Page 156 of Wreckage and Rain

His hand finds the hem of the rugby shirt and slides under it, flat against my stomach. He doesn't go anywhere with it. He just holds it there, half asleep.

"I didn't take it this morning," I say.

He goes completely still, listening with his whole body.

"The pill. I didn't take it. I haven't decided anything yet. I just didn't take it, and I wanted to say it out loud and hear how it sounds."

"How does it sound," he says.

"Like the door we keep standing in front of."

He turns me to face him. The morning light is on his face. He isn't smiling. This is too big for the crooked corner.

"Say the rest," he says.

"I want to stop. I want to find out what happens. No schedule. No chart. Just stop closing the door and see who comes through it."

"Yeah." Soft. Almost wrecked. "Yeah, Summer."

He kisses me. He takes the rugby shirt off over my head and drops it off the side of the bed. The sheet slides down. He settles over me, up on his forearms, careful, and I open my legs around him.

"Nothing between us," he says, and he means it every way there is.

"Good," I say, and I pull him down to me.

He pushes in slow. I feel all of it. We've done this a thousand times. This is the first time it's ever meant this. We both know it. Neither of us says so, because saying it out loud would be too much.

He moves slow. He keeps his eyes on me. I hold his face. The light comes across the bed and onto the pillow. When I come it's quiet, my forehead against his jaw, my hands flat on his back. He follows a few strokes later, deep, his face in my neck, my name once, low and broken.

We lie there after, the sheet tangled, his hand coming to rest flat on my stomach like it already knows something it has no way of knowing.

"Whatever happens," he says.

"You and me," I say.

He kisses my hair.

The sun is all the way up now. Down the hall the cursor's still blinking after the line about how this isn't the end, it's the after. Up here it's just the two of us, the warm sheet, the door we left open, and the after that's only getting started.

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