Chapter Thirty

 

Ezra

 

 

“Tell me about your first time.”

Kimba asks the question in the middle of the night. After we dragged our limp bodies from the mudroom and up the stairs, we stumbled into the guest bedroom and made love again, this time a slow, savoring union, commemorating what was the best sex of my life. I spoon her under the covers, pushing the damp hair, half straight, half coiled, away from her neck and ghost kisses over her soft skin. She presses her naked back into my chest.

“My first time?” I tighten my arms around her middle and spread my hand over her stomach. “It should have been with you.”

“Obviously.” She reaches back, scraping her nails through my hair. “But who was the little wench?”

I chuckle and push my knee into hers from behind. “Francesca Aldi. I was fifteen. She was sixteen. My first time. Not hers.”

“Where was it?”

“Rome. Her house. Her parents were away. She didn’t know it was my first time. I was too embarrassed to tell her.”

“Oh, Ezra.” Kimba turns to face me and rubs a thumb over my eyebrow and down my cheekbone. “I bet you were so dear.”

“I hope not.” I choke out a laugh.  “‘Dear’ is not what a guy wants to be his first time having sex.”

“How was it?”

“I remember feeling deflated. Disappointed, like everyone had played a trick on me—convinced me sex was this amazing thing I wouldn’t be able to get enough of. Don’t get me wrong. It did feel great. Better than my hand and a fistful of lotion.”

She snickers and pulls the comforter higher over our naked shoulders.

“But I always thought my first time would be fireworks.” I hesitate and then tell her the truth. “I guess I always thought my first time would be with you. I don’t think anyone could have lived up to that.”

She nods. “Same.”

“What about you? Who was it? Where? Was it good?”

I want to know everything all at once so I can stop thinking of her with anyone else.

“Terrell Anderson.” She chuckles. “It was a total cliché. Prom night my junior year. He was a senior and got us a room. I had to lie to my parents to stay out. Kayla covered for me and made sure I had condoms.”

“And was it good?”

She laughs, but it’s laced with regret. “I guess for him. Not for me. I was disappointed, too. Even more for how he acted after it was over.”

“What’d he do when it was over?”

“Another cliché.” She rolls onto her back and studies the ceiling. “He told all his friends he’d fucked Joseph Allen’s daughter.”

“Bastard,” I mutter, wishing I could find the piece of shit and tear him apart.

“Very much so. When I found out he’d told people, I confronted him and dumped his ass. He didn’t like that. I was a junior who should have been happy he’d deigned to take me to the prom, much less pay for a hotel room and dispose of my virginity.”

“What’d he do?” Because I can already tell he did something I’ll hate him even more for.

“He told me if I didn’t let him fuck me again and suck his dick this time, he’d post pictures of me in the cafeteria. Pictures he took while I was asleep. He even threatened to send them to my father.”

“Motherfucker. What’d you do?”

“What I always did with my problems.” She smiles sadly. “Went to my father.”

“You told him—”

“I told him everything. I always could.” Her naked shoulders gleam in the moonlight when she shrugs. “He told me not to worry. Said he would take care of it, and he did. I don’t know exactly how, but there were no photos and Terrell couldn’t even look me in the eye to the day he graduated.”

“I hope your dad did something incredibly painful that ruined his future.”

Kimba slants an amused glance to me. “He might have. Daddy did have his ruthless streak.”

I shake her playfully under the covers. “That’s where you get yours from.”

“Damn right.” She laughs but sobers after a moment. “Terrell ended up going to Morehouse. If I hadn’t known before that I didn’t want to go to Spelman, I knew then. I didn’t want to be that close, to run into him.”

“Did that idiot affect your decision not to go to Spelman?”

“Not just that, but it did kind of push me over the cliff I was already standing at the edge of. My family name, reputation here in this city, started feeling like an albatross. I wanted to set it aside for a little while and have a clean slate in a new place. Arizona gave me that.”

“That’s where you met Lennix Hunter?”

“Yes.” A wide, open smile touches her lips. “We were two peas in a pod from day one and have been best friends ever since.”

“Is it silly that I still get a little jealous hearing you call someone else your best friend?”

“Yeah, that’s really silly.” She throws her leg over mine and pulls me close until her breasts are crushed between our chests. “Because you should know by now that no one could take your particular place.”

I search under the covers for her hand, link our fingers. “I didn’t even know how much I missed you until I got you back.”

“I felt it at the funeral.” She breathes out a shaky laugh. “As soon as I saw you again, I knew it would be like this.”

“Is that why you shut me down?”

She gnaws at the corner of her lip. “When I saw Noah and Aiko, realized you had a family, knowing the pull I felt between us right away, I knew it would be too dangerous to stay in touch.”

“We’d been having problems even before that, and we’d gone to counseling, but I wonder if some part of me gave up after I saw you, hoping our lives might intersect again.”

I hate to even say that out loud. I hear how it sounds. It was a subconscious thought I’d never given voice to.

She’s quiet, running her fingers through my hair, soothing the turmoil that idea causes.

“Does it make you feel guilty?” she asks after a few quiet seconds.

I press my forehead to hers. “I don’t know what I feel, but it’s nothing related to regret. I did try, had been trying, but after that funeral… I knew why you didn’t give me your number. I felt it, too, that pull. I can’t even reduce it to just attraction. It feels like we were this one thing that was severed in half, and our parts want to be rejoined.”

Wow. That sounded intense.

“I mean—”

“Yes. That is how it feels,” she says.

We’ve only been back in each other’s lives for two weeks. We just made love. It’s too soon to say what I know is true. What has always, on some level, at least for me, been true.

I love her.

She might not call it that yet, and I won’t say it aloud, but I know it. We were born on the same day. I’m not overly religious, and I’m not sure what I believe about other lives, other worlds, and other dimensions. I do know if soul mates are real, Kimba is mine. I believe that if people are “created,” we were made together. She was there for my scaffolding—there when my flesh was knit over my bones. And if love is not just an emotion, but a type of eternity, an infinity that lives in our hearts, then we have always been in love. It’s an ageless thing that isn’t about puberty or chronology, or even if we get to live our lives together.

But when we are apart, I ache.

I can disguise it with friends, mute it with other women, distract myself with goals and dreams, but the truth remains. If I don’t have Kimba, there is a part of me missing. And as much as I tried with Aiko, as much as we’ve done together, built together, despite the beautiful boy we made together—she is not my soul mate. How could she be when there was Kimba?

“What if she’d said yes?” Kimba asks. “When you asked Aiko to marry you? What if you’d been married when we met again?”

“I would have been faithful to her,” I say without hesitation, with absolute conviction. “I wouldn’t have betrayed my vows or done anything to hurt Noah and Ko, but I would have hurt. Probably for the rest of my life, a part of me would always hurt wondering if I could have had you.”

Barely visible in the moonlight, on the cusp of dawn, she glances up at me through a fan of long lashes. “Who says you have me now?” she asks, her voice teasing, but I see the contentment in her eyes.

“I say I do.” I caress her hip, her back, her finely boned face. “And you have me if you want me.”

“You know I want you.” She reaches up to brush her fingers over my face, too. “I always have.”