Sunny
Sun crept over my body, tickling my nose. I moaned into the slab of skin I was using as a pillow. “Nooo,” I cried. “Isaac, it’s morning, make it stop.”
“I don’t think the sun takes bribes,” he mumbled, “but if it’ll buy me some more naked time with you, I’ll see what I can do.”
Naked. Bodies. Orgasms. Really fucking filthy orgasms. The memory of last night washed over me. I’d had a lot of good sex in my lifetime, but being in bed with Isaac felt intuitive and thrilling in a way I didn’t know could exist. It was somehow satisfying, and left me greedily hungry for more at the same time.
I sat up, my hair tangled into a nest and the quilt draped across our hips. The room was already cozy, but the sun cast another layer of heat that was almost too warm.
Isaac groaned as I stood up from the bed and he rolled into the vacant space I’d left behind, as though he were absorbing me.
I checked the time on my phone. Oh, we had to go.
“Isaac,” I whispered into his ear, my breasts grazing his shoulder. “It’s time to get up. Checkout is in five minutes.”
“Tell them I’ll just buy the place if they let me sleep.”
“I don’t think you’re cut out for life as a hotelier,” I told him.
Both of our clothes were folded on the bench at the end of the bed where Isaac must have organized them at some point last night. I shimmied into my clothes as he slid out of bed and held his head in his hands. “This is so uncivilized.”
“Get dressed, Sad Boy,” I said and tossed him his clothes... minus his merino shirt, which he’d tucked into the complimentary laundry bag.
Before I slid my sweater over my head, my chest tightened as his warm fingers sank into my hips and he kissed a trail across my shoulder. “Let’s go home.”
Home.As though the mansion was both mine and his. More than just a grand staircase and hollowed out ceilings and slippery marble floors and cozy libraries and a cat-chewed recording studio. A building that had become a home only because we shared it. Together.
And the thought was so good it haunted me.
“Let’s go home,” I repeated back to him.
Isaac took my hand the moment the door closed behind us and then kissed my knuckles. I supposed if I was going to force Sad Boy to face the sun, the least I could do was hold his hand.
We left our key on the check-in desk and walked back to where we’d left the truck, which was comically close compared to how absolutely treacherous our journey by foot had felt yesterday.
The truck was frigid, like colder-than-a-porn-star-in-a-Titanic-spoof cold. Isaac patted the space next to him in the middle of the bench seat, which I would normally take without a second thought, but something had shifted last night.
This was more than roomies with bennies. This was intense and good and achy all at once.
I’d been with plenty of partners, all of them special in their own way—or at the very least memorable. But somehow, there had always been a disconnect between how they made my body feel and how they made my heart feel. But with Isaac, both of those things were in sync for the first time... ever. And that truth felt so rare and precious that if I even acknowledged its existence, it might just evaporate before my very eyes. Like we’d found some secret language only the two of us could speak, and it was perfect enough that I’d be willing to ruin every promise I’d ever made to myself about self-reliance, about commitment. To ignore the story I told myself about not needing love, not wanting love, because love meantstaying, and staying meant...
Endings.
Staying meant endings, because staying meant time, and time meant endings, and sure, not every ending was a fatal car crash after Christmas, but they allfeltlike that in the end. A breakup, a failed college semester, a friendship gone south—all of them were car crashes in their own way. And why would I choose to be in a car crash? Why wouldn’t I cut and run before the good thing inevitably went south?
For over the last decade, I’d had the freedom of being tetherless. I could be anyone. I could be with anyone. I could go anywhere I wanted, except home.
But that’s exactly where Isaac and I were going at this exact moment. Home.
I left the seat between us empty, and Isaac silently studied me for a moment before pulling out of the parking lot, mounds of snow on either side of us left behind by the plows.
Home.
And all the good and fuzzy feelings that had come with that word were changing, were growing prickles and burrs andscratching at me until I felt restless and a little desperate. Isaac and I didn’t have ahome, we couldn’t have a home, because if my home was with him, then that implied staying. That impliedending.
And I wouldn’t survive an ending with him. I couldn’t.
And withhome, and all the fraught inevitabilities home meant, with this thing between us that wouldn’t stop thing-ing—
