He carries me in, laying me back on the bed. I can tell he wants to look down at me and appreciate the moment, but I grab his shirt and drag him down onto my comforter covered in pink roses, my favorite.
The light from the hall is enough to see his body is far better than I imagined it to be. We are naked and writhing against each other, just as I always wished we would.
There is no way I could have been more wrong about every aspect of him. When he’s on top of me, pushing himself inside, I swear I have never felt anything like it. He doesn’t treat me like a gentle creature or pay homage; he’s rough in the right way. He doesn’t quite make love, and that’s the way I like it. He thrusts, lifting my leg higher, so my calf rests upon his shoulder. It’s a steady balance of thrust, pressure, and size, and it brings me to an orgasmic level of joy I couldn’t dream of. We orgasm together, collapsing in a heap of awkward sweat.
He kisses my cheek, whispering into the brush of our skin, “I don’t know if I should apologize or thank you.”
I smile. “Do either and I will murder you.”
“And we can’t forget you actually know how to do it and get away with it.”
“That is a fact you don’t want to overlook.” I turn my face, brushing my lips against his. “Can we just be who we are in this room and forget everything else in the real world?”
He nods. “And make up some story about how we met. Something plain and normal like your cat got out and I found him and we fell in love at first glance?”
“That’s a good story, but who do you plan on telling it to?”
“Just in case we need a backstory one day.” He grins, and I feel it against my lips. His discussing a future “one day,” after we’ve had sex for the first time ever, makes me moan, which in turn makes him laugh. “Did I scare you, Agent Spears? I know how much you like the possibility that one day you might be a normal girl.”
I shove him back. “You’re mean, going for my weaknesses like that.” He ignores my whining and wraps himself around me. I feel his fingers find my scars in the dark. It’s like telling him my secrets, but with him I never have to explain. I don’t ever have to say the words My entire family died in a terrible fiery crash. I lived, but I lost them in every way. I lost my twin sister, Andrea. I lost my father and my mother. I lost everything in a blink of pain and screaming, but then in a secondary way, I lost them again. When I woke from the coma, after six months, I was a blank slate. I was alone in the world. I was an orphan of the truest kind.
A person can only lose so much before God or whatever force there is shines a light upon him or her. That light for me was an orphanage where I learned how to be me. I learned to be strong, because the nuns were strong. I learned how to be fast, because the mean kids at school were faster. I learned to be cruel in response to cruelty being inflicted upon me by kids from the town where the orphanage was. But I also learned there were comforts in the world, comforts you had to find. The sound of dishes and humming and singing and cooking. Those were good sounds. Rose gardens with pink roses everywhere—those were beautiful places to hide and be alone. Shredding paper in the head nun’s office for fun was a comfort. The smell of shredded paper still makes me smile. The nuns loved us in their capacity and treated us with kindness and grace. They taught us to be good people.
When you lose everything, you are grateful for the little things you find.
His fingers tracing the scar where I lost the ability to ever have children is a little thing. He knows what the scar is, and yet he is making up a backstory to be with me. Maybe it’s only in this moment, maybe it’s for the rest of my life, maybe it’s for a year. It doesn’t matter, because to an orphan like me an hour like this one is something to cherish. And working with people like Samantha Barnes is perspective a person can always use. My parents loved me, I’m sure of that. I’m sure they never meant to leave me behind. And at the very least, they never harmed me. They never left me to kill myself in a concrete room out of desperation to stop myself from becoming them.
No, my parents and my twin sister were good people.
I close my eyes, grateful he is here, and let him be bigger than anything else in the world. And if we wake up in the morning and decide we don’t need a backstory, I will be grateful we had tonight because it was more than I ever imagined.
EPILOGUE
A YEAR LATER
I creep into the town house, worried about what I might find. The smell is amazing, but it’s silent. I tiptoe into the kitchen to find nothing but the oven on and some dishes in the sink. The table in the dining room is set, with wineglasses and a pink rose across my plate. The living room is empty, and Binx is nowhere to be seen. My heart is racing, my mouth is dry, and I’m not sure of exactly what to expect, but I know it’s going to be bad. He’s such a diva, drama queen, and emotional mess. I can’t take it.