“There.” She points at the gray-and-white rug in front of the fireplace.
I get up and push the coffee table off the rug. “Anything else?” I ask. Her take-charge attitude is cute, and it’s making the front of my pants grow tighter.
She stands and steps to the center of the rug. Light from the fire dances on her hair. She looks more beautiful than any sight I’ve ever seen, and my chest swells when I think of what she’s about to give me.
“We have you, me, space, and quiet. You know what that means?” Her lips quiver with mirth.
I close the few feet separating us and reach for her, pulling her in. “What?” I ask into her hair. The fire has already warmed one side of her body.
She leans back and giggles. “Tonight, Sutton, you can press my button.”
I throw my head back and laugh, and she reaches me on tiptoe to press a kiss to my neck.
Then, I do just that.
With my hand, I lead her to the ending she was so close to a few weeks ago. When she comes back down from the high, I sit up to roll on a condom. She sits up, too, and asks me to teach her how to do it. When she rolls it up successfully, she claps for herself, and I laugh. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed during sex before.
Ember lets out a long, slow exhale when I’m finally all the way inside her. I’ve gone slowly, allowing her to adjust to each inch.
“This is my first time,” I tell her, pushing a stray hair from her face.
“No, it’s not.” Her voice is raspy. I’ve started moving above her, and she’s clinging to my shoulders.
“I’ve never been with anybody I loved.” I can’t believe how different it is.
It’s better than I’ve ever had it. Ember makes it better.
Magicmakes it better.
I’ve always considered myself a straight line. Maybe a few right angles thrown in, but still, I’m two straight lines meeting at a harsh point.
Ember is all curves. Maybe it’s not even as simple as that. She’s a spirograph. Dramatic curves, convex and concave, deep dips and high heights.
Each time I kiss her, I feel her longing. My heart calls to hers. My right angles want her wavy, meandering curves.
We’re different, and that’s good.
We’re the same, and that’s good.
I want her forever, and that is unbelievably good.
12
Ember
People don’tfallin love.
Well, maybe some do, but not us. Noah and I didn’t fall. We crashed, and in the collision, the pieces of me and the fragments of him scattered.
Mixed.
Coalesced.
He’s asleep beside me, one arm tucked under his head like a child, the other across my chest. The bed we slept in is monstrous, but we stayed in the center in a tangle of limbs. My soreness didn’t stop me from waking him in the middle of the night. That time, however, when he climbed on top of me, I wrapped my legs around his backside, and it felt even better than the first time.
Last night I asked Noah to leave the drapes where they were, pulled all the way back and revealing the moonlit ocean. Endless swaths of darkness with no way to separate sea from sky, but there were stars. They looked close enough to touch. That was my last thought before I slipped into sleep. Now the sun pours in, and the ocean waves crash against the shore just as they did yesterday, and the day before that, and all the other days before that.
What’s different now is me.
