There’s just him behind me — one hand on my hip, one hand working my clit, his mouth at my shoulder — and me saying his name like it’s the only word I have left.
His grip tightens. His pace builds. Every thrust deeper than the last, every drag back somehow worse, and I am completely gone — no armor, no distance, no version of myself that keeps things manageable.
Just this. Just him. Just the specific wreckage of being known by someone who pays attention.
“Give me one more,” he says against the back of my neck.
I do.
It tears through me and I say his name broken and he holds me through every second of it.
He follows. Buries himself deep. A low wrecked sound dragged out of him against his will, hips jerking once, twice, then stilling.
For a second neither of us moves.
He lowers us down together, still inside me, both of us breathing too hard. He doesn’t pull away. He rolls us onto our sides instead, one arm hooked under me, the other pulling me back against his chest until there’s no space left to put between us.
I press my face into the couch cushion that smells like my apartment and my life and, now, faintly like him. His hand finds my hair— threads through it slow, working out a tangle he put there himself, in no hurry to stop. This is the part that gets me. Not that he’s an amazing lay. Not even the fact that it was him. This. The quiet after, and the fact that he’s still here for it.
“You have no idea what you do to me,” he says, low against my ear. Not a line. Just him saying a true thing quietly because that’s who he is.
I feel it go all the way through me.
“Canyon Bay,” I say eventually.
“Hm.”
“Eight months. My record.”
His hand keeps moving in my hair. Slow. Like he’s got time.
“Military kid. New base every two years.” I stare at the ceiling. “I got very good at being funny before anyone could decide theydidn’t want me around. Beat them to it. Make them laugh first and then at least you know where you stand.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just listens. The whole-body kind of listening.
“Canyon Bay is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I was eight years old.”
“How’s it feel.”
My mind goes immediately to Dina on my back steps every night. Eight months of showing up for something that won’t let me in and doing it anyway because apparently I don’t know how to stop.
“Terrifying,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. Just that. Like he understands from the inside of it. Like maybe he knows what it costs to keep showing up for something that doesn’t always show up back.
I don’t say anything else. I don’t have to.
He stays for chicken and pasta.
We eat at my counter because we’re apparently people who do that now. He eats and says it’s good and means it and I tell himabout Okinawa, Germany, the three Southern bases that blurred together.
“Did you ever go back?” he says.
“To which one.”
“Any of them.”
“No.”
