Page 101 of Resonance

“Well, I wasn’t gonna go all ten-dollar word on it, but yeah. Eclectic. Everywhere.”

“Huh.” He dug the base of his beer can in the sand and lowered flat on his back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I never thought about it that way. But I think I like that, actually.” He cut a narrow look at me from the corners of his eyes. “I thought I was the one who said the insightful shit.”

“I reckon we can share custody on occasion.” I set my can down, and Owen yelped as I spread my cool hand over his chest and leaned to brush a kiss over his lips. “Fact, you can keep the majority share, since my mind tends to go in uncivilized directions when you’re around.”

After the sun had sunk from the sky, we returned to the cottage, boiled shrimp, and ate until we damn near made ourselves sick. Then we lay in the hammock strung across the front porch, listening to the rush of waves and the chirp of crickets.

“I was pretty gung ho on figuring out if it was possible to fuck in a hammock, earlier.” Owen’s bare legs were tangled with mine, and the sag of the hammock pulled his weight further on top of me as he shifted closer. “But I’m getting the idea it’d be a lot more complicated in reality than it is in my head.”

“I think we’d have to think of it as more of a swing.”

“Like a sex swing?” His brows rose in a salacious arch, and I chuckled.

“Something like that, yeah.”

The intimation lingered between us, gathering momentum, becoming wisps of desire that would curl around us like smoke until it coalesced in fire. Minutes from now. Maybe a little longer. I could see it in the back of my mind: we’d start here but finish in bed, my head between his knees, my fingers and tongue inside him while he writhed and pulled the sheets. Those quiet gasps of sound he made that’d rise in volume to become a wail that would drive me out of my mind with lust. He’d make promises and demands in the same rush of breath, come with me buried deep in the heat of his body, fingers curled into the hair at my temples, mouth panting against mine. My entire field of vision nothing but his eyes.

“I like this, too, though.” Owen combed his fingertips through the whorls of hair on my chest. “I was thinking about how you said I belong everywhere. But that’s just my music.” He wiggled around until he could tilt his head back and gaze at me. “I belong to you.”

It satisfied some deeply possessive craving in me, and I couldn’t help the content rumble in my chest as he said it. Or the acknowledgment in kind I vocalized a second later. “We belong to each other.” I stilled his arm, outlining the splash of tattoos with the corner of my thumb. The hummingbird and the guitars. His grandfather’s pocket watch. A stargazer lily that reminded him of the bulbs his aunt once planted and that he waited for each spring because he found the smell so intoxicating but too brief. And beneath the elegant curve of petals, the fresh, stark ink of a record. The pale blue label was blank except for a tiny imprint of the year: 2018. He’d come home that day with the plastic wrap taped to his arm, shiny with ointment, and shyly exposed it to me as I stood in the kitchen cooking dinner. When I’d stopped what I was doing to pull him close and look at it, asking why there was nothing else written on it, his cheeks flushed pink, but the words left his lips with such conviction that I pulled him into my arms even as he was still speaking them.Because the music is still being written.

Owen’s fingers moved lightly over my collarbone before he buried his lips against my neck. “Thank you,” he said simply, and the warmth of his breath and his weight in my arms wrapped around my chest and held fast.

“You’re welcome,” I told him, and knew he heard it the same way I’d heard him. That behind the words, we were saying the same thing.