Things started going faster because I really wanted them too, and Levi was right there with me. We didn’t exactly turn into gymnasts but at one point he did do a flip, turning upside down so that he lay one way on the bed and I lay in the other. I was trying to give my full attention to his erection, which was impressive and made me feel more than slightly wild, but it was hard to focus when his face was also between my thighs. I losttrack of what I was doing as pleasure ran through my body until I trembled with it.
“Levi,” I said, and then everything seemed to stop, like time standing still for a moment, and I felt a giant wave of bliss.
“Let’s…ok…here,” I heard him gasping, and he flipped again so he could pull my hips back against his. He drove inside me. He massaged my breasts and then, when his hand went back between my legs, I started to shake again. I held his other arm like it anchored me, just in case I might have blasted off the planet in a rocket of pleasure, and both of us came.
Then we both breathed like we’d just won a race in a regatta, and he still held me tightly against his body. Gradually, we relaxed together. “Thank you,” I said, and he laughed quietly.
“Right back at you, doll,” he answered.
“If you really want me to move into your house, then I will. I would be happy to,” I told him.
“It was that good?” he asked, nuzzling my neck.
“No. I mean, yes, but it wouldn’t only be about easier access to your body,” I explained.
“I want us to live together because I love you,” he said. “I love you, so I want to be around you as much as I can. But this won’t turn into a five-year waiting game. I have a lot of plans.”
“Like what?”
“Like we’ll get married,” he said. “Like we’ll have a family of our own. I want my whole future to be you, Emerson.”
I thought about how to answer that and maybe I was quiet for too long.
“Isn’t that what you’re thinking?” he asked.
“I was thinking that I used to be exceptional. Not in a positive way,” I added. “I was stood out for not being able to fit in. I couldn’t make friends or make people love me, not even my cat.”
“I think that you’re exceptional in the most positive way, exceptionally amazing,” he said. “Coral loves you. I do. My family loves you, too. They all, individually and together, have told me that I better make this work. I haven’t been such a success, you know?”
“You’ve successfully been a good friend, a wonderful brother and son, and a person I admire very much. You’ve successfully made me love you, so much that I want my whole future to be you, too,” I answered.
“I don’t know what could be better,” Levi said. He kissed me again, and we were well on our way to finding out.
Epilogue
“No matter what, it doesn’t really matter.”
“I know,” Levi answered. “I know that.”
“Because it’s just a personal opinion,” I continued. “It’s only subjective ideas from someone who might have woken up with gum stuck in her hair, so she’s in a bad mood and lashed out.”
“And we know all about the gum problem,” he said, and then looked over at our son. Ice and peanut butter had saved Everett from scissors and a buzz cut, so his white blonde curls were still intact. He was also never allowed near Aunt Ava’s purse again.
“Es una cuestión de opinión,” Hernán chimed in. Everett sat on his lap and they were reading together from a book that our friend had also read to Lucía when she was a baby. It had been in one of the boxes that we’d carried out to his car when he’d moved to Las Vegas, but it had come back with him to Detroit in his suitcase so he could read with the little boy that he liked to call “mi nieto.”
“Es una cuestión de opinión,” I repeated. “Didn’t I just say that?”
“But you said it in English,” he reminded me, and that was true. I’d never progressed too far in speaking Spanish, but I did understand a whole lot more than I used to. “Everett, ¿qué es?” He pointed to a picture on the page.
“Oso,” my son said, and Levi grinned and bent to tickle him. All three of them laughed and then so did I. “Mama,” he said next, and reached out his arms for me.
I picked him up and we cuddled, and Levi got in on the action, too. Everett had been born twenty-one months before by emergency C-section after I’d gone into labor early, and my husband had been a rock for me until he’d first held our son in his arms. Then he’d lost it, and I had, too, and we’d been hugging a lot ever since. Not that Levi had ever stinted on affection, and that was just fine with me.
In fact, I was thinking about the physical contact we’d had last night, just the two of us. It had been without the usual protection. If we were lucky, Everett August would have a sibling, but we were in no rush. “We did so well the first time,” Levi had whispered while we’d watched our baby boy sleeping in his crib.
And I had always wanted siblings, people like Ava and Liv. Everett already had five amazing cousins, and one more on the way. Fortunately, both of my sisters-in-law had plenty of help, which Ava had agreed to accept. After her second shoulder surgery, she’d allowed that maybe she would let go of somethings and ask for a hand with others, because we all needed her in one, happy piece. But Levi and I also needed to step up and do our part in expanding the love in the Lassiter family. So the night before, I’d nodded and taken my husband’s hand, and once we were in our bedroom…
But for now, we had other things to deal with.
