Page 36 of When We Had Forever
I’m floating. I’m flying. I’m coming apart in some unplanned way, and I chase the burning-down of myself until I become nothing but ashes.
When he finally pulls back, he says, “How was that? Sufficient?”
I almost toss back a flippant one-liner, but I don’t want to diminish the fact that I’m no longer the same person I was three minutes ago. “It was mind-blowing. My brain might be lying on the floor somewhere. I’ll have to go looking for it in a second.”
With a smile, he tucks my hair behind my ear, then pulls me from the couch and leads me to the bedroom, where, as promised, we go to bed without anyone’s underwear coming off.
The stardust remnants of the kiss still sizzle in my blood, though, and sleep hovers at arm’s length. I turn on my side, studying Michael’s face as he slips into slumber with his arm slung over my waist.
City-lit quiet floods the room. I marvel at what a single rise and fall of the sun can do. I’ve just moved in with a man I’ve known for a day, and not one single part of me wants to leave him tomorrow, even to go job hunting. Maybe I don’t want to leave him at all, which is possibly even more inconceivable than moving to Athens for no reason.
My future shears into halves: life if I go, life if I stay. Far-flung vistas and adventure, or scorching kisses and soul-nourishing conversation.
Not that Michael has so much as mentioned the possibility of me staying. But it’s creeping in already, tiptoeing through a back door in my mind, and I know that in thirty days, Iwillhave to choose.
Which means I can only leap, one way or the other, and pray I make the right choice.
BEFORE
I decide I must be dreaming.
Yet days pass, and I continue to awaken in a nineteenth-floor palace beside a man who does things no boyfriend has before.
Every morning, Michael brings me coffee in bed. Then we head to work—him to his swanky architectural job, me to a temporary assignment collating loan data for a company that buys and sells mortgages, which is just as boring as it sounds. But boring doesn’t matter, because in the evenings, we snuggle on the couch and watch campy horror movies other guys always made fun of me for adoring. Michael holds me close through all the tense parts, which he pretends is for my sake, but every time the villain pops out, he jumps, and I tease him relentlessly for it.
We kiss. We twine together in the orange dimness of the bedroom and talk until our eyelids get heavy.
We also don’t have sex. Which I love.
And hate. Mostly hate.
On weekends, Michael introduces me to a Washington I’ve never seen. We hike the majestic, up-and-down trails of Mount Rainier National Park while he teaches me to properly weight a pack and layer my clothing. We power up mountainsides, then lie in the sunshine and munch on dried fruit. Back at home, we curl on opposite ends of the couch, our freshly scrubbed feet touching while he reads his fifty pages and I write a travelogue about our hike.
One evening, Michael sets his book aside, then scoots around to my side and peeks at my computer screen. When I don’t flinch, he raises a golden eyebrow. “You don’t care if I read it?”
“No,” I say, more distracted by his nearness than anything else. I’m aching to kiss him, but if I do, this paragraph will never get finished.
“I thought writers were private about their work.”
“There’s not much I’m private about.” I gesture at my computer. “There’s not even a password on this thing.”
He snuggles closer, solid and tempting against my side. “So someone could just go poking through your email if they wanted?”
I chuckle. “There’s only one ‘someone’ in this condo, and he’s not pathetic enough to snoop.”
“True.” His gaze roves over my face. “I’d come up with something way more ingenious.”
For a moment, we just stay like that, until I close the computer and stash it behind a throw pillow. God, I could stare into his eyes for hours. It’s like floating in the ocean, except that I want to touch the ocean in extremely inappropriate ways.
He tucks a long strand of hair behind my ear. “No secrets, then?”
“Not here. What about you? Any closeted skeletons I should know about?”
He doesn’t blink. “Nothing I won’t tell you eventually.”
I pause, wondering what exactly that means, but in another moment, he’s kissing me. My arms wrap around him almost by themselves and, as predicted, the paragraph doesn’t get done.
Some nights, we stay up late and blare Journey from the living room speakers while dancing around in our underwear. When I confess my unrepentant love for kettle corn, Michael invests in a home popper and experiments until he discovers the exact ratio of brown sugar and butter that makes me moan.
