He keeps me there and refuses to relent, and the waveform of climax dips to a brief trough of between, and then he does something else and I’m riding another crest and his hair is soft on my belly and his beard scratchy against my inner thighs and his tongue is clever and his fingers strong and gentle. I can’t take any more, I’ll explode if there’s more—but there is, and I fling through that as well, and each time I think I’ve reached as far as I can go, that I’ve come as hard as I can come, he finds a way to push me past that edge.

And then I just need him.

I pull at his jaw, tug at his beard, and he ascends my body, wