There was a fine line between not enough sleep and just enough, but the chasm between just enough sleep and too much was depression. Mei knew this very well because she’d spent the last three years vacillating between all three. Sometimes, the sadness kept her awake until the wee hours of the morning. The nights she’d spent wide awake even as her brain and body were exhausted, when no amount of masturbation or counting down from one hundred would quiet her brain, were too many to count. And then there had been those nights when she stayed in bed for days at a time, only awake enough to go to the bathroom and cry, and sometimes not even that as the dehydration made her shrivel up physically and emotionally. Nights full of good sleep were, however, rare. But when she woke up in Miles’s arms, she realized that even her best night of sleep without him couldn’t compare. There was something about waking up in his arms that had always felt right.
They’d kicked off all the covers in the night, but she wasn’t cold with Miles covering her. He’d always been a hot sleeper and no down blanket could replace how good his body heat felt. His face was buried in her hair, and her spine tingled as his warm breath ghosted over her scalp.
She hadn’t woken up like this in years. She hadn’t felt so at peace since he asked for the divorce. His hand traced gentle circles around her belly button. The pressure of tears built at the back of her eyes while her core started to soften.
He moved his mouth to her shoulder and kissed her skin softly.
She didn’t mean to gasp; it had just been so long. Every touch, every kiss were jagged reminders of all the times he’d done those things before and just how long they’d been apart.
He shifted behind her, leaning on his right elbow to bend over her side, pressing his dick against her ass.
She closed her eyes quickly, and her next exhale came out as a moan. He kissed all over her shoulder as those fingers moved over the curve of her stomach. She lifted her left leg, giving him room to slide his knee under hers, planting his foot on the bed to hold her thighs open.
The length of his shaft settled against the seam of her ass cheeks and his fingers brushed the soft hair over her mound. They didn’t speak. A tear slid down the side of her face as he brushed her clit in soft, tight circles. She ripped her eyes open on one more groan.
He rubbed down her lips, relishing in their softness, and back again to her clit. Her eyes drifted closed slowly as she luxuriated in his gentle touch. Her body moved of its own accord and before she even realized it, Mei was using her right foot against the bed to shift her body up and down his dick.
“Yes,” she sighed as Miles’s blunt fingertips pressed at her entrance.
His fingers grazed her skin as he pushed one digit inside her to the second knuckle.
Mei tried to moan but couldn’t; there was no more air in her lungs, and she didn’t have enough wherewithal to remember how to breathe yet.
He pumped his finger inside of her in unhurried strokes, going deeper as her hips helped him along.
Mei grabbed her left breast, needing the dull pain of her own tight hold to ground her in her body because she was starting to float away.
She reached behind her back and wrapped her searching fingers around the head of his dick. His skin was hot. Precome pooled in the slit. She played with it on the head, used it to ease the palm of her hand around his shaft, stroked him slowly, awkwardly down to the base.
He grunted against her skin and moved the hand lying heavy and possessive over her waist, slapping his palm against her thigh.
She didn’t know how thin these walls were, but there was no way the entire hotel hadn’t heard that sharp crack. Or Mei’s loud cry as Miles rubbed the hot sting away. She managed a small handful of breaths before he pulled another shocked, greedy groan from her mouth as his fist wrapped around her inner thigh possessively.
She wanted to tell him he didn’t have the right to hold her like that anymore. That this kind of touch was reserved for her husband, but she’d never stopped thinking of him as such and she barely could force herself to breathe, let alone start another conversation about the state of their relationship, so she groaned again as he moved his hand behind her knee and lifted her leg.
“Yes,” she sighed, shivering at the delicious, burning stretch in her inner thighs as he pulled her legs open as wide as they could go.
“Stay here,” he whispered, his breath gently moving through her hair to caress her temple.
She had to let his shaft go to hold her leg up high; she wasn’t young enough to manage this on her own anymore. But they simply swapped places, and Miles grabbed the base of his dick with intention.
The wet tip dragged across her left ass cheek. She felt the bulbous head at her perineum and then his fingers were leaving her in an obscene squelch. But Miles would never leave her feeling empty for long. In one breath, his wet fingers left her; in another, the head of his dick slipped inside. She reached for his arm and squeezed as he sank in slow and steady while Mei struggled to breathe once more. His wet fingers stroked up her lips and started playing with her clit once again.
It wasn’t just good; it was earthshattering when his balls settled against her ass. Even when they’d been together, every time Miles pushed into her felt like it had been too long since the last time. Mei felt exposed in this position and it made her wetter. She felt every veiny inch of him as he pulled back slowly, then the room filled with the clap of skin against skin as he pounded back inside. Mei lost herself again in how good it felt to be with Miles, to have him fuck her just the way she liked, the exact way they’d learned together.
He pressed his mouth into the crook of her neck and she grabbed at the back of his head and they humped into each other like animals. When they were both covered in a thin film of sweat, Miles pushed Mei forward with his chest. Her pillow muffled her cries. His hands pressed into the mattress as he fucked down into her. She swore she heard him panting her name as he moaned into her ear.
* * *
It was electricity in the air.
That was what he used to say when people asked Miles how he knew Mei was the one. Every moment with her was crackling with tension. When they smiled at one another, when they fucked, when they sat on the couch watching cartoons, when they were about to fight. Every second with Mei was full of anticipation, electricity gathering in the atmosphere until they were ready to let it loose.
Miles was sitting shirtless at the foot of the bed, his pants on but unbuttoned, as he bent over to pull his socks onto his feet. He could have run out of the room half-naked and saved himself. He didn’t care what anyone in this hotel thought of him except for three people. In that moment, except for her.
“Tell me,” she demanded in a voice full of anger and hurt and hope. There was no question and no need to explain what she meant.
Miles could have feigned ignorance. He could have asked her to elaborate just to buy himself time. He didn’t.
“We can’t keep having the same conversation, Mei.”
She reached for a sweatshirt on a chair by the bed and pulled it over her body. His eyes focused on the name of their alma mater. He hadn’t seen that sweatshirt in years and just assumed it got lost in the move. He smiled, thinking how fitting it was that Mei had it all along.
She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You’re right, but since we’ve never had the damn conversation, we can do it once.”
She didn’t mean it like that, he knew, but it still made him shift his gaze away.
“Tell me,” she said again. “I deserve to know why you left me. It’s been three years, Miles.”
He shook his head, elbows on his knees. He dropped his head to his hands. He wanted to cry.
“Tell me,” she said one more time, “and set me free.”
It was the way her voice broke at the end. The shimmer of tears in her eyes when he looked up at her. The fact that it had been three years and they were both still right where they were the last time they were together. He’d never planned to leave, but she was supposed to move on. She was supposed to turn her anger into the impetus she needed to find somebody else. But he knew by the way she pushed her tongue into his mouth, the way her pussy opened for him, eager and wet, the way she’d yelled his name last night. This hadn’t been the plan.
“My dad was thirty-one when he died,” Miles said.
Mei flinched back. “I—”
He shook his head. He only wanted to do this once, and if she stopped him, he knew he wouldn’t make it.
“My dad was thirty-one when he died, and my mom said he was healthy right to the end. He went for his yearly physical, he played basketball, he ate alright, nothing wild. Then one day, he’s running for the fucking bus and has a heart attack. Apparently, heart disease runs in the family, but no one told him that.”
She opened her mouth to speak but shut it quickly.
“One day, I went to school and I had a dad, and the next time I went, I didn’t. Mom had a part-time job at the library and a son to raise on her own.”
The tears in Miles’s eyes stung as the pressure built and then finally spilled down his cheeks in pained rivers. Mei went from crystal clear and beautiful to blurry and beautiful.
“When I was a kid, I used to be excited about having a kid. A son. Miles Jefferson the Third.” Mei moved a hand over her mouth, and Miles finally wiped at his face. “I couldn’t wait to do all these things my dad did ‘cause I thought it would bring me closer to him. But that was all a fantasy, just the shit a little boy who missed his daddy made up as a coping mechanism. None of it was real. And then I met you.” Miles’s voice broke here, and Mei’s hand couldn’t hide her shocked smile.
“When I was with you, everything was real, and at first, that was great. We were together all the time, we were always in sync, and we met right after high school, just like my parents. Every minute we were together was amazing, exactly the kind of life I’d always dreamed about.
“But then, one day in my cubicle at work, I got short of breath, and my chest felt like there was an elephant sitting on it. I was alone in the office late into the night, doubled over in pain, no one around, and you across the Bay probably out with your friends, none the wiser. Thankfully, the janitor decided to look in the cubicles that night. He called an ambulance and the EMTs looked me over, but by then, I was fine. I felt fine. They told me I seemed okay but suggested I see my doctor. So I did.”
“Miles,” Mei said, the fear in her voice hardening to steel.
“I was sure the doctor was going to tell me I had a heart murmur or something. A blocked artery. He ran every test in the book, putting our health insurance to the test. It was like half a workday, and I had to wait a couple days to get back all the results.
“I decided we needed to divorce in those two days. I didn’t know much, but I knew I couldn’t have long left.” He sucked his teeth, searching for the right words. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘oh, I only have another year, let me wild out.’ It was that we were finally in the right financial position to have a kid but I’m not going to have time with them. Not as much as my dad had with me. I was gonna leave you to do all this on your own. We’d grown up together, grown together, and I was gonna leave you to do this hard ass job without me.”
“Was it heart disease?” Mei asked, grasping at straws.
Miles glanced up at her and looked away before shaking his head. “Panic attack.” He smiled sadly. “Probably from the stress of the job and our mortgage and the responsibilities of having kids. Probably a hundred other things I wasn’t even thinking about consciously, but my brain was worrying about all day, every day.”
Miles wiped angrily at his face before he met Mei’s eyes again. “My mom was three months pregnant when my dad died. She lost the baby. She had to grieve him and my little sister and raise me. She still had to raise me, and it was hard as fuck.
“She wasn’t proud and had no problem asking for help, and she needed it. Without my dad’s paycheck, she couldn’t afford rent. She couldn’t afford daycare. She had to get another job to scrape by, but we still had to live with my grandparents ‘til I was fourteen. She worked herself to the bone, and I was the only one who knew she cried herself to sleep at night for years after dad was gone.”
Miles’s eyes filled with more tears. “I don’t know if my dad would have done anything different if he knew what was coming, but I could. I didn’t know if I had a year or ten or fifty in those two days, but if there was even a chance that I was gonna leave you alone with a baby… I couldn’t do that to you, Mei. I couldn’t—”
“Get out.” Her voice was tight with anger.
Miles blinked up at her, trying to see her as clearly as possible. He couldn’t say he’d expected this kind of reaction when he told her because he had never planned to share this with Mei. He didn’t want to burden her with his sadness and grief on top of everything else.
But this wasn’t the response he’d expected. This wasn’t the Mei he knew.
“Mei?” he breathed, trying to focus on her through the tears veiling his eyesight.
She didn’t answer, only stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door in his face.
He knew he deserved far worse, but it still stung.