Page 37 of When We Had Forever
The first time it happens, he grins like a wolf. “I love that I just made that sound come out of your mouth. I can’t wait to take a stab at it without any food involved.”
I cram a fistful of popcorn into my mouth and waggle my eyebrows. “‘Take a stab’? Are you being punny right now?”
“Maybe.” He stalks across the kitchen and leans down to kiss me. Or pretends to. At the last second, he filches a piece of unchewed popcorn with his teeth.
“Hey!” I try to steal my treat back, but when that fails, I settle for retaliation. I surreptitiously fish an ice cube from the glass of Scotch he’s just finished, lean up for my own fake kiss, and drop the frigid chunk down the back of his shirt.
He leaps away, bellowing and laughing. Within minutes, we’re on the floor—concrete be damned—making out like teenagers, the popcorn forgotten.
Day by torturous day, I familiarize myself with every inch of Michael’s body, except those inches I crave the most. I feel him against me often enough to know he’s blessed in that department—becauseof coursehe is, he’s ridiculous, which would annoy me if I wasn’t so excited about it—but his fingers never stray past the waistband of my panties. He doesn’t even take off my bra. Instead, he makes it his mission to discover erogenous zones I didn’t know I had, sliding his lips along my rib cage, raking his fingernails over the tender expanse of my inner arm while exploring my mouth with his tongue.
I coil ever tighter. I’m like a tropical storm, spinning and swelling, drawing sustenance from the turquoise sea and yearning to make landfall, at which point I’ll probably explode with enough force to annihilate everything in sight.
One evening in bed, I gasp against his lips. “I’m pretty sure the whole building’s going to collapse when we finally get naked together. I’ve never wanted anyone so badly in my life.”
He chuckles. “Just the building? I’ll consider it a failure on my part if we don’t level this entire block.”
“Eleven days,” I say.
“Eleven days.” He dips his head to lap at the hollow of my neck, and I have to forcibly stop myself from tearing his boxers off.
A week later, we take a two-hour drive to a mountaintop observatory just to see what the night sky looks like beyond the bright dome of the city. Michael swings the Audi through one switchback curve after another and parks in the empty lot up top.
We emerge into the cool velvet evening. Overhead, some divine giant has sprayed frosty chips of crushed diamond across the sky with such enthusiasm that I can only stare upward, open-mouthed.
Michael cranes his head, too. We let glittering wonder flow into us. I feel simultaneously ageless and newly born, and utterly privileged to exist in a world that contains such majesty. In the darkness, Michael’s hand finds mine.
“Holy shit,” he says, after ten minutes of star-drenched silence. “There’s an entire philosophy written up there.”
My mouth curls. I love it when he gets reflective. “Really? And what’re you reading, up there in the sky?”
“A whole book. About how infinitesimal we are. But also about how we’re the exact opposite of tiny. I mean, think about it. No one else will ever experience this moment in this same way. Only you and me.” His thumb draws circles on the back of my hand. “No other two people, not in the whole endless life of the universe, will stand onthismountaintop onthisnight, seeingthesestars and holding each other’s hands. It’s a gift for us and no one else, ever. Which makes us anything but insignificant. It makes us infinite. It means we live entire lives full of moments that no other soul will experience. It makes usgiants.”
My attention veers from the sky to him. I would never have thought to look at it that way. Not in a million years. I stare up at his hopelessly beautiful face, my lips parted, my heart swelling to an impossible size.
And then, although I swear the moment can’t get any more perfect, it does.
“Mina...” In the starlight, his eyes turn warm and expansive. “I’m desperately in love with you. I want you to know that.”
“I’m desperately in love with you, too.”
That’s it. It’s just...easy. True. A statement of fact that surprises nobody.
On the way home, Michael holds my hand atop the gearshift. I study his profile, wondering if I can possibly board that plane in four days.
I can’t imagine it.
Not that this man is perfect. Nearly a month together has allowed me to ferret out some flaws, and in a way, Michael’s coworkers weren’t wrong. He’s never an asshole to me, but he does reserve his charm for the handful of people he finds engaging—me, the chess-whiz doorman in our building, his friend Ben from work, who I went to school with once upon a time and seems to be the only person at Forsythe & Winter Michael truly respects.
Others don’t get much from him. He’s briskly courteous in public, but his patience wears thin when people find themselves confused by situations that seem straightforward to him, like when the girl at the grocery store fumbles to make change or the barista on our block misspellsMinaasNemoand spends a good five minutes calling the name of a cartoon fish before we realize it’smyhazelnut latte that’s ready. Then, Michael’s words grow clipped enough that annoyance peeks through the polite facade.
He also doesn’t need nearly as much sleep as I do. He stays up late and wakes up early. On weekdays, he reads his fifty pages in the morning, which grants me some extra time, but the condo doesn’t offer enough in the way of sound dampening that I can continue to sleep while he clunks around making breakfast. So I nap after work. Otherwise, I’d fall to pieces, completely incapable of surviving on the five or six hours that somehow sustain him.
No one’s perfect, though, and I don’t expect even the incomparable Michael Drake to remake that rule. I actually like that he isn’t Prince Charming.
I’d be suspicious otherwise.
After getting home from the observatory, we take our usual places on the couch and sip wine in the dark.
