Dr. Allen is doing her thing, making me look into her instruments and click my remote when I see the wiggling lines, measuring with her string.
“How’s therapy?” she asks.
“I changed therapists, and I’m working with Allie Gould. She took me out in a trainer car yesterday to learn how to use the extended mirrors.”
“You’re going for a daylight license?”
“Yeah, I am.”
She sets down her ophthalmoscope after testing the movements of my eyes. “I think that’s great. Allie’s good.”
“She is. She likes going where I am. She set up software and headphones and a mic for me at work, and she spent a couple hours with the lab tech to learn about the ESEM so she can think about how my bench work would be adapted, if I would need it.”
“That sounds like Allie.”
Dr. Allen looks at me for a moment. “Look, Evan told us in a chart review for you that he excused himself as your OT. You two developed feelings for each other?”
“Yes.”
She looks like she wants to say something, so I give her the permission she needs. “He was always totally professional.”
“I know that. He did everything like he was supposed to, it’s just that I know what he was thinking, and I’d like to ask you your perspective if you’d like to talk about it.”
Not really. I don’t really want to talk about it. Evan and I haven’t talked about it, what I saw on his skin, that C had shown me in pieces. He did everything like he was supposed to except say, that day in my office when he discovered I was Lincoln—I took these pictures.
Which, of course, meant I should be able to say I’ve seen this tattoo, though that choked and lodged inside my throat.
Before, it seemed like the only thing unspoken between us was a kiss.
Now it’s two whole other people who are supposed to be strangers.
“I guess,” I hedge, “I don’t have a perspective, not yet, it’s new.”
“Look, I probably shouldn’t say anything at all, it’s just that you’re special. You’re a special woman. Now, I know Evan, and he’s special, too, and I don’t actually have any theoretical reservations, but you’ve had the most dramatic few months I can imagine.”
I laugh, kind of. “I can. Imagine I mean. And the thing is, with Evan, there isn’t anything to worry about.”
Which feels empty, in my mouth, to say.
We have C and Lincoln to worry about.
“Will you—talk to me about it? If you need to? I don’t want to presume, but you and I? We’re in it for the long haul. Or, at least I am.”
Oh. I feel the tears.
I never had any reason to sit at home in the dark, I’m finding.
None.
None.
Evan Carlisle-Ford, in particular. In my confusion since our afternoon together, I looked him up in the campus directory, looking for little pieces to put together. Obviously, he didn’t use the hyphenate of his name at work, or maybe he didn’t use his given first name with his family. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have enough to put together from the beginning, not enough data.
I wondered if I had all the data now.
I had this hypothesis, about love, about living, but I wasn’t sure how it would be proven.
“Jenny?”
“Yeah?”
Dr. Allen sits down across from me, puts down my chart between us.
“We need to talk.”
* * *
I listened.
Asked questions.
Looked at Dr. Allen’s numbers.
Just rough percentages, she said, but too much loss of peripheral than she is comfortable with inside the time frame.
Answered her questions about my functionality.
Discussed therapy, again, my wholehearted participation in it.
She smiled at me and gave me a hug.
I hugged her back, just like I always do, tight, with my whole heart in it.
It’s snowing and the sky’s dark with it. The flakes are tiny, and coming down fast, the kind of snow that will drift in huge piles. I’m starting to get a sense of the snow, a crash course in it. I’m starting to be able to look at a snowflake and see the snowfall.
The snow that had been so pretty last week, that had been such a pretty backdrop to my shopping, to desperate kissing, had given over to intermittent storms.
Tomorrow, the city will be a mess. Children’s schools will close, or be delayed, traffic will slip and slide over the freeways. If it’s still snowing like this, the plows might even wait it out, conserve their salt and their gasoline until it lets up, until the sun breaks and gives the dark asphalt a chance to help them out.
It feels good, out here in the snow, the air cold enough to break open my lungs and let me breathe. There is never anyone in this courtyard, and there hasn’t been anyone here since it started snowing, most everyone has left for the winter break—no footprints.
Just the white blanket over everything.
Covering everything up.
I want to mess it up.
I want it to look dirty and gray and salted and torn.
I want the red bricks to show through and the black ice to take over.
I want it to look as awful as it really is.
