Page 45 of The Drifter

"You feel⁠—"

"I know."

We stayed like that. I don't know how long. Full and still, forehead to forehead, her heartbeat all around me, mine hammering into her. It was the closest thing to arriving I have ever felt in a life spent leaving.

Then, I moved, and it was slow the way the tide is slow—too big to hurry.

Long, deep, dragging strokes, all the way out to the edge of her and all the way home. She met every one, her hips rolling up into mine, her hands sliding down my back to pull me deeper. We found a rhythm old as anything and kept it, unhurried, her breath and my breath, the wet sounds of us. I watched pleasure move across her face. When she got close again, I felt it before she said it—felt her start to tighten and gather. I changed the angle, ground up into her slow, and held her eyes.

"Stay with me," I said. "Right here. Let me watch."

She came apart with her eyes open.

That undid something in me. She clenched around me in long pulls, milking me, and I worked her through it, slow, slow. She was still shuddering when she wrapped her legs high around me and said, against my ear, raw:

"Don't hold back anymore. Please. I want all of it. Come inside me."

So, I gave her all of it.

I gathered her wrists in one hand, gentle as tack, and pinned them above her head—her eyes flared, and her whole body answered, arching. I drove into her, deep and hard and steady, the bed talking now, her cries climbing, her heels dug in, both of us past slow, past careful, down into the old country underneath.

She came once more, screaming it, and the grip of her pulled me over the edge behind her. I let her wrists go and got my arms under her and held her whole body to mine and buried myself deep and let go, pulsing hot into her, her name coming out of me like something torn loose. She held my head against her neck and took all of it, everything, all the way to empty.

Quiet, after.

Long, ringing quiet. Our breathing coming down in stages. Her fingers trailing up and down my spine like a woman reading. Me still inside her, neither of us in any hurry to end it, the sweat cooling on us, the harbor throwing its light around the ceiling.

"Well," she said, finally, into my hair.

"Yeah."

"I don't do this."

"I know you don't."

"I mean I have never—" she stopped, and I felt her decide not to build the wall. Felt it happen, right there under my hands. "Okay. Here's the truth. I made a promise to myself once. Standing in my own lobby. And you are currently lying on top of the wreckage of it."

I lifted my head and looked at her.

"What was the promise?"

She looked back at me a long time, her hand coming up to trace along my jaw. Whatever it was moved behind her eyes and stayed there.

"Ask me another day," she said.

I let it be. I know how to let a thing be.

She rolled us over and settled onto my chest with her ear over my heart. Her whole body went loose by degrees, the way a rope goes slack when the load comes off. The light moved on the water, and I lay in a bed I had no plans to leave with my hand moving slow in her hair.

I didn't think about the road once.

I noticed that later. Right then, I wasn't thinking at all.

13

SASHA

Iwoke up on him.