I leave my shoes in her kitchen and my jeans somewhere outside her suite’s bedroom door and I don’t bother shutting it because Darcy’s in front of me, gloriously fucking naked. I grab her by the waist and pull her back against me, my cock nestled against her ass and the small of her back, and for a second I just stand there with my arms around her and breathe.

Then Darcy arches and stands on her tiptoes and tilts her head back, lips open, and it’s over. If I was thinking that this feels a little like the end of something between us, I don’t fucking care because it’s also the door to something new and beautiful.

I kiss her. I spin her around and walk her to the bed and lift her up and nearly throw her on it, laughing, but at the last second I remember her back and I put her down gently. Darcy wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me in, tangling us together.

Her bedroom’s dark but her hair is fanned around her, stark against the white hotel sheets, and for a moment I just look at her while her eyes roam my face. She runs one finger over the lump in my collarbone, the half-circles on my shoulder, the same look in her eyes as before.

“What?” I whisper.

“You drive me out of my mind,” she whispers back.

Darcy reaches down and grabs my cock again, tightens her legs around me, lifts her hips until I’m at her entrance, and I slide inside.

She gasps. Her eyes go blurry and lose focus, her fingernails digging into my back and her thighs tightening on my hips, and inside her is tight and hot and right now I’m breathless, fucking wrapped in her so I can barely think, barely breathe.

Fucking drowning in her. Fucking melting.

I pull back and thrust again, and this time we both moan together, her head to one side, her eyes closed, breathless and beautiful. I’ve imagined this moment a thousand times — a million maybe — but this is better than all of them combined, the slow rhythm of our bodies moving and working together.

I fuck her harder, faster, and she shouts with her head thrown back, nails digging into my shoulder. I grab her knee and put it over my shoulder, the back of her thigh against my chest, and somehow I get even deeper.

Darcy gasps my name, shouts it, her hand slides off my shoulder and grabs the sheets in a fist as she clenches around me like she’s about to come. Thank fuck, because I’m unraveling fast, my self-control unspooling with every second.

I put my hand over her fist, on the sheets, and she lets them go so I can lace my fingers through hers and I hold onto her tight, like she’s my lifeline. Her eyes come open, and she’s sweaty and undone and wild. She grabs my hair and looks me in the eyes.

“Fuck, Trent,” she gasps.

And she comes. I can feel it as her whole body tenses, wrapped around me, and in seconds I’m following her over the edge, face buried in her neck as I shout some string of nonsense, coming so hard I think my vision goes blank.

Even when it’s over, we don’t move. I can feel her heartbeat, her chest move as she breathes, and I’m still wrapped in her.

Slowly, we unfurl. I flop over next to her, both of us diagonal on the enormous bed, and Darcy rolls over onto her stomach, hair around her face. I think she’s smiling. I reach out and lightly run my knuckles along the lumpy, smooth-skinned new scar on her back.

“You okay?”

Darcy raises the one eyebrow I can see, like she thinks it’s a funny question.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“I mean your back.”

“Yeah, I got that. These sheets have a thread count of a million or something, it was like fucking on a cloud,” she teases me.

I just slide my knuckles carefully along her back. I feel like this situation should have weight, should have gravity, that I should say something meaningful to her right now that could tie what just happened to the years before of us, but I can’t think of a damn thing.

It doesn’t feel heavy. It feels weightless. I take her arm, tug, and she scoots toward me until her head’s on my shoulder, her other hand drumming patterns on my chest. I stroke her hair, my mind blank.

“Trent,” she says after a while.

“Darce.”

“This wasn’t a bad idea, was it?”

“This was a great idea.”

She laughs, her fingers still playing patterns on my chest.

“Are you still gonna think that tomorrow?”

“I’ve got a good feeling about it.”

More drumming. Something else occurs to me.

“Hey, Darce?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re still on the pill, right?”

She rolls in, resting her chin on one hand, and looks at me like she’s laughing.

“Don’t you think the time to ask that was ten minutes ago?” she teases.

“Ten minutes ago I was barely thinking,” I admit.

“I’m still on it,” she says. “You’re not barebacking groupies right and left, are you?”

I snort. Before tonight I hadn’t been with anyone in months. Not that I couldn’t have, but random hookups weren’t what I wanted.

