I know the consequences. I know what this might cost me.
I’m going to do it anyway.
“I think so, too,” I say.
Jesse smiles and then laughs. “Then what the hell are we doing down here?” he says. He stands up and puts his hand out for me, like a gentleman.
I laugh and take it. But the moment I’m on my feet, Jesse has lifted me right back off of them, swooping me up into his arms.
“When was the last time you did it in a twin-size bed?” he asks. It is a joke. And I know better than to answer. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s not such a good sign how often I’m cherry-picking the truth.
Jesse rushes us out of the living room to the stairs.
“Oh, my God!” I cry out, stunned at how easily he can move about the house with me in his arms. “You’re gonna drop me!”
He doesn’t listen. Instead, he bounds up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He pushes open the door to the room that was once considered his. Jesse throws me onto the bed and lands on top of me.
Nothing I’ve ever done has felt as much like home as this, being underneath him, feeling his lips on mine, his hands running down my body.
He unbuttons my shirt and opens it wide.
My body has changed since he left, the somewhat natural process of time. But I don’t feel shy or embarrassed. I feel invigorated. As if I want to be as naked as possible, as quickly as possible—as if I want to show him all of me.
I watch as he takes his own shirt off, as he puts his arms over his head and pulls. I am surprised to see that he’s even skinnier than I imagined and that there is a tangle of faded puce scars running down the left half of his torso. They look like lightning bolts tied up in knots. He wears so much of his pain and hardships on his body.
“All those years that I missed you,” he says as he runs his nose gently down my collarbone, “I missed your face and your voice and your laugh.”
My body is hot, my face is flush. His hands feel so much better than I remember. His body fits into the corners of mine effortlessly, like our limbs were formed around each other, ebbing and flowing in relation to the other.
He tears the button of my jeans open with a flick of his wrist. “But more than anything I missed the feel of you,” he says as he pulls my jeans off of me, struggling at first to get them around my hips and then flinging them across the room. He wordlessly takes off his own. He lies back down and presses his whole body onto mine.
“I missed the way your hands feel on my back,” he says. “And the way your legs feel around me.”
I move slightly, inviting him.
And then I am lost.
I am no longer anyone but the Emma that loves Jesse Lerner, the Emma I’ve been for so much of my life.
And when we are moving together, breathing together, aching together, I hear him whisper, “Emma.”
And I whisper back, “Jesse.”
We are lying in bed.
We are naked.
We are tangled in sheets, covered in sweat.
We lie in each other’s arms and I am reminded of all of the other times we lay next to each other, catching our breath side by side, limbs intertwined. We learned how to do this together, explored ourselves with each other. We loved and desired each other when we were bad at it, and we grew good at it together, in tandem.
Now, we are great at it. The best we have ever been. Even though we are done, I roll over to Jesse and we begin once more.
He reciprocates easily, pressing into me and moaning.
His breath has gone sour. His hair smells dirty. It is my favorite form of him.
“Again,” he says. It is neither a question nor a command. Rather a simple fact, observed. We will do this again. We have to be closer again. Here we are again.
And this time, the passion is no longer akin to a house burning down, but instead feels like a steady burning flame, hot and warm.
Neither of us is in a rush. Neither of us could rush even if we wanted to.