I start on the outside edge of the courtyard, and drag my boots as I go, sliding in the ice that never fully melted underneath. I keep walking, like I’m doing one of those meditation labyrinths my mom always took me to, a maze, except with no dead ends, outlined in pebbles in some beautiful garden, something that was supposed to remind you of the path of life, of its twists and turns and continuity or some fucking-stupid bullshit.
Because this isn’t twists and turns, this is skidding and ugly and my feet catching in bricks and the falling snow covering my progress before I am even close to the middle.
I’m not meditating, I’m falling, and getting up and I’m sobbing, right out here in this fucking-stupid empty courtyard and my rough sobs echo off the brick walls all around me, and there is something about that, anyway, about the sound of my ugly crying bouncing around while I fall and kick and skid in this fucking-stupid snow that is right, finally.
The whole world should feel how dumb this snow is, how it covers everything up, how you can’t fucking see anything, how cold it is, how it stops everything, keeps people from living their lives, going to school, going to work, how it can hurt people.
I kick, and I cry, and I even run, my circles smaller and smaller, and then I fall again, a really hard fall, on my side, it takes me right out, shocking me with a whomp of pain and a sudden loss of control.
I’m breathing hard, and my whole side is throbbing, so I just curl up, right where I am, wrapped up in my giant green coat, on the ground, in the middle of the courtyard, and I listen to myself cry and cry, hoarse and loud in the empty courtyard, the snow and crumbled ice painful against my face, the bricks hard and cold against my hip.
And then I’m not alone.
I can barely see him, my eyes so swollen and streaming, and I can’t even process that he’s here, anyway, on the ground next to me, pulling me into his stupid arms, pulling me close to his body and scooting a leg under my hip so I’m not really on the ground anymore.
It’s awkward, and our scraping and hitching and scrabbling against the ground and the broken-up ice is loud, but then, it’s just Evan, all around me, tight and warm.
On the ground, in the courtyard, the snow coming down on us like it means to cover us up in a drift.
I don’t stop crying.
I can’t, I can’t.
But every time I hunch around another sob, he pulls me tighter, and now he’s rocking me, rocking me in his arms, on the ground, the ground I kicked and ruined, and I can feel snow landing in my ear, but nowhere else, because he’s holding me so close to his body, away from the elements.
“Shhh,” he breathes, but I can tell he doesn’t really mean it, it’s just something you say to someone you find weeping on the ground in the middle of a snowstorm. He actually means I can cry as long as I need to, and he’ll weather it with me, right here, right where he found me.
Right where I’m at.
“Shhh,” he says again, and I’m crying so much into his neck and shoulder, it’s wet, and when I try to mop him with my mitten, he stops me and pulls us up to sitting, and hauls me into his lap, my head under his chin.
“You didn’t fasten your coat.”
“I saw you through my office window.”
“Oh.”
“I was taking my coat off, watching the snow, and saw you fall.”
“Okay.”
I can’t seem to say more than inane things, but he just holds me, still rocking, doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t start conversation.
We haven’t had a real conversation since we met at the coffee shop. He’s checked in, wanted to meet and talk.
I’ve told him I need to think.
He’s let me think, which means I’ve kept his secret, too.
Now he’s here, and right now I don’t care what’s between us, what’s underneath, not when I need to be held by someone who’s already seen me cry.
I can hear wind rushing through the gaps between the big campus buildings, and the hum of HVAC systems trying to keep up against the cold.
Evan’s breath against my ear.
The crunch of his sneaker against a chunk of ice as he sways with me in his arms.
My arms are folded between us, and finally, I push a little and he loosens his hold around me.
His face is reddened from the cold, his hair has blown everywhere, wet with snow and melting snow.
His eyes look so blue.
His dark brows are all wrinkled up, all worried, and I pull off my mitten, and I put my hand over his forehead. His skin is so cold, my hand is warm, and he closes his eyes while I press away his worry.
I drag my hand down over his jaw, his stubble is soft, long.
I watch my fingers rub over his lips, and he watches me.
I push my first finger against his lower lip, and he opens his mouth, draws in my finger, sucks, and then I close my eyes. It feels more intimate than sexy though it’s a little sexy. I scrape along his bottom teeth as I pull my finger away.
His hands are cold as he traces over my cheeks, and it feels perfect where the tears have burned. He cups my whole face in his hands, and his cold palms make me blow out a breath with the relief of physical comfort.
His hands gradually warm against me, and he pulls off my hat, and the cold wind over my sweaty hair feels good, too.
