Emma kisses me on the mouth, and although I’m not sure whether it’s because she’s in the moment or because she just want me to shut up, I’m happy to focus my attention back on her.
I move my hands from Emma’s hips and place one hand across her back onto the opposite shoulder and the other around her lower back, my hand resting just above her hip on the other side, and I pull her even closer as I continue bringing her down faster and harder onto me.
“Oh God,” she says, “oh yeah. I’m going to come, baby,” she says, and a moment later, she’s quivering in my arms.
We’re kissing and there’s not a sliver of air between us as the tempo increases and the feeling begins to crescendo and it’s all I can do to keep enough air in my lungs.
“I’m going to…” she trails off, and the next sound from her is a loud, enthusiastic moan that seems to stretch on forever as a single note of the most perfect symphony.
I’m getting close myself seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting this woman. She’s immaculate, and that’s when she says it.
She’s still coming hard on top of me and her hips are moving furiously, though the rest of her body is comparatively still, and in a long whisper, she says, “I love you.”
A few seconds later and Emma’s slowing her pace, and she opens one eye to look at me because I haven’t said anything yet.
After another half minute, Emma’s motionless with me still inside her, and she’s looking at me with those wide eyes, saying, “I love you, Damian,” and I could swear that before she says the words, I had the ability to speak, to respond, to say something, bu
t that’s gone now and getting only further away with every breath that passes with me not saying anything.
More seriously now, Emma looks hard into my eyes and repeats, one last time, those words, “I love you.”
I know the worst thing I can do here is not answer, but I’m incapable of anything else at the moment.
Whether it’s that so much has happened over so few months or whether it’s all that stuff Danna said about Emma still rattling around in the back of my head or whether I’m still a little resentful that she didn’t say it back to me that first time, I haven’t a clue, but she’s starting to lose her patience and I’m just sitting here.
Epilogue
Synchronicity
Emma
“Things don’t always happen as we plan,” I tell Brock Emsley, host of Late Night with the Stars, one of the five or six top late night talk shows currently out there. “Sometimes, it’s all you can do to take the leap and see what happens.”
“Well,” Brock says, “it looks like that philosophy’s been working pretty well for you so far. I want to thank you for coming to see us and chat for a little bit about what you’ve got going on,” he says, and turns from me to the hot camera. “After these messages, we’ll be back with a very special live performance by Sons of Anatolia. Stay with us.”
The red light goes off and Brock leans over, and shaking my hand, he says, “Thank you so much for coming. It’s always nice to have an Oscar winner on the set.”
“It’s been a pleasure,” I tell him, and when directed, I follow a man in a blazer off the stage.
The Oscar, that wasn’t for Flashing Lights.
After all the hell and tumult that went on during the filming of my first major role, the movie opened to a modest reception. The first couple of weeks saw huge numbers, but after everyone subconsciously realized that they’d seen that film a hundred different times and the immediacy of my world of scandal began to fade, Flashing Lights slowly sunk into the distance.
The reviews weren’t too bad, though.
The award, I won for a role I played as Margaret Thatcher. One of my reviews even went so far as to say that I managed to make my character likeable, which, according to the author of the review, was a feat that he didn’t even imagine possible.
I’ve never been that interested in politics, myself.
It’s been a long time since Flashing Lights and it feels like it’s been even longer.
After his role as the English-tutor-turned my-character’s-lover in Lights, Damian Jones took another long break from making movies, and when he came back, he was a different man.
For the first time in his career, Damian wasn’t just the eye candy with the nice smile. He started taking roles that not only challenged him, but were new, different. He started taking roles because they were outside of his comfort zone instead of sticking to the world of summer comedies.
Things haven’t been all upside for Damian, though, as his former-would-be-father-in-law, Ed, passed away waiting for a new heart. That was one of the reasons Damian stayed offscreen for so long.
The two had made their peace, although, from what I’ve heard, the two of them never stopped talking shit to one another even until the very end.