There is no long-distance arrangement. We haven’t bothered to talk about what’ll happen when I’m back in town. It’s pointless. Now that I have my own place in Cali, I’ll be in Hampton less and less. I’m more likely to end up in Norfolk or at my brother’s cabin for the holidays. I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents put our house on the market sometime this year.

I won’t stay. He can’t leave. We both know that this is the end of what could have been.

All we’ll have left after tonight are memories and this mutual ache I fear we’ll carry with us for a lifetime.

I brush my fingertips over his lips, then trace the definition of his throat. I will my head to stop spinning and the tears to stop falling as I desperately try to memorize every detail of this man. I resist the urge to even blink and lose a millisecond of the time we have left.

He raises his mouth to mine in the most agonizingly slow kiss, sealing a fate we both know is inevitable. He’s kissing me goodbye, and the kiss is filled with so much sorrow, I think I might combust.

I can taste his sadness. There’s so much regret and longing behind the way his mouth moves against my lips, my neck, my chest, my stomach as he crawls down my body and positions me where he wants me.

“You’re still mine tonight,” he murmurs against my inner thigh.

I say nothing. I can’t. But then he hovers over my body and tilts my chin up, urging me to look him in the eye.

“Stay with me, baby girl. It won’t hurt less if you pull away before time’s up. Stay with me—right here, right now—and live in this moment. Let me try to show you what a lifetime of us could have been.”

I choke back another sob and nod. If all I have to give him is this one last night, I don’t want to cry. I want to be right here, totally in it.

He peels down my thong and savors the skin around my center, kissing, sucking, and even biting me with slow, tantric care. He licks up my folds and sucks on my clit just how I like, but he doesn’t build me up high enough to fall.

He rolls on a condom and nudges in, giving me just an inch at a time, forcing me to feel every roll of his hips and tilt of his pelvis. When he’s finally seated inside me, he uses those damn arms I love to hold himself above me, locking me in his gaze and stroking my hair as we revel in this connection one last time.