Evan scrapes my hair away from my face, breaking up the damp clumps, then twists my hair at my nape.
He slides my hat back on.
His mouth is warm and tastes like he has just eaten a mint, sugary.
I grab his face, scratch through his stubble with my nails and open to him. He’s a little too gentle, so I rake into his hair, fist the cool wetness of it, angle him over me.
“Jenny,” he kisses my top lip, my jaw, pulls apart my coat and kisses my neck, “will you tell me?”
“No,” I say. “Not now.”
I kiss his neck, his Adam’s apple, lick the hollow in his throat. I can’t hear him over the wind, the fans in the HVACs, but I feel his groan.
Then he holds my head still, and his kiss is deep, slow, his breath hard through his nose, and everything goes hot over my skin and the way the snow is touching us, dripping from our hair and skin as it melts, just serves as a contrast to this warm kiss, how it makes my blood rush in a scald over my chest.
He uses his kiss to coax me up, his arms under my coat and around my middle, until we’re standing, and he’s kissing my neck, letting us breathe.
“Does anything hurt?” He runs his hands over the side of my body that hit the ground. I hiss when he presses over my thigh, right under my hip.
When he softly touches the area again, I look down. He’s brushing handfuls of eiderdown off his hand, the wind picks up the tiny feathers and mixes them with the snow.
The ice and brick tore right through the coat my mother sent me, and it’s ruined.
“You’ve torn through your jeans, too,” he says, and shows me the bloody rip. “Come on”—he grabs my hand—“let’s get you cleaned up.”
I follow him.
The courtyard is a mess, and we pick through the chunks and patches of ice I exposed out from underneath the pretty snow.
* * *
I don’t let him treat me like a child.
I take off my coat, keeping the torn side up so it doesn’t spill too many feathers in his office. Then I untie my boots and put them carefully in a plastic boot tray he has under his coatrack.
Without looking at him, I unsnap my jeans and shimmy them off, easing them over the scrape, then I fold my jeans and put them on a chair.
Evan has taken off his coat and pulled out a first-aid kit. “Can you hand me an antiseptic wipe?”
Our eyes meet. He looks tired, his hair sticking up everywhere from the snow and my hands. His gaze drops over my side. I must look ridiculous, standing in his office in my sweater and flowered underpants and wool hiking knee-highs.
“Let me.” He looks back to his kit, pulling out the wipes, his eyebrows worried.
He sits in the chair next to where I am standing and tears open a wipe. The scrape is surprisingly deep for how many clothes were over my skin. I think a brick must have torn open my coat on the way down.
He starts at the edges, scrubbing away where the blood has dried. Then opens another and gently drags it through the raggedy grooves. My eyes water, it stings, but then he takes ahold of my thigh with his hand—I must have flinched—and his fingers are resting on my inner thigh.
Now nothing hurts.
He finishes cleaning it, takes his hands away to get gauze and tape.
“No, that’s okay, don’t dress it. It’s not bleeding anymore.”
He looks up at me. “Neosporin?”
“Okay.”
When he holds on to my thigh again, I close my eyes. I want to move my hips, or I want his hand to move. He swipes the ointment over the scrape but doesn’t take his hand away from my thigh. So I reach down and put my hand over his, guide his hand a few inches higher, then let go.
He rests his head against my stomach. “Jenny?”
“Just touch me. Okay?” I put a hand in his hair and ignore the way my throat feels like I should cry. I don’t want to cry.
I want Evan to touch me in that way he has, like he doesn’t believe he actually has permission but is so glad to be granted it.
He hikes my sweater and T-shirt up to rest his face against my skin. I step closer, and he opens his legs so I can stand between them. I jump a little when he kisses me over my navel, but then his hand soothes over my whole stomach, pushing into my skin, over my hip. He hooks a finger into the waistband of my underwear, and scootches it down over my hips, over my bottom, but no more.
His hands move over all the exposed skin, over and over. My waist, my hips, my stomach, the fronts of my thighs. At first, it’s strange. I’m standing in his office, my sweater hiked up, my underwear bunched down, and nothing’s happening but his hands playing over me.
I sift through his hair as it dries in the heat of his office. Touch the wrinkles in his brow. Follow the whorls in his ears. When I do that, he closes his eyes, so I do it over and over until his cheeks are pink.
On a pass over the hill of my lower belly, he brushes over the thin cotton of my underwear between my legs. Looks at me.
