Beautiful Beginning

The wildness unhinges him. I can hear the sheets pop away from the mattress and feel them bunch behind me as he grips them for leverage, moving hard enough that the headboard cracks into the wall.

“Oh,” he groans, rhythm growing punishing. He buries his face in my neck, groaning, “Here. Here. Here.”

And then he opens his mouth on my neck, sucking and pressing, shoulders shaking over me as he comes. I slide my hands over his back, relishing the bunching definition of his tense posture, the curve to his spine as he stays as deep as he can. I shift beneath him to feel his skin on mine, mixing my sweat with his.

Ansel pushes up to his elbows and hovers over me, still pulsing inside as he presses his palms to my forehead and slides them over my hair.

“It’s too good,” he says against my lips. “It’s so good, cerise.”

And then he reaches between us to grip the condom, pulling out and slipping it off. He drops it blindly in the vicinity of the bedside table and collapses beside me on the mattress, dragging his left hand down his face, across his sweaty chest where it comes to rest over his heart. I’m unable to look away from the gold band on his ring finger. His stomach tightens with each jagged inhale, jerks with each forceful exhale.

"Please, Mia."

I have one last refusal in me, and I squeak it out: "I can't."

He closes his eyes and my heart splinters, imagining not seeing him again.

"If we hadn’t been drunk and crazy and ended up married last night . . . would you have come with me to France?" he asks. “Just for the adventure of it?”

"I don't know." But the answer is, I might have. I don't need to move to Boston yet; I plan to because I had to leave my campus apartment but don’t want to move back in with my parents for the entire summer. Paris—with Ansel only as a lover, maybe even just as a roommate—would be a wild adventure. It wouldn't carry the same weight of moving in with him for the summer, as his wife.

Moving because we’re married feels like pretending it could last. Moving as a lover is impulsive, wild, something a twenty-three-year-old woman should do.

He smiles, a little sadly, and kisses me.

"Say something to me in French." I’ve heard him say a hundred things while he’s lost in pleasure, but this is the first time I've requested it, and I don't know why I do it. It seems dangerous, with his mouth, his voice, his accent like warm chocolate.

"Do you speak any French?"

"Besides, 'cerise'?"

His eyes fall to my lips and he smiles. "Besides that."

"Fromage. Chateau. Croissant."

He repeats "croissant" in a small laughing voice, and when he says it, it sounds like a completely different word. I wouldn't know how to spell the word he just said, but it makes me want to pull him on top of me again.

"Well, in that case I can tell you, Je n'ai plus désiré une femme comme je te désire depuis longtemps. ?a n'est peut-être même jamais arrivé." He pulls back, studies my reaction as if I'd be able to decode a word of it. "Est-ce totalement fou? Je m'en fiche."

My brain can’t magically translate the words, but my body seems to know he’s said something wildly intimate.

“Can I ask you something?”

He nods. “Of course.”

“Why won’t you just annul it?”

He twists his mouth to the side, amusement filling his eyes. “Because you wrote it into our wedding vows. We both vowed to stay married until the fall.”

It’s several long seconds before I get over the shock of that. I sure was a bossy little thing last night. “But it’s not a real marriage,” I whisper, and pretend I don’t see it when he winces a little. “What does that vow mean anyway if we plan to break all the others about ‘until death do us part’?”

He rolls over and sits up at the edge of his bed, his back to me. He curls over, pressing his hands onto his forehead. “I don’t know. I try not to break promises, I suppose. This is all very weird for me; please don’t assume I know what I’m doing just because I’m holding firm on this one point.”

I sit up, crawl over to him and kiss his shoulder. “It seems I fake-married a really nice guy.”

He laughs, but then stands, moving away from me again. I can sense he needs distance and it pushes a small ache between two of my ribs.

This is it. This is when I should go.

He pulls on his underwear and leans against the closet door, watching me as I get dressed. I pull my panties up my legs, and they’re still wet from me, from his mouth, too, though the wetness feels cold now. Changing my mind, I drop them on the floor and put on my bra and my jersey dress and step into my flip-flops.

Ansel wordlessly hands me his phone and I text myself so he has my number. When I hand it back, we stand, looking at anything but each other for a few painful beats.

I reach for my bag, pulling out gum, but he quickly moves to me, sliding his hands up my neck to cup my face. “Don’t.” He leans close, sucking on my mouth the way he seems to like so much. "You taste like me. I taste like you." He bends, licking my tongue, my lips, my teeth. "I like this so much."

His mouth moves lower, down my neck, nibbling at my collarbones, and to where my n**ples press up from beneath my dress. He sucks and licks, pulling them into his mouth until the fabric is soaked. It’s black, so no one but us will know, but I’ll feel the cool press of his kiss even after I walk out of the room.

I want to pull us back to the bed.

But he stands, studying my face for a beat. “Be good, cerise.”

It occurs to me only now that we’re married, and I would be cheating on my husband if I slept with someone else this summer. But the idea of anyone else getting this man makes something simmer in my belly. I don’t like the thought at all, and I wonder if that’s the same fire I see in his expression.

“You, too,” I tell him.