He stroked her cheek with one hand and used the other to guide his dick back inside her. And even though he’d just been begging her to fuck him faster and harder, he fucked her in long, achingly deep, slow strokes. And even better — or worse — his eyes never strayed from her face. Deja had nowhere else to look but back at him as he made love to her tenderly until the force of his own orgasm made him bury his face in the crook of her neck.

She felt his shouted release against her skin as he filled the condom between them.

Six weeks was a long time, but Deja wanted to believe that it wasn’t too long. She wrapped her arms and legs around Alejandro and held him close, hoping for the first time ever that winter break didn’t last too long.

Fifteen

Week One

Deja was sitting in her home office at the desk she rarely used to write and mostly used to stress about writing. She had a small stack of books piled high on her right — books she’d started reading but hadn’t finished yet — and a folder of earlier iterations of the first and hardest chapter of the book she was really trying to write on her left. She opened the latest version of the chapter on her laptop and forced herself to take slow, even breaths.

Her most frequent writing advice to her students was that a messy first draft was your friend because it was always easier to revise than confront a blank page. She fundamentally believed in that advice, but over the years, she’d started to wonder if that advice could work for everyone else but her. But she knew that couldn’t be true because she remembered writing those chapters of her dissertation and feeling a kind of freedom. Sure, she’d camped out in the grad student computer lab in her alma mater’s main library at the computer in the far south corner for nearly ten hours a day, every day for close to three months, but she’d loved it. She’d been certain that her brilliance was hitting the page in a way that would change the field of Sociology, and she’d felt so hopeful about the rest of her career.