“Don’t you think the time to ask that was ten minutes ago?” I tease right back.

“I was hoping you’d be a gentleman and wrap it up if you thought you might have super-syphilis,” she says.

“I’m quite safe with my five-groupie-per-night habit,” I say, and Darcy just rolls her eyes.

“Glad to hear it,” she deadpans. “You get the other four out of the way before we went trespassing?”

“Something like that.”

“I think we left the meat thermometer behind,” she says, turning onto her back, her head still propped up on my chest. “And the baby powder, whatever that was for.”

“Shit, that was a nice thermometer,” I say. “I could’ve used it for steak or somthing.”

She just laughs and tells me I can’t cook for shit, and I say I can, and even though we’re naked and we just had insane, explosive, world-ending sex this feels... the same. It feels like everything I liked about us, only with less clothes.

After a while, Darcy sighs, yawns, looks over at me.

“I should brush my teeth before I fall asleep,” she says.

Until a couple years ago, when we all suddenly had money, Darcy’s teeth were constantly giving her problems, because it’s not like any of her foster parents were going to pay for dental work. It was the first thing she spent her Dirtshine money on, and she’s religious about her teeth. Drunk, high, drunk and high, doesn’t matter. She brushes.

“Are you kicking me out?” I ask, half-teasing.

She looks over at me, hair spilling onto my chest.

“You don’t have to go,” she says, her voice suddenly careful. “If you don’t want to.”

She pauses.

“I’ve got an extra toothbrush,” she offers, and I laugh.

“My toothbrush is next door,” I say. “I think I can make it.”

We sit up. I kiss her, just one more time, then grab a towel, go to my room next door, and get my toothbrush. I bring it back and brush my teeth next to her, both stark naked in her hotel bathroom.

We get back into her giant bed, and even though there’s enough space for us to both splay out like starfish, she curls against me and I put my arms around her. We fall asleep that way.

* * *

It’s not nearly late enough when I wake up to a knock at the door. I’ve got the sense that it’s been going on for a while, that someone’s been knocking for ages, but I lie there and stare at the ceiling, feeling like my eyes had been glued shut.

Darcy’s still lying on one of my arms. The knock sounds again, louder, and she suddenly wakes up with a snort.

“The fuck is that?” she asks, somewhere between baffled and furious.

“Door.”

I’m still half in the strange dream I was having, where I was trying to chase an incredible number of iguanas from our recording studio, but I sit up, legs over the edge of the bed.

“I’ll get it.”

“It’s my room,” she says, plopping her face down onto her pillow. She sighs dramatically, then rolls over, sitting up as well. “I got it.”

She grabs a robe from the bathroom, tugs it around herself. I flop backward onto the bed and listen to her walk to the front door. I wonder, briefly, if the bed is visible from the door, but I decide it’s not.

“Hey,” Darcy says, opening the door.

“Hi,” says Gavin, who sounds far too fucking awake for — I check the clock — 9:30.

“Shit,” Darcy mumbles. “Is it time for stuff already?”

“Did I wake you?” Gavin says, obviously teasing her. Dick.

“Guess.”

“Sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he’s trying not to smile. “I was actually just looking for Trent, I wanted to talk over a slight guitar modification I’m thinking of but he’s not in his room or the lobby and he’s not answering his phone. You’ve not seen him, have you?”

There’s a long, long pause.

“Me?” she finally asks.

Listening in the bedroom, I put a hand over my mouth so I don’t start laughing.

“Yes,” Gavin says.

“Trent?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t... uh, I don’t know? He could be anywhere? Like sometimes he goes and walks around or something, maybe he didn’t take his phone but I’m sure he’ll be back soon. I haven’t seen him, that’s all just a guess.”

“If you do see him, would you mind telling him I’m looking for him?”

“Sure,” Darcy says, then yawns.

“Thanks,” Gavin says. “Go back to bed, rehearsal’s not ’til noon.”

“Thank fuck,” Darcy mutters, and the door closes.

She shuffles back in, already throwing the robe off, then crawls back into bed.

“Gavin’s looking for you,” she mumbles, her face already on the pillow.

“I heard.”

Practically on cue, something buzzes very faintly in the other room of the suite.

“Bet that’s him.”

“We can talk later,” I say, rolling over and carefully throwing an arm over her back. “Plenty of time.”