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As waves of pleasure subside, Henry’s breathing goes ragged. “Where do you want me to come?”
“What?” I ask, dazed.
“Norah, where can I come?” Henry repeats, his voice firm, and I snap back into reality.
“I want you to come inside me,” I say with certainty, and the muscle in his jaw twitches.
His movements become more frantic, but he’s hitting exactly where I need him, and I start to feel the build again. I gasp as his release pulses inside me, and suddenly, I’m descending with him once more, this time violent, animalistic. Henry presses his forehead against mine as we both ride through the bliss. When it finally subsides, and we’re breathless and boneless, I slide off him, kissing him briefly before scooting off to the bathroom.
When I reemerge, Henry is lying down on the length of the couch. He raises his arms for me to come back to him, and I curl up into his sticky-sweet body, our noses pressed together. He grabs a blanket from the back of the couch and pulls it around us.
“I promise I usually have better endurance than that,” he laughs shakily.
“It worked for me,” I assure him.
“You just wreck me, Norah.”
Tell him, tell him, say it, idiot, my brain urges.
“I latke you,” I whisper, hating myself every time I can’t make the right word come out of my mouth.
“I’m so fucking in love with you,” he replies, and then he kisses me so slowly my whole body melts into him again.
When we come back up for air, Henry smiles, victorious. “I have to hand it to my old roommate, Nick. Sex on the couch is infinitely better than I gave him credit for.”
I roll my eyes and run my hand up his thigh, coming across the ridges of a scar. I trace the outline. It’s high enough that it’s in a spot I never could have seen in our childhood, but I know it. “When you biked on the ice?” I ask, and he nods. This feeling of knowing his body on so many levels is almost scary.
“This is good,” I say, maybe more for me than for him.
“Really good, Norah.” Henry holds my eyes for a moment longer until a chill runs up my spine. “Now what are your feelings on cake for breakfast?”
Chapter 24
We spend the next full day wrapped up in each other, eating leftovers from Ignoto and playing house in Henry’s luxurious apartment. When he asks me to spend a second night in a row, I don’t even hesitate.
I’ve never referred to sex as “making love” because it always felt cheesy, but we alternate between fucking and making love all over that apartment. In the bed, on the counter, up against the windows that overlook the city. The couch, the shower, the couch again. Until neither of us can walk, but somehow still can’t get enough of each other.
I only packed one spare outfit, assuming I would return home far sooner than either of us was ready to part, but it doesn’t matter because any of the limited times I’m wearing clothes, I just steal his. His boxers, his sweatshirt, his giant wool socks that come up to my midcalf.
On the third consecutive night, Henry swipes around on his phone, and groceries appear at his door in under an hour.
“It’s our third date,” he tells me as he unpacks a crown of broccoli, a vibrant green cabbage, a box of shiitake mushrooms. “I’d like to cook you dinner.”
“Does it really count as the third date if I never left?” I ask. “Isn’t this more like one extended date?
“We make the rules,” Henry says simply. “None of this is normal. On a third date I wouldn’t usually know all your childhood baggage.”
“Don’t forget my daddy issues,” I joke, glancing at the mirin in his hand. “The pork udon dish you promised me when we were back home?” I eye him, skeptical. “Is this your go-to move?”
Henry laughs, removing the last items from the bag, before folding it up and storing it away in a cabinet. “I do tend to cook on the third date. It gives us an opportunity to talk more. But the pork udon is just for you.”
I’m suddenly extremely grateful that we never kept kosher.
“How can I help?”
Henry puts me to work tearing the leaves off the head of cabbage as he grates ginger and separates the white and green parts of the scallions. He tells me to chop the cabbage and then immediately takes the knife away when he observes how I hold it. To be fair, I subsist mostly on takeout and Luisa’s generosity with groceries I help pay for. Henry and I maneuver around each other in the kitchen like a choreographed dance, like we’ve always done this, even though I never actually witnessed him cooking before the trip.
After the prep work is finished, he lifts me up and seats me on the counter. He gives me a kiss, then starts to heat a skillet on one burner and boil a pot of water on another.
