at me when you come.”
It was such a simple thing. To know that this was what he wanted, to make me come and to watch me like this, undone and unthinking, all because of him. So I did as he asked while he plunged deeper and deeper inside me, and I rolled further and further away from myself, my mouth falling open, making no sound, saying nothing, only feeling, unburdened from a single conscious thought.
I felt him too, then, deep inside me, hardening right before releasing, the pure, hot wetness of our bodies coming together.
“Fuck,” he sighed, dropping his forehead on mine. “Anya. I could die like this.”
A kind of spell lifted off me, leaving me all weak and calm and satisfied. Dreamily, feeling touched in every sense of the word, I smiled at him. “What a lovely way to kill a man,” I said, and for a moment, a tender, human moment, we just lay there in each other’s arms, laughing.
???
An hour later, bathed, exhausted, and wearing only a clean pair of underwear, Kai rested with his back against the headboard on his side of the bed, where he had organized his existence atop the wooden nightstand the night before—his wristwatch and cigarettes and reading glasses—while I, also bathed and wonderfully sore, lay diagonally with my head on his lap, observing the room. The cold autumn sunlight chasing out the shadows, the fragrance of the candles we’d burned last night, the rumble of the heater in the kitchen bleeding through the wall. I was seized by this warm, melancholy sense of returning to an old feeling, or perhaps the realization that this feeling was something I would want to return to in the future. Nostalgia. The ultimate privilege. Because yearning for your own memories was proof you’ve had a life worth remembering.
Kai went on stroking my hair, his fingers moving lazily through it, and after several minutes of companionable silence, he asked if I were feeling okay.
“I’m really happy,” I told him. Because why not be happy, even in the midst of all this uncertainty? Why not just accept the gifts life had given us? This house, this place, the way we validated each other on this earth.
He smiled down at me, gratified, proud even. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I promised. “From now on and for the remainder of my days, whenever I think of a happy life, I’ll always picture this: a house by the ocean filled with laughter and music and books. And you. Just you, in the center of everything.”
Chapter Fifteen
Never, not for a moment, did I stop to think that this was a mistake. To abandon my life, to escape, to be here, to be here with him all felt incomparably right at the moment. If only I could bottle up the rest of my days and trade them for these two weeks, I would be the happiest person in the world.
Yes, what wouldn’t I give to relive them over and over again, each slow morning, each intimate night, every conversation, every silence, every feeling. The way he would fling an arm around my waist and pull me to his side in his sleep, or the way his pulse thrummed against my ear whenever I would lie with my head on his chest. But also our life at the cottage itself: creaky sun-scrubbed floorboards, smells of tobacco and strong velvet coffee, eating toasted bread with butter and jam, which we’d made with our own two hands the night before. Textures of wool and cotton and the linen sheets we’d had to wash over and over again. Sunrises on the beach and swimming in the ocean until our limbs were numb with cold. Then going down on my knees and taking him in my mouth right after, his fingers threading through my hair, and his voice breaking into a moan.
“I want to taste it,” I told him the first time he asked me where to come, and his eyes rolled white with pleasure.
By the time we’d get into the shower, he’d want me again, his hands on my hips pulling me back to him. “You are making me insane,” he would groan and then come deep inside me. And I would smile to myself, half-delirious from the selfish human desire to be wanted so passionately you could drive someone mad from it.
At dinner, flurries of conversation: clashing of opinions, books we’d read and loved, recapitulations of our time together at RAM, those elevator rides we had both spent secretly wanting to do the most obscene things to each other but had opted for polite smiles and appropriate physical distance.
Other nights were filled with musings about the future. Things he wanted to do together, places he wanted to take me. These were always introduced by him, for I couldn’t even imagine a future where I would be returning to my old life.
I felt completely and irreversibly disconnected from anything related to reality. The apartment on Arcade Street, my job, my friends, the possibility of going back to the Center and saying what?Sorry I sort of freaked out the last time I was here. I just wasn’t feeling my best. Let’s try again?
No, I didn’t want to think about any of that. So I always maneuvered the conversation back into the past. Anecdotes from his high school years, his first crush, his first kiss. Never had a serious girlfriend, he said. It had never felt quite right. And when I asked him if it felt right with me, he kissed me, long and deep, and told me that I should never learn just how right it was.
“Why shouldn’t I know?” I asked, laughing, satisfied even before knowing the answer.
We had just finished eating, and we were sitting on the floor before the fireplace, his face looking flushed and youthful in the golden radiance of the room.
“It will scare you away,” he said lightheartedly, but I could tell he really believed it.
Without looking away, I crawled over the rug to where he sat until I was kneeling upright between his parted legs. “I’m not that easily scared,” I told him, running my fingers through his hair.
Looking up at me, enthralled, he slipped a hand under the thin cotton of my nightgown and traced a whispering line from my thigh to the edge of my underwear. “You’d be terrified to know how much I want you,” he rasped.