I’m not sure what he sees in my face, but then he starts kissing me right at the edge of where my underwear is rolled down, and his hands, warm, shape my ass again and again until my underwear is easing off, until it’s hardly hanging on and he slides it off with one of his long, slow, touches.
He brushes his fingers over my curls there, and I suddenly feel a blush start, over my neck and into my face, and I can’t help it, I reach and grab onto his hand like I would stop him.
I need him.
I’m not certain if I want him yet, there is so much we haven’t said. More we haven’t seen.
But I need him. I need the Evan who made me see with my eyes closed and knows that I cry. The one who lay down with me in a courtyard and hasn’t asked why. I need the one who fired himself just so he could touch me, knowing perfectly well that I’m actually just fine without him.
I need to tell him one thing first, ask him another.
I sit in a chair right next to him, so I don’t feel so exposed, bottomless, standing in front of him.
“What does f/16 mean?”
He stills. I look at him, and his expression is hard to take in—his eyes are searching mine, his mouth his tight, his eyes shiny.
“I knew before,” I say. “From in the van. You saw the pictures on my desk. You didn’t say.”
He lets out a breath, loud, and looks down. “I’m sorry, I—”
“You were always completely honest with me. I trusted you with things I didn’t trust anyone else with.” I make myself breathe.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say, “I didn’t tell you, as soon as I saw, in the van, but I didn’t even have the words. Then, today, I got bad news from Dr. Allen, about my peripheral loss, and all I wanted was you.” Hearing myself say that, my throat closes, choking, and his fists tighten.
“Not therapy, Evan, but you. The way you always see me as smart and capable. How I can relax around you and just feel the way I’m feeling, but I couldn’t go to you because you didn’t say; you kissed me, the very first time you kissed me, and you knew, but you didn’t say.”
“I was—when I saw those pictures and realized what it meant, God, Jenny. I was so happy. I’ve loved talking to you online, the serendipity of it, the things you said about my pictures, and more and more, I realized Lincoln was a real woman, of course I knew that, but she was starting to live outside of my own mind. I respected her boundaries, of course, but I wanted to know her.”
“What about me?”
“Then there was you. I told you about you. You were real as soon as you walked into my office, so intelligent and angry. More and more, you made Lincoln less real, and that worried me. I had a relationship with her that had started to mean something to me. It’s why I wanted to meet her. Needed to meet Lincoln. I had been working through my feelings with you for longer, trying to be honest with myself, then I met Lincoln online. It was confusing. Absolutely everything I was feeling. Meeting Lincoln was important to understand how I felt about both of you. When I saw the picture on your desk, it was the worst best thing. Some kind of miracle answer to my problem. But impossible, because how could you trust such an unbelievable coincidence?”
“I sent you my picture! I told you my name! And you knew and sent me bits and pieces.”
“I thought—”
“What?” What, exactly, what. I want him to tell me. This incredible convergence of the university, our landlord’s contract with them, a Christmas letter, my love of pictures, out of all that, what?
I needed him to tell me.
“I remembered, through all of this, when I was moving out, that the landlord had told me a woman from Seattle, a postdoc, was moving in. I thought of all the times, if I had some reason to look at the contact sheet in your chart, that I would’ve found out that way. Always, always, we were drifting together, always, I was getting to know you more, falling for you. I just thought. I don’t know. I thought, when I saw that picture on your desk, realized you wouldn’t believe in it. Believe or trust in me.”
“What?” I whisper. He touches my hair, but just the long ends over my shoulder, not looking at me.
“I could hardly believe any of it myself. We had just agreed to meet, finally, I had wanted to meet you after the first time we chatted online. Already, I was nervous about meeting Lincoln because of the—intimacy,” he whispered this, and a flush rose from his throat.
He touched the hair on my shoulder again. “I had come to your office to tell you how I felt about you; meanwhile, I had all these feelings about Lincoln, and like I said, Lincoln was real to me, even though we hadn’t met. I’d been so confused, you have to understand, just fucking off my pins.
“Then I picked up that picture, and this will sound totally stupid, but it felt like Christmas.” Evan dragged a hand over his face. His almost smile was back, but his eyes were wrecked, looking over my face desperately.
My hip, where I fell, throbbed. The chair was hard and cold against my bottom, my thighs. My heart was beating fast while my blood fizzed through it, on the edge of making me feel like I might float away from my body.
“I thought,” Evan said, his voice rough, “you wouldn’t believe in all of this, how could you? I barely could. I walked out of your office feeling like I was carrying some kind of, I don’t know, it sounds so fucking stupid, but magic around, and you’re a scientist, and so unbelievably smart, I was just worried that you’d think I arranged it or something, like I was creepy, pathological, even. Can you imagine? By the way, this picture, I took this and we’ve been cybering for weeks and I just so happen to also be the slob that is firing himself for wanting to kiss you? There was no way you’d think that was real.”
I take his arm, and he stops. I’ve seen him patient, with me, with himself. I’ve seen him search, so many times, for what to say or do next. I hadn’t seen this.
This tangle of fear in the face of something he wanted that had become precarious.
It’s not something that I think I could have seen before.
But I get it now.
I get the lack of trust, the sense that what you want is a moving target, the grief of disbelief that losing yourself is possible when you were doing so well.
He looks at me. “I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose you if I told you this crazy story. If I told you right then, or if I sent you a picture of me, just me, in return for yours. I was completely positive that you would freak out, I had worked out all the reasons you probably would in my mind. Then, after you sent me that picture of yourself, and I was dumb and sent those macros of me, you, well. You broke up with me. With C. Of course you did. It was all the biggest possible mess, and at the coffe shop that day, I hadn’t planned the kissing, I promised myself none of that until I told you, and then we were kissing, and the last thing my brain or body wanted was to watch your light go out like I watched Lincoln’s go dark. I had decided I would meet you, like we’d planned, on Christmas Eve’s Eve and hope, hope it would be okay and you wouldn’t just walk out.”
My throat’s tight, my heart stopped, my eyes burning, and I don’t even know there are tears until he’s holding my face, rubbing them away.
But I don’t want that.
I turn my face away.
It’s not that I believe in magic, my work is concerned with the observable world, after all, it’s that I’ve always been able to see the convergences of things, the complexity of systems that pile together and behave like magic.
When I saw his tattoo in the van I didn’t believe that he had arranged all of this, but I step back and look at the whole system to try to understand what I believed. What I saw.
I’m not sure it was ever entirely observable.
Except, underneath, it was always just us.
The scrape on my hip starts to sting, and my tears are coming faster, sitting on this chair, at an awkward angle, my pants off, my face in his hands—I’m uncomfortable.
Inside and out.
I close my eyes.
That makes it easier to get inside my own body, out of my head, and just pay attention to the man in front of me. I put my hands over his on my face.
“Bad news from Dr. Allen today,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry.”
“I was feeling pretty good, and I didn’t realize that some part of that was her confidence that I was holding right where I was, that all I had to do was get used to the changes that had already happened. I didn’t totally get I would have to deal with more.”
Then I feel him lean toward me, and he kisses my forehead.
“I don’t believe in magic.” I open my eyes and look at him. “But actually, there is totally such a thing as coincidence.”
“What happens after a coincidence?”
“Well, in my work, I note it and move on and get on with the bigger picture.” He smiles. “I don’t know if I am good at the big picture. I’m good at big pictures of small things.”
I smile back. “You are, I think. You kind of lost sight of this one.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, Jenny.”
“I’m upset, just really upset.” I look at him; his face is so worried. “You know how when someone dies, everyone has sex?”
He looks at me for a long moment, his eyebrows nearly crossed, and then laughs, rubbing his palms over my jaw and down my neck and back again. “I think I know what you mean. Life-affirming kind of thing?”
“Yeah, that.”
He keeps up his touching, his thumbs rubbing tears before they drip, sliding down my neck and squeezing my nape. “Jenny—”
“That. I’d like that. I want life-affirming sex, Evan.”
He closes his eyes. So I kiss him.
He receives my kiss, his mouth soft.
Then I hold his face, tipping it where I want it, the nap of his bristles soft one way, prickling another. I kiss his top lip and his bottom one, I kiss the divot over his top lip and the crease in his chin under the bottom.
I touch with my tongue, just a little, and then he opens to me, kisses back.
I’m willing to kiss as long as he needs to.
As long as I do.
I hope it isn’t long, though, before he’ll follow me where I need to go.
I let myself just feel him. I close my eyes and ignore how that makes my heart feel too tight. I remember that day in the foyer, when my mind reached out to what was around me.
