"Am I?" He growled, speeding up, pushing himself into me harder, until each thrust was forcing the air out of my lungs. "I want you to come, Tasha. I want to feel you coming on my cock."
It was going to happen. I could sense it building with each kiss, each sweet movement of Kaden's body against mine. When it was very close, to the point where I was inhaling in quick, short little bursts and every cell in my body felt like it was doing the same thing, I said something I didn't mean to say. I don't even remember saying it - Kaden only told me afterwards that I had.
"Come inside me," I whispered, burying my face into the hard muscle where his shoulder met his neck. "Please, Kaden. Please come in me."
And before the word 'me' had even slipped fully from my tongue the rollercoaster ticked over the very peak of the hill and a rush of blissful oblivion seized my body. I clawed at Kaden's back, pulling him against me, driven by an absolute need to have him as far inside me, as close to me as possible. I could feel my sex pulsing around him, each tightening better than the one before it, until his breath was ragged and his body was stiffening.
"Tasha," he groaned, digging his fingers into the flesh of my hip just before he jerked his hips down one more time and stayed there, all the way inside me, emptying himself of what felt like everything.
"Wait," he said, holding me down when I shifted my body slightly. "Wait."
He wasn't finished. I angled my hips up and smiled at him as our eyes met again and he thrust into me a few more times, his face creasing into a grimace as he shuddered the last of his orgasm away.
I almost cried. That sensation of emotion that crawls over your face, stinging your eyes and tightening your throat almost got me but I swallowed it back down to where it had come from. The last thing he needed was to be forced to deal with my tears. I myself didn't even know where they'd come from.
Kaden didn't say anything, nor did he pull out right away. I reached up and put my palm on his cheek, awash with post-orgasmic tenderness and filled with a powerful need to take care of him, to take his pain away.
"Are you OK?" I asked, when his breath had slowed a little.
He reached down and pulled himself out of me, collapsing onto the sofa and pulling me on top of him in one move.
"I don't know, Tasha," he said, wrapping his arms around me and holding me against him. "I can't tell. Right now, here, with you? I'm OK."
It took awhile, I think, for what had happened to sink in for both of us. We lay on the sofa quietly, just listening to and feeling each other breathing.
"This feels different," I said, quietly, after we'd laid together in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
"It does," Kaden agreed.
"Why?"
He thought about it for a few seconds. "I'm not sure. Maybe because of - well, it's a lot of things. Obvious things, yeah. But a lot of time has passed, a lot of feelings have passed."
I stifled the cold stiffening in my body at that last phrase: 'a lot of feelings have passed.' His mother was in the hospital, on the verge of death. I knew better than anybody how real and profound that fear was. It wasn't for me to make that evening about me. But I said nothing, which was a mistake. If I'd questioned him he would have explained what he meant, and the mistaken beliefs that grew out of those few words could have been avoided.
A few minutes later, when I felt it was safe to do so without Kaden reading anything into it, I got up.
"I have to go to the bathroom."
I flipped the light on and closed the door behind me before catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. There was a certain amount of surprise when I saw that I still looked exactly the same. Part of me expected to look different, somehow, after what had just happened. My hair was messed up and my lip-gloss had been kissed off but nope, still the same old me.
Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.
'It' being that comment, from Kaden. The one about feelings having passed. Maybe it was the strangeness of the evening itself, but I think I actually managed to justify it to myself - that night, anyway. Obviously feelings had passed. I was the odd one out there, wasn't I? Other people got over feelings, or developed the same feelings but for new people. That was normal. Wasn't it enough that he still, on some level, came to me when he needed someone? He'd even said it himself that he missed me.
Briefly, I looked into my own eyes in the mirror and then away again very quickly. I knew I was rationalizing and somewhere inside, underneath the happy hormones and post-coital feelings of warmth, was the knowledge that I might have just made a very big mistake. Two years and it didn't feel like anything had changed. I told myself things had changed. I no longer thought of him every night before I went to bed, I no longer spent every spare ounce of mental energy missing him. Maybe that's what people meant when they said you 'get over' someone. Maybe they meant you feel the same way about them, you just develop the ability to go on with your life without their absence affecting you all the time?