The crumb-dusted plate by the sink told me Harper didn’t need a sandwich. I shut the light and went upstairs, dragging dissatisfaction behind me.

What did I want? More Chris, but how? Did I want him now or wish for the past? Did I want the broken man or the beautiful boy? Did I want him now? Later? Or never? Would the reality of him break the world I’d built for myself?

I walked right by the master suite. I didn’t want to sleep under Reggie’s mural. Didn’t want to see it or feel its weight over me. I went to the front bedroom and flicked on the light. The bed was still made, and next to it sat the boxes of unread letters. The mattress creaked when I sat on it, and the cardboard flaps coughed dust when I pulled them up.

A parallel universe sat in a crumbling pile. A universe where I’d gotten the messages and bent my life around Chris Carmichael. A universe where I was a different woman, maybe happy, maybe miserable, maybe some shade in between. But in every iteration, I was different.

I picked up the top letter and opened the flap. The glue had hardened long ago, and the letter inside was brown at the fold.

I didn’t want to be different. If I’d found the first letter or the last, I would have been a different Catherine. I liked who I was. I hadn’t thought about it until I closed the envelope flap, but I’d done much with little. That alone was worth the price of every other possible outcome.

Pock.

I dropped the envelope, freezing at the memory of that sound.

Pock. Pock.

I threw open the sash and leaned out the window. Chris was in the front yard, tossing the tennis ball and catching it in one hand. The beautiful boy was purely a man, and though I was different, I was not immune to him.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, tossing the ball up at the window.

I surprised myself and caught it. “Wait for me.” I slapped the window closed before he had a chance to answer.

When I got out the front door, he was waiting. I took his hand, put my fingers to my lips, and jerked my thumb upward, toward Harper’s room. I pulled him to the backyard, and he put his arm around me.

He pulled me closer as we walked. Strong. Secure. As real as the day we met, the thrill of his presence and his touch vibrated throughout my body. I was glad he was there because I could barely walk, but he was the reason I felt as though the earth was dissolving under my feet.

I’d intended to bring him behind the headstone where he’d left me, but the stone, and all the others around it, was covered in burned-out branches. I couldn’t recreate the moment for him or myself. I stopped at the white fence. “I…”

I couldn’t finish, because the realization hit me like a cyclone that started in my heart and twisted through my mind. The scene of my past was blocked by the fires of my present.

“What is it, Catherine?”

“It’s not the same.”

He nodded, and I knew he wasn’t stalling. He nodded because he understood me. Maybe I never knew if he was having exactly the same thought.

I tore my eyes away from the web of bushes and looked the man in the face. “We’re different. Things that happened, we’ve done things. And they changed us. We can’t go back. We don’t get a redo.”

“But we have now.”

“What if I don’t love you now?”

“Are you saying you don’t?”

“I’m saying I don’t know.”

“I think you will.”

“You filled a space for me. What if I don’t have that space anymore? What if it’s all filled up already?”

He touched my face with a tenderness that melted the skin underneath it. I wanted him, but I didn’t need him.

“Chris—” My voice broke. “What if now isn’t enough?”

“My now wants your now. Come forward with me. All you’ve done in this world has made you the woman that would have been too much for the Chris you knew. Back then, I needed simple answers, and you gave me one. That answer, money, it isn’t the answer anymore.”

I put my hand on his chest and bit my lip against giving him an easy response. We both deserved better.

“It’s not simple anymore, is it? Back then, you gave me reason to be my own woman, and when you left, I became that woman. I don’t have any simple answers now.” I felt his heart beating through his jacket. Felt the life in him fighting to get out. I wanted to see that life. “I don’t know if I love you, but I want to know the man you are and I want to see the man you’ll become.” My tears got cold in my eyes, and I blinked them away. They weren’t tears of disappointment, despair, or tension. They were tears of relief. “That’s not the same as it was, is it?”

He wiped a tear away with his thumb. “It’s not the same. We won’t know until we try. I’m not going to ask if you still want me. You can’t still want that kid. But do you want me now? Because the man I am now wants the woman that you are now.”

I barely had a voice to answer, so I whispered, “Yes.”

