He ends a long, hot tangle of lips and tongues with a soft nip and a wicked smile. “Don’t let me drown, Diz.”
Before I can parse his meaning, he’s on his knees. We never got around to removing the grab bars in the shower when we bought this house. Now, as Tobin hikes my thigh across his broad shoulder, I swipe unseeingly for a bar and wonder if Mrs. Elias installed these because she was eighty, or because she was a genius.
Oh, his mouth. “Slower,” I tell him. I really want it faster, but what I want even more is to be in charge of the magic we’re making. Although “magic” isn’t the right word for this power between us, with his face between my legs and my sounds bouncing off the tile. Anyone could see how he enjoys doing this, but he can’t possibly take as much pleasure in it as I do, so it’s my spell and I’m going to speak it.
“S-slower,” I gasp, and it works again. My body arches, and wrenches; I can’t stop it and his eyes are fire, blue like the hottest kind of flame.
The next long, long, exquisitely leisurely move—I love him, I hate him—pulls me to the top and holds me there, suspended, until I tip into color and sound and light.
And Tobin.
Tobin with me, dragging brilliance from me one epoch at a time, a thousand years of pleasure with the slow violence of stars colliding.
“Okay,” I whisper, when it’s over.
I’ve forgotten there’s such a thing as quick and that he can bethat, too. He’s on his feet with my legs around his waist and my back against the wall so fast. So fast.
But when he nudges me where I’m soft and he’s hard, what he says is “Slow.” The word sounds like it hurts him, but he says it and he does it and he never takes his eyes from mine. His neck is corded with the effort of holding back, but he doesn’t let himself go even when I cling to him and shake all over again, lost.
The laugh bubbles up from some deep well that was dry, and now it’s in flood. “Tobin,” I hum, wrecked with the aftermath, my hands nudging grit from his back.
“What?” he asks, muscles motionless.
“Rip it.”
“Rip it.” He makes a sound, half laugh, half gasp. There’s nothing he doesn’t do gracefully, so it’s a miracle of motion how he pins me and holds me and keeps us tight, tight together, his body wrapped around mine as much as mine is around his. When he cries out, my name is dark and rough in his mouth.
After a time, he lifts me down. We hold each other, new and weak like baby animals, water cascading from one body to the other, until the spray goes cold.
Waking up in our bed is an odd homecoming, everything the same yet different.
The sheets smell like wind and sunshine and the morning version of Tobin, a healthy, outdoorsy man with the sweetness of sleep still on him.
My absence left a bigger mark here than my presence did. Five weeks was enough to erase the layered notes of my peach deodorant (nonnegotiable; all the others smell like bug spray) and volumizing styling products (totally negotiable; I adore pretty packaging and improbable hair promises). My pillow wasundented before Tobin wrapped me in a thick towel and led me, trembly kneed, to bed.
Early evening sun puts a soft touch on this still life: the afternoon-delight wreckage of the bed, the half-open door showing the empty side of the closet. The strangeness I felt last time I was in this bed is back, but this time the stranger isn’t Tobin. It’s me.
Tobin didn’t feel it, judging by the way he passed out hard with my head on his chest. The laws of nature clearly state, “Thou shalt not remain awake while entangled after sex,” so I didn’t have time to ponder, either.
But now, waking up alone among the familiar/unfamiliar humps of bedding, feeling the smug soreness of some truly gymnastic sex nestling against the uncertainty of having broken my no-sex rule.…
Not sleeping with him was a good rule, actually. We were making real progress, and I might have unraveled it all by listening to my vagina instead of my brain. And I know Isaidit was just this once, but that’s not the way Tobin’s gears turn. Especially after everything that went on with his dad. He’d rob a bank before he’d have sex outside a serious relationship, much to the dismay of West by North’s clients. When he and I got together, we slept in the same tent for weeks before he produced a strip of condoms, whispering my name like a question.
I just fell into bed with a man who considers sex more or less the equivalent of a blood oath. I didn’t think I was the kind of person who slept with someone, knowing they were in “yes, and” love with me, and I was in “yes, but” love with them.
He wanted this. I wanted this. We’re consenting adults. The part of my brain that’s telling me I’m an asshole can yeet itself into the sun, thank you very much.
Downstairs, Tobin’s moving around the kitchen the way hedoes when he’s trying to be quiet. A drawer opens and closes with meticulous slowness; a chopping board lands softly on the counter. The cooking music is just loud enough for me to catch snippets of Bruno Mars. He’s making dinner for two; I’d bet my life on it.
It’s almost like I still live here.
But I don’t.
Discomfort launches me out of bed. You can’t not rock out to “Uptown Funk”—another law of nature—so I boogie while rummaging for clean clothes. This evening’s look will be me going commando under out-of-season workout gear, right on the heels of The Great Commando Merman Incident.
It’s funny, but my laugh feels forced.
Olivia Rodrigo is how I figure it out. Tobin doesn’t like sad or angry songs, blaming his mom’s emo music binges whenever his parents split up.
