He pulled out, almost all the way, and then pushed back into me. Again. Harder.
“Still good?” he asked.
All I could do was nod and clutch at his back, his body, try to hold on as the seas rose around us.
He growled, swearing under his breath, and then grabbed onto the arm of the couch, using it for leverage as he began to pound into me.
“Touch yourself,” he told me.
“No,” I said, because what was happening was new. What was happening was different. “I’m going to come. Just like this. Keep. Just…. ”
I didn’t have to tell him twice. He pounded into me three more times, each time so deep, impossibly deep, and then I was coming, unraveling beneath him. My nails digging into his back.
“Oh…fuck. Annie,” he cried, and then he buried himself inside of me and came.
I held onto him, stroking his hair, his back, the scars on his neck, and wondered what happened after something like this?
How was I supposed to still be Annie McKay after this?
I woke up slowly, rolling slightly, only to find my back stuck to whatever I was lying against. My skin peeled as I sat up. Leather. I’d fallen asleep on the leather couch.
There was a soft blue blanket over my very naked body.
My very naked, very…sore body. I felt stretched wide between my legs. The muscles in my back, in my thighs—they felt like they were made out of water.
I felt like I was made out of water.
I pressed my fingers against my lips as if I could hold back the giggle. I wanted to giggle. A giggle was going to happen.
I laid my head back against the cushions and like the seventeen-year-old girl I’d never been—I giggled.
Ho. Ly. Shit. That…had been amazing. Dylan had been amazing.
What I’d had with Hoyt followed—to the letter—what my very uncomfortable high school health teacher had told us about sex. Or procreation. There had been the hardening and the insertion and the ejaculation.
It had been cold and clinical and painful.
What had happened with Dylan? I didn’t even have words for it. But if I’d had a wish list for what sex could be like, Dylan just crossed everything off the list.
I fell sideways back onto the couch, my hands between my legs, where I was warm and sore. Who knew…honest to God…who knew my body was designed to feel so much?
What a fucking miracle that was.
When I turned sixteen, our church got a new pastor. The first time he spoke from the pulpit, Mom and I went to church in the best of our Sunday best. We sat in our pew, right side, third from the back, and waited with bated breath to hear the new guy.
I remember exactly his sermon. Exactly. Tolerance. That faith was not just faith in God, or faith in people who looked like you or were attracted to the opposite sex. Faith was faith in humanity. God loved all of us. And we should do the same.
It had been a revelation to me.
Not so much for Mom. We didn’t go back until that pastor left.
It was weird, my body sore from sex, my mind blown from the power of what I could feel, but at that moment, more than any in the past few years…I missed church.
The power of those two things—the spiritual and the carnal—were connected, like the arc of electricity between heaven and earth.
From behind the cracked-open door that led to Dylan’s garage, there was a thump and a muffled curse. Dylan was up.
I pressed a hand to my heart where it pounded, barely contained by my ribs and my skin. Part of me wanted to vanish. Just…not be here. Not look at him. Not try to make conversation after what had happened between us. I didn’t know how to do that. Not with any grace.
But another part of me, alive and hungry and curious, wanted to do all of that again.
I grabbed my clothes from the floor but they smelled like sex and sweat, so I wrapped the blanket around my body and walked back to the room that was mine.
In the drawers I found a clean set of pajamas. Size small, the tags still on the soft fuchsia tee shirt. And the dark navy flannel pants with the stars and moons and bright yellow suns scattered over them.
They fit. They fit perfectly and they were pretty.
Dylan didn’t pick them out, I got that. Margaret had. For her granddaughter. But