For a long time, kissing Evan is like swimming underwater. How the light pressure all over your body is at first giddy and novel, and then it just is what it is—small currents like little breezes. Relaxing, absorbing.
Then his hands leave my nape and travel over my shoulders to fist in my sweater. My heart speeds up, my hands start to move, too, I squeeze his shoulders, his sides, he’s solid and live and his movements are bulky, a little out of control, and I feel every part of him that’s touching every part of me.
“Jenny, I—” He pulls me from the chair, and we sink to the floor.
Kissing.
“Shhh,” I soothe, and I brush over him, over his fly. “It’s okay,” I whisper into his neck, “if this is all you want—kissing. I want you, but it’s okay.”
Though, really, I want him to lay me out, come inside of me, over me, but I know he has to be right with me.
He has to need this, too.
I open my eyes, and his are right there, looking in mine.
When he looks away, I try not to be disappointed, but he’s not letting me go, not at all, he’s fumbling in his back pocket, one arm still braced along my spine.
I watch him open his wallet. I watch his hands shake as he fumbles out a condom.
“Could you read this?” he says. “I need to make sure it’s okay.”
I take it from him, and it’s fine. Not even wrinkled. The expiration months away.
“Do you sit on your wallet?” I can’t believe my calm voice. My questions from Sex Ed 101.
“No. I usually keep it in my bag. I don’t usually have those in there, not exactly, I—”
“It’s okay. It’s good. Can I put it on you?” Our eyes meet again, and I try to keep steady, but I feel hot over my neck again, I feel like I’m standing on the edge of the abyss and Evan is the only thing keeping me from stepping over.
“Yeah.” He bunches up his T-shirt and sweater in his fist, pulls them over his head.
His skin is flushed, the planes of his body on the big, lanky scale that’s Evan, how he’s made.
I pull apart his leather belt, the buckle falling loose, kiss his shoulders, his chest, his collarbones, while I unbutton his pants, reach inside, hold him, full in my hand, then, touch him, stroke him until he’s completely hard.
I rub my nose over his collarbone and he gathers my hair in his hand. I play with his erection—soft touches, watch his stomach cave when I hit a sensitive spot.
I decide I could do this forever. Just touching, holding.
Then he bumps his hips up, groans, wraps his hand around mine and asks for a rougher touch.
I roll on the condom, slow and careful.
He eases me on my back, on the floor. The carpet is a short nap, the kind that’s easy to clean in buildings like this, and it’s rough on my ass and catches at my sweater.
He kisses me, and seems determined to kiss me for as long as it takes for us to get there, to that restless, needy place. His mouth is exactly what I want, and I’m grateful for the buzz that starts taking over my brain, for his fingers, sliding where my clit’s grown pinched, for his arm at my back keeping me steady.
Even better is his hard penis at my entrance where I already feel so tight and throbbing. I bend my knees and tip up at the very same time he spreads me open with his fingers and slides the head snug against me.
He keeps his thrust slow, and we watch each other. He feels big, slick, and I let myself squeeze tight, to slow it all down, but then he makes this noise, something almost articulate and awed and distracted and I tip up more and he pushes and then I make the noise, too, because he’s inside me, hot and stretching and good.
We move our faces into each other’s neck, and I breathe in his skin, and he gives another little push that makes my eyes roll back and my hips feel shaky.
I hook one leg over his back so he stays right there, and then I feel the pressure of his thumb or a finger right to the side of my clit, just pressing, and God, the whole world finally, finally disappears.
I sink into it, way, way down.
Every time he thrusts, his thumb presses, and I say, “just like that,” or I think I do, but I must because he doesn’t stop, and it’s so big and perfect, his glide, his press, the sound of his breath in my ear, it’s something like when he was rocking me in the courtyard, all comfort, all physical presence and attendance.
I fight against coming until I know he can’t, when I realize I can hear his belt buckle ringing as it hits the floor with each thrust.
“Evan,” I say, and then we’re kissing, and I’m coming, and it feels so good, but it’s mostly my heart I can feel pounding, making my chest tight, and then I understand that I’m crying, that coming with Evan inside of me somehow shoved everything I’ve been holding back out of the way, and so I’m taken up with all this pleasure, but unrelieved, sobbing with every pulse of this orgasm, Evan’s cheek rough against mine, and he’s coming, too, and he says my name, Jenny, over and over.