His kiss was as tender as his touch, gently greeting my lips. The greeting turned into something warmer, then hotter, as his tongue broke past my teeth, touching mine, connecting us at the mouth in a way our hands could not. I clutched his jacket, his hair, wanting to know his body as well as I knew my own.

He pushed against me, hip to hip, hitching me against him until my legs were wrapped around his waist. He carried me up the back porch. Still kissing, I reached for the doorknob and opened it. We were locked together through the house, up the stairs, and I directed him to the room at the end of the hall. The room with the made bed and the boxes of old letters. Groping him, kissing whatever piece of skin I could find, I tasted the present and the unknown future.

When he closed the door, the hall light cut off. Moonlight streamed through the windows. We undressed each other like animals getting past our prey’s skin, reaching for the vital organs. 

I’d never felt this before. I’d wound my entire emotional life into despair and unworthiness, and suddenly they were coins flipped to passion and desire. His body was firm and powerful and my body was melting into liquid fire, bubbling at the edge of the pot, lid tapping and rattling.

Laying me on the bed, he said, “You are more beautiful than I ever imagined.”

He dropped his pants, and his erection was a singular perfection. Finally, I’d have it again. He crawled on the bed and drew his hand down my body, between my breasts, over my belly. I felt as though I’d never been touched before. Not by him. Not by this man. My body answered his hand by arching, my blood answered by closing the gap between us.

I gasped for him, saying, “Yes. Now,” without making the words.

“I want you right now,” he whispered with a voice as thick as the darkness. “And I’m going to have you, but I’m not rushing. We both waited too long.”

“I have all night.”

“Good,” he sighed into my breast, kissing around the base, working his way to the peak.

He sucked until it was hard. I squirmed, but he took his time, doing the same to the opposite side. His lips worshipped my belly and hips, my thighs and my knees. He pulled them apart and ran his tongue along the inside of one, then the other. My fingers were woven through his hair, gripping tight when he got close to my center.

He paused with his mouth so close to my core I felt his breath on my wet skin. I held my own breath until my lungs hurt. My exhale was a whimper. His voice was the rustle of the grass in the wind. My name was a prayer.

His lips were reverent, soft, slow. His tongue ran slowly along my seam, not just offering pleasure but tasting me, as if the pleasure wasn’t mine but his. When it reached my clit, the darkness behind my eyelids lit up with lightning and my ears rushed with my own cries. The pot bubbled over, hissing against hot metal.

And still, he was slow and deliberate. My legs opened wide for him, and my body bent and thrust with an orgasm that rushed hard and fast after thirteen years of waiting. Lifting my hips off the bed, I twisted, and he grabbed me by the thighs so he could keep his face between my legs as I flipped.

“You have to stop,” I lied, pushing myself onto his face and coming again. I fell back, away from him. “Oh, my. My God.”

Resting his weight on one elbow, he smiled at me with a slicked face. “I wouldn’t have known how to do that when I was sixteen.”

I climbed on top of him, straddling his shaft as it lay against the length of my seam. “I can’t wait to find out what else you know.”

“This.” He shifted my hips forward then back, sliding against me.

I followed his rhythm, aroused all over again. I bent and kissed him. “Can you come like this?”

“I want to fuck you.”

Sitting straight, I rode him, taking control of the pace. “You’re thinking about protection.”

“Yes.”

“I just finished my period.”

“Kismet.”

I whispered in his ear. “I also got a condom from Harper.”

We laughed, and I reached into the nightstand drawer. We put it on.

Lifting myself a little, I gave him room to guide himself to my entrance. I placed my weight down slowly, letting him into me, feeling my body react to his presence.

We were joined again, but this time it was without fear, without sneaking. We weren’t two romantic kids against the world, but two people. No more. No less.

He pushed his body against mine, letting me set the rhythm and wrapping himself around me when I leaned into him. My lips, his lips. My heart. His heart. One breath. One moment inside of a life.

My orgasm blossomed like a rose, opening from a tight bud into a splay of petals and pleasure. I cried into his neck, and he thrust hard into me twice, then sucked in a breath, knotting his brows and arching his neck to look me in the face as he filled me.

This was what he sounded like when he came.

This was what he looked like now.

It was beautiful.