Warmth rushes throughout my body a split second before I fall.

He sees it happen. He watches, mouth parting in relief, eyes blazing in victory. My orgasm crashes over me so hard, so consuming, I’m not myself anymore. I’m the savage pulling him down onto me, rutting up into him and gripping his ass to pull him in deeper. I’m pure desperation beneath him, begging, biting his shoulder, spreading my legs as wide as they’ll go.

The wildness unhinges him. I can hear the sheets pop away from the mattress and feel them bunch behind me as he grips them for leverage, moving hard enough that the headboard cracks into the wall.

“Oh,” he groans, rhythm growing punishing. He buries his face in my neck, groaning, “Here. Here. Here.”

And then he opens his mouth on my neck, sucking and pressing, shoulders shaking over me as he comes. I slide my hands over his back, relishing the bunching definition of his tense posture, the curve to his spine as he stays as deep as he can. I shift beneath him to feel his skin on mine, mixing my sweat with his.

Ansel pushes up to his elbows and hovers over me, still pulsing inside as he presses his palms to my forehead and slides them over my hair.

“It’s too good,” he says against my lips. “It’s so good, cerise.”

And then he reaches between us to grip the condom, pulling out and slipping it off. He drops it blindly in the vicinity of the bedside table and collapses beside me on the mattress, dragging his left hand down his face, across his sweaty chest where it comes to rest over his heart. I’m unable to look away from the gold band on his ring finger. His stomach tightens with each jagged inhale, jerks with each forceful exhale.

"Please, Mia."

I have one last refusal in me, and I squeak it out: "I can't."

He closes his eyes and my heart splinters, imagining not seeing him again.

"If we hadn’t been drunk and crazy and ended up married last night . . . would you have come with me to France?" he asks. “Just for the adventure of it?”

"I don't know." But the answer is, I might have. I don't need to move to Boston yet; I plan to because I had to leave my campus apartment but don’t want to move back in with my parents for the entire summer. Paris—with Ansel only as a lover, maybe even just as a roommate—would be a wild adventure. It wouldn't carry the same weight of moving in with him for the summer, as his wife.

Moving because we’re married feels like pretending it could last. Moving as a lover is impulsive, wild, something a twenty-three-year-old woman should do.

He smiles, a little sadly, and kisses me.