My Heart Insists I Want Forever
I follow Hannah into her dark apartment, glad I’m there with her, worried about if I hadn’t been, Sebastian and his shark eyes would be waiting for her. I’d realized as soon as she shut the door the night before, and when I walked into my empty apartment, that my anger was secondary to my fear. If I’d been thinking clearly, I could have owned that and moved forward. If I had, I would have been sleeping with Hannah instead of by myself, but sometimes distance and time is the right calibrator for clearer perspective.
Showing up at the library was less about writing the paper and more trying to find a clear opportunity to apologize. I’d been lucky she’d been able to talk rather than having to wait to take her to dinner.
Now, I shut the door behind me with my thoughts on what’s ahead: taking her out, reminding myself that being alone doesn’t mean sex. But I’d be lying if that wasn’t on my mind. It’s so fucking on my mind. What happened in the study room at the library, the way I wanted to bang her against the wall or thought about the top of the table. The night before in the car.
I take a deep breath to clear my mind. “Where’s Jewel?” The apartment is quiet. I glance at Hannah.
She looks over at me, sets her backpack into the seat of the stool at the counter, then retraces her steps back to me. Without taking her eyes from mine, she reaches around me and locks the door.
“Not here. And I don’t want to go to the Sandwich Spot,” she says and pulls the scarf from her neck, drops it on the floor, and shrugs out of her jacket, which she tosses at the stool. It misses and drops with a hiss of fabric and a tap of buttons. Her pupils are blown, and she’s not smiling. She reaches for my jacket, bunching the blue fabric in her fists, and pulls me to her. “I want to order take out, but not until after this.”
Then she’s kissing me.
Oh, fuck, she’s kissing me. It’s a kiss filled with a promise, and that promise is sex.
My heart leaps, slams up against my chest, and I frame her face with my hands, answering her kiss with a promise of my own.
“Yes?” she asks, her mouth still on mine.
“Fuck, yes,” I tell her and shrug out of my jacket, tossing it toward the stool—it misses and falls to the floor—and then I grasp her hips, angling my head to kiss her deeper. Yes. Yes. Yes, my brain chants, now the only thought in my head, walking her backward through the apartment toward her bedroom.
She angles her head in response, making a sweet sound as her hands slide up under my shirt and push it up over my torso.
We break apart, and my t-shirt falls to the floor.
Her eyes are wild, the blue intense and dark. “I don’t want to wait anymore,” she says, her hands moving across my chest, down my stomach, which makes my muscles twitch, to the button of my jeans. She yanks the top button open.
“Let’s not wait anymore,” I say and restore our connection, kissing her again. I wrap my arms around her and lift her, mouth tasting her and lighting a forest fire inside of me that’s heat rushing through my bloodstream. Her legs wrap around my waist, and I walk us the rest of the way to her room, using my foot to shut the door behind us. We are an extension of one another, every uncovered place seeking connection. Mouths, tongues, hands, arms. Together, we help each other out of our clothing: jeans and t-shirts and socks, underthings, until there’s nothing left between us.
“I want to look at you,” I tell her.
She disconnects and takes a step away, then another as she backs toward the bed. She’s fucking beautiful. Her curves. A goddess. The memory of lying between her legs, so close to sex over a week ago, of touching her, of being between her legs and tasting her since then and hearing her orgasm, to her mouth helping me reach my own orgasm, a mutual giving and taking with one another, all reinforcing my fantasies. Her eyes skim my body, get caught on my erection, then jump back up to my face. She sits on the mattress, retrieves a condom from a drawer by her bed, and sets it near her. What undoes me, though, is when she leans back onto her elbows, spreads her legs, and says, “I want you, Seth.”
I groan and waste zero time getting to her, climbing up the bed, over her to settling between her thighs. My mouth seeks hers and my hands skim her skin, seeking refuge in the soft places.
I kiss down her neck, kiss her breasts, kiss her stomach, revel in the feel of her hands in my hair when I kiss her between her thighs, her vulnerability offered freely. When she comes—a beautiful sound of her letting go of the wall, of allowing me the opportunity to catch her—I retrace my path, find new places to kiss, new ways to offer her my worship.
“Seth.” She breathes my name, then repeats it.
I settle my hips between her legs again, my need pressing against her tender flesh. “What is it, Hannah? Is this still okay?”
She nods. “Yes. Yes. Please.” She helps me with the condom, her fingertips skimming my erection and stealing my breath.
I position myself to enter her, braced on my arms, but wait, though every cell in my body is screaming to go. “Hannah?”
Her gaze slides up from looking at where we’ll join to my face. “What is it? You still want this?”
I nod. “Yes.” I nod again, trying to find words. “I don’t want this to end.”
She grabs hold of my face. “It won’t last forever.” She smiles. “Even if we want it to.”
“Not the sex, Hannah.” I meet her gaze. “You and me.”
Her smile fades, and she makes an emotive sound that pushes my pulse a little faster and draws me down to kiss her again. Then she reaches down between my arms, grasps my ass, and pulls me into her, tilting her hips to meet me. Gasping against my mouth, she finds her breath to say, “I want that too. All of you. I want you, Seth.”
The sensation of being wrapped up completely in Hannah is perfection. It’s as if I’ve been traveling this one road toward an unseen destination, and suddenly there’s a new path. I take it, and there she is, the destination, waiting for me with her hand outstretched. When I reach her and take her hand, we walk the road together, side by side.
She makes this beautiful moaning gasp that tells me she’s with me on this journey. That sound is perfect too. I can feel her finding her way, her body wrapping tightly around mine as she mewls out a broken sound with my name, and I join her, losing myself in the moment. I let go just after she does.
When my breathing evens out, I take care of the condom and return to her side, lying on my side to look at her.
Hannah smiles at my movement, eyes still closed, little tears sitting in the corners of her eyes. Her hands move over the skin of my back, a gentle caress. Back and forth.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m perfect,” she says. “Perfect.” She turns her head to look at me. Then she does something absolutely devastating. She smiles.
And I’m a goner. Obliterated. Love, yes, but the forever kind.
“What are these?” I run a thumb across the tear that has left a trail over her temple.
“Happiness.”
I wrap my arms around her, filled with so much emotion that I can’t find words, or rather, they’d never be able to find a way through my throat that has suddenly constricted with feeling. There’s a fleeting thought that perhaps I’m making more of this than I should; Hannah has been on my heart for a long time, but it’s a temporary flare in a dark sky. That realization is in and of itself the point. Hannah has been a tattoo on me all that time, a permanent trace stamped into my heart and waiting for the opportunity to reemerge and remind me who I am. The sun in my solar system.
But I am suddenly at odds with myself.
Hannah has seen the ugliest parts of me and still wants me. I’m a fool to allow insecure thoughts any purchase in the beauty of now, so I release them like helium into the atmosphere where they squeak away into nothing.
“Seth?” Hannah’s fingertips move back and forth across my back as if she’s tracing pictures or writing words.
I hum a response, eyes closed, enjoying the feel of her in my arms, of her fingertips, of her breasts pressed against my naked flesh, of her legs intertwined with mine.
“I love you.”
I stop breathing, before oxygen rushes in like I was deprived of it. I remember the first time I caught a wave. I’d spent so much time in the icy cold of the Oregon ocean, trying to catch one in the mess of the whitewash. It’s doable, but it takes time and patience to learn it. That first time, I remember the elation, the feeling like I was the first and the only.
That’s how Hannah’s declaration makes me feel.
I squeeze her tighter, burying my face into the safety of her skin. “I love you, Hannah. So fucking much. I’m never letting you go again.”
I have never told a more singular truth.