Chapter Fifteen
Never, not for a moment, did I stop to think that this was a mistake.
To abandon my life, to escape, to be here, to be here with him all felt incomparably right at the moment.
If only I could bottle up the rest of my days and trade them for these two weeks, I would be the happiest person in the world.
Yes, what wouldn’t I give to relive them over and over again, each slow morning, each intimate night, every conversation, every silence, every feeling.
The way he would fling an arm around my waist and pull me to his side in his sleep, or the way his pulse thrummed against my ear whenever I would lie with my head on his chest. But also our life at the cottage itself: creaky sun-scrubbed floorboards, smells of tobacco and strong velvet coffee, eating toasted bread with butter and jam, which we’d made with our own two hands the night before.
Textures of wool and cotton and the linen sheets we’d had to wash over and over again.
Sunrises on the beach and swimming in the ocean until our limbs were numb with cold.
Then going down on my knees and taking him in my mouth right after, his fingers threading through my hair, and his voice breaking into a moan.
“I want to taste it,” I told him the first time he asked me where to come, and his eyes rolled white with pleasure.
By the time we’d get into the shower, he’d want me again, his hands on my hips pulling me back to him.
“You are making me insane,” he would groan and then come deep inside me.
And I would smile to myself, half-delirious from the selfish human desire to be wanted so passionately you could drive someone mad from it.
At dinner, flurries of conversation: clashing of opinions, books we’d read and loved, recapitulations of our time together at RAM, those elevator rides we had both spent secretly wanting to do the most obscene things to each other but had opted for polite smiles and appropriate physical distance.
Other nights were filled with musings about the future. Things he wanted to do together, places he wanted to take me. These were always introduced by him, for I couldn’t even imagine a future where I would be returning to my old life.
I felt completely and irreversibly disconnected from anything related to reality. The apartment on Arcade Street, my job, my friends, the possibility of going back to the Center and saying what? Sorry I sort of freaked out the last time I was here. I just wasn’t feeling my best. Let’s try again?
No, I didn’t want to think about any of that.
So I always maneuvered the conversation back into the past. Anecdotes from his high school years, his first crush, his first kiss.
Never had a serious girlfriend, he said.
It had never felt quite right. And when I asked him if it felt right with me, he kissed me, long and deep, and told me that I should never learn just how right it was.
“Why shouldn’t I know?” I asked, laughing, satisfied even before knowing the answer.
We had just finished eating, and we were sitting on the floor before the fireplace, his face looking flushed and youthful in the golden radiance of the room.
“It will scare you away,” he said lightheartedly, but I could tell he really believed it.
Without looking away, I crawled over the rug to where he sat until I was kneeling upright between his parted legs. “I’m not that easily scared,” I told him, running my fingers through his hair.
Looking up at me, enthralled, he slipped a hand under the thin cotton of my nightgown and traced a whispering line from my thigh to the edge of my underwear. “You’d be terrified to know how much I want you,” he rasped.
He was only wearing a t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, and it was easy to pull down the elastic and take him in my hand. Squeezing him, I asked, “This much?”
He groaned, baring his throat at the ceiling. “More.”
I stroked him harder, and he fell back on the rug, breathing fast, his hips lifting to my touch.
“How about this much?”
“More,” he repeated, ecstatic, on the verge of release already.
Then before I could stop myself, I whispered, “What if something happens?”
Slowly, as if it required great physical effort, he rose to his elbows and looked at me. “Nothing will happen.”
I moved over him, covering his body with mine, my hand still between us, touching him. “What if I forget again?”
With an arm around my waist, he pulled me down next to him before rolling on top of me and pinning me to the floor, his hips pressing between my thighs, the tip of his cock resting under the hollow of my navel.
“Then I’ll remind you,” he said, lowering his mouth to my collarbone. “Again and again I’ll remind you.”
A hot, raw pressure built inside my throat, like wanting to cry, to scream, to articulate something inarticulable.
There were no words to define all that he was to me, how he made me feel about myself, about the world, about my place in it.
And so I uttered the closest thing there was. “I think I love you.”
Again he gazed at me, eyes dark and steady. “I’m certain I love you,” he said, and when he pulled my underwear aside and touched me, I cried out and told him we’re insane.
“We can’t be in love already.”
“No?” he hummed against my mouth, his fingers inside me moving so fast I could not only feel but also hear how wet he was making me. “Tell me who knows you better than I do.”
“Kai—”
“Tell me.”
“No one,” I breathed out, a pure, accepting feeling flooding my body. Every time he touched me was like that, so intimate I could almost recall everything that was lost from me.
Panting now, shaking with need, he asked me again, “Who else can make you feel like this?”
“No one,” I repeated faithfully and felt his other hand come around my throat, possessive, his thumb flicking up my jawbone.
With a low, ragged moan, he buried his face in my neck, his lips hot, confessing, “I’m only like this when I’m with you.”
“I know,” I whispered, because I did. Because our way of knowing and understanding each other entered a space beyond language and common sense.
Some nights, he let me do whatever I wanted with him, lying back on the bed while I sat on top of him, my hands on his chest or on the headboard if I was moving really fast. And if I told him how much I liked having him like this, I could make him come in a matter of moments, which made him feel embarrassed and me very powerful.
Like all the times he dragged me to the edge of the bed, got down on his knees, and buried his face between my thighs.
More than the act itself, more than the sensations of his mouth and tongue and his soft hair between my fingers, it was the idea of me being so comfortable and euphoric up on the bed while he was on his knees on the hard floor doing everything he could to pleasure me that brought me the greatest satisfaction.
Other times, he was the one with all the power, making me take it, making me tell him how much I liked it when he was like this with me. He would be kissing my neck, already panting after a few thrusts inside me, and then rasp in my ear,
“I want to feel you deeper. Is that okay?” And I would always mumble, “Yes. Please, yes,”
and he would turn me on my stomach and raise my hips the way he liked so that my knees were up against the mattress but not my hands.
Then he would curl his fingers into my hair and stretch back my neck, my throat coming flush with the pillow in a way that made it hard to breathe, which gave me an intense, out-of-body sense and made me come within seconds.
I realized that the level of satisfaction you experienced during sex was inextricably correlated with the amount of power you were willing to give to the other person.
And the way they handled this exchange told you everything you needed to know about them and the quality of the relationship you were building with them.
These were the moments Kai was most revealed to me, when he was too vulnerable for self-consciousness. In the pure honesty of his desires.
One night, with his face and neck still flushed from the things we’d done, he held me very close to him and asked, “Are you okay? Was that alright?”
“It was perfect,” I told him because it was, because he always asked for permission before doing something even if we’d done it before, because he always talked me through it, because there was no amount of passion that could erase his underlying tenderness. Because he was Kai.
“I really like that hair thing you do,” I admitted bashfully, my face half-buried in his shoulder.
“I know.”
“Oh, do you?”
Lips twitching as if he was trying not to laugh, he said, “Yeah, you always get really incoherent afterwards and sort of start to beg me for it.”
“Stop, that’s so embarrassing!” I squealed, squirming out of his arms only for him to grab me around the waist and pull me back to him.
“Nothing we do is embarrassing,” he reassured me, pressing a soft kiss to my temple. “Except for when you get on top of me and I come within minutes.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I guess you feel a bit bolder and talk a lot more during it. I’m not sure how to describe the feeling I get when I hear you say how much you like the things we do.”
“Yeah, I get what you mean,” I murmured, and we kissed for a while, slowly, baring all the tenderest parts of ourselves.
Afterwards, he would always get me into the shower and wash my hair because I’d be too tired to do it, and then we’d return to the living room to rekindle the fire and have a cup or two of hot chocolate.
We had started reading that collection of short stories together. One night he would read aloud, and the other I would. Needless to say, I liked the nights he read the best.
“You’re so much more expressive than I am,” I told him one time as we were settling down.
“You’re just too nervous,” he argued.
“Well, I don’t want to disappoint you.”