The way her hips rise to meet each thrust.
The heat between us building in layers, not spikes—a slow, rising burn that starts deep and spreads outward until my entire body is vibrating with it.
Her legs wrap around my waist.
Her heels press into my lower back, pulling me deeper, and the angle shifts and she gasps and her eyes finally flutter and I watch her fight to keep them open because we've made an unspoken agreement that this time we see each other.
All the way through.
My left hand finds hers on the pillow.
Our fingers lace together.
My bare ring finger against her knuckle—the place where the metal used to be.
She squeezes. I squeeze back.
And something cracks open in my chest that isn't grief.
It's the opposite of grief.
It's the thing that grows in the space grief leaves behind when it finally, finally loosens its hold.
The pace builds.
Not from urgency but from inevitability—the way a wave builds, the way a storm gathers, the way two bodies moving together create a momentum that takes on its own life.
Deeper. Harder.
Her moans rising in pitch, her body tightening around me in pulses that tell me she's close.
I'm close.
The heat is everywhere—in my spine, in my hands, in the place where we're joined, in the tears I can feel on my face that I didn't notice starting.
"Stay with me." Her voice. Broken. Beautiful. Her eyes on mine, wet, wide open. "Don't close your eyes. Stay with me."
I stay.
She comes first.
I watch it happen—the way her face transforms, the tension gathering and then releasing in a wave that passes through her whole body.
Her back arches. Her hand crushes mine.
Her mouth opens and my name comes out of her like something sacred and shattered and I feel her pulsing around me, clenching, the rhythmic grip of a woman coming undone—and I break.
I come inside her with my eyes open, looking at her, seeing her.
The release tears through me—deep, wrenching, the kind of orgasm that starts in the body and finishes in the soul.
I bury myself as deep as I can go and hold there, shaking, pouring everything I have into her—the grief, the love, the years of silence, the choice I made this morning on a bed in early light to take off a ring and let myself live again.
We don't move for a long time.
I'm still inside her, softening, our bodies cooling in the morning air.
Her head on the pillow, her hair fanned around her.
