Page 90 of Goode Vibrations

I ached within her. Didn’t need to say it back. That’s not how it works. You say it when you mean it. When it emerges from you unbidden.

She rolled back, and then I ached to be deeper, and she sobbed again, laughing still as well, and then we were moving together, me sliding in, deeper and deeper, and my groan was her breath, mouth shuddering on mouth. Each movement was slow, feeling each other, taking this as a measured experiment of what it was to make love. She clung to me and let herself sob out loud each time I drove into her, and I heard my own groans become broken as our hips met, as I delved into the deepest part of her.

It wasn’t long.

It didn’t matter.

It was us, expressing love.

Climax was a combined eruption, more of half-sobbed sighs than of screams, of whispered benedictions of gasped names than of growled expletives.

15

Them

Body on body in the moonlight. The lake wrapped warm around us, enveloping us as we swam, splashed, laughed, naked together. Dove down into darkness and found each other, skin on skin, twisting and rising as one.

There was only we.

Dawn met us as we lay wrapped in a blanket on the porch, sharing a single chair, sipping from a single tin mug. Sated for the moment, we luxuriated in the feel of flesh and warmth of togetherness, sunrise staining the treetops pink and then the sky above salmon-orange and then the lake a brightening molten gradient of pink-to-scarlet.

He carriedme inside once the sun had risen, and we ate a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast cooked over an open flame, and he wore only a pair of what he called “stubbies,” and I stayed wrapped in his fleece blanket, which now held so many memories of us in its soft pilled surface. More coffee, and I lay on the bed with my head on his thighs as he read aloud to me from a book of classic fables he’d found on the mantel above the fireplace. The fire had melted to glowing coals by the time we drowsed, with the sun fully breaching the windows, bathing us in stunning yellow light.

I fell asleep to the sound of his voice reading to me, the soft gentle hum in his chest and that delicious accent I never tired of hearing.

He began to drowse and I half woke to feel him set the book on the floor and slide down and now it was my turn to hold him—I cradled his head against my breasts and felt his breath on my skin and knew he heard and felt my heartbeat lulling him to sleep in my arms.

We slept longer than I think I’ve ever slept in my life, till the sun was orange again.

He went outside and turned on the generator, and a few minutes later the narrow, cramped shower in the bathroom was wreathed in steam, and even though it was so small it barely fit me let alone us, we took turns scrubbing ourselves clean in the iron-tang of the well water.

I left my hair wet, only taking the time run a brush through the snarls, and then he took over, sitting behind me, his legs around my hips, brushing my hair. I remember him telling me how he’d done this for his mother, and I felt him connecting to that past, felt him let it wash through him, heard him breathing hard and sniffing, and gave him space to feel it and as he brushed and brushed my hair till it shone, I felt him mourning for the first time and in so doing letting the memory and the pain become less intertwined.

I lay back against his chest, removed the brush from his hands. His chin rested on my shoulder, and I twisted until I could kiss him. I tasted salt once more, and his willingness to let me see it, feel it, taste it, to let me know the depth of his sorrow made me love him so much my heart wanted to expand past the confines of my chest, and I could only show him by kissing him, clinging to him, lying on his body, my back to his front.

He shifted and shimmied, and he was naked under me. I reached up, behind my head, clutched at his neck, his head. His hands scoured my belly, cradled my breasts, and I felt him angling hard and thick against me.

“I have to get a—”

“I don’t care.”

I grasped him, took him into me.

“Poppy…” he whispered, shattered to be bare inside me.

“We’re covered, “ I whispered back. “Birth control.”

“I’ve never felt anything like this before,” he growled, desperate, wild.

“Me either.”

“It feels too good,” he murmured, breathless, forcing himself to move as slowly as possible, sliding into me millimeter by millimeter, savoring the enrapturing ecstasy of bare unity, skin on skin, flesh within flesh and nothing else between.

“So good,” I breathed. “Too good. I want it to last forever.”

“We have forever.”

His palm caressed my breast, thumbed the nipple and the piercing until I ached and mewled, and the fingers of his other hand slid over my tender swollen aching center and I didn’t need the help, feeling him like this was more than enough, was more than everything, but the added rough brush of his fingertips over me took me to heaven, to climax and beyond within seconds, to a place beyond climax where even screams couldn’t express the full shattering nirvana of this, with him.