Then I lean back, fit us together again.
This time he’s the one who groans as I sink my weight onto him, the one whose hands tighten on me as I move. I go slow at first, savoring every inch, letting Levi lose control. I like the feel of his skin against mine and I like the way he sighs explosively when I hilt him, the way he palms a breast and slides his calloused hand over a nipple.
But I can’t go slow for long, despite myself. Soon enough I find the angle and the spot and the rhythm, and then I can’t help it. I spread my hands on his chest and I want more and fast and now and God, it shouldn’t feel this good, nothing should feel this good, and then somehow he’s got his thumb on my clit and I’m riding him hard and fast and I come again, my whole body rattling and shaking.
This time he doesn’t stop. This time I’m still coming as Levi rolls me over onto my back and I wrap my legs around him and he buries his face in my neck and I swear I’m still coming as he drives himself into me deep and hard and then he comes too, groaning and shuddering.
We lie there for a long time, Levi’s head on my chest, my arms around his shoulders. This still feels unreal, like a hallucination or a long realistic dream. Maybe I got hit by a bus. Maybe I’m in a coma.
I’m tired, drained, exhausted, but I fight sleep. Partly because I haven’t brushed my teeth, but mostly because once I go to sleep, then I’ll have to wake up and say goodbye to Levi for the day and go to the Herald-Trumpet and slog through another day.
It will get better, I tell myself. The first day at a job is always hard.
It has to get better, because Levi’s moving here to be with you and if it doesn’t get better, you’ve cost him all that for nothing.
That thought makes me hold my breath for a moment, as if someone’s tied a rope around my lungs and then dropped a weight from it.
I realize, all at once, that this is what love is. It’s the happy moments and the laughing together and making out at stoplights and the looking forward to seeing them every single day, but it’s also the simple, astonishing fact that now I have to take him into account.
Suddenly what I do matters to another person, and somehow, I was unprepared for this. Levi knew. He looked at the situation, refused to ask something of me that I didn’t want to give, and got on a plane to South Dakota.
“What is it?” he asks, looking up at me.
I just shake my head.
“It’s something. You’re not there,” he says, slowly pulling himself off of me, pushing the pillows back, leaning against them. He’s still stark naked and doesn’t make a single motion toward modesty, utterly comfortable in his own skin.
“Just thinking about work tomorrow,” I say. “Today was a little rough, so I’m just thinking about ways to make it… not that.”
I’m already lying, or at least, not quite telling the truth. The weight around my lungs threatens to strangle me.
“Ah,” he says, and drapes an arm around my shoulders. “Anything I can help with?”
“None of my coworkers are trees,” I say.
“I work with humans,” he says. “Frequently, even.”
“Not these humans,” I say, mostly to myself.
Levi leans over, kisses me on the top of the head, and it sends an ugly black prickle of guilt down my spine.
“Show me the apartment you’re looking at tomorrow,” I say.It’s 3:26 a.m. when I wake up. I don’t know why I wake up, but I do, all at once like I’ve just come up for air from the depths. I roll onto my other side and try to fall back asleep, but I know right away that it’s pointless.
Still, I stay there for a while, on the cheap motel sheets in the double bed that’s really too small for us to share, but neither of us wanted to sleep separately. Levi sleeps on his stomach, one arm over his head, and for a long time I watch his back rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.
It’s nearly four when I get out of bed, find our clothes in a pile on the floor, locate a shirt, pull it on. It’s his, plaid and long-sleeved, and I get a fresh pair of underwear from my suitcase and then I go to the table and chairs set up by the window and I sit.
Briefly, I wonder if I should have put a towel down, but it’s too late. I know I could go into the bathroom and turn the light on and read on the toilet, but I don’t want to read. I want to sit here in the dark, staring at the light leaking in through the cracks in the curtains, and think.