He brushes a thumb under my eye, a smile on his lips, encouraging, loving. His hand rests on my waist, on my hip. Then he grips both hips and helps me settle more fully on him, and he’s in me and I’m surrounding him enveloping him falling forward onto him and clinging to his neck and groaning, waiting for myself to get used to him.

He’s stone still. Waiting. Shaking all over, stomach hard with tension.

Shaking with the need to move.

I’m wild with ecstatic glory, and he fills me and presses into me and scrapes against me such that I need only to move, to feel more, to fall higher. He isn’t moving—he won’t, I know it. He knows he’s big, that if he moves too fast, too hard, he could hurt me, and so he cedes control to me, even as I know everything inside him is driving him to take me, to take his release. His hands caress me, all over.

Finally, I feel the need to move exploding inside me. I press my palms flat on his chest and lift up, and his eyes meet mine, and I don’t look away as I begin to move. Lift up, pause, sink down. Gasp and moan on the downstroke, the filling thrust. A groan isn’t enough, though. It’s a song inside me, and the note I need to sing is loud, wild, enthralled, lost, gloried. So I lift up and sink down and let my voice go, give in to need, to nature, to what we are becoming together in this moment. He growls counterpoint to my long-drawn hoarse ragged cry, and the cry becomes a constant wail as I move faster, needing more, more. His big hard strong hands are not so gentle now and I relish the power in them as he grips my hips with rough dominance, tugging me downward, and the more I demand of him the more he gives me, and the tug of his hands becomes forceful and my bottom slaps against his thighs and there’s only us, and his lips are against my ear as we move in orchestral unison.

“Nadia,” he whispers, growls, grunts.

“Nathan, oh god, Nathan, Nathan.”

I think deep in the darkest corner of my soul, my hesitation at allowing this moment with Nathan to come was that I’d forget, that my lips would utter a different name. But that’s impossible. I am fully present, fully alive and fully aware of where I am, when I am, and whom I’m with.

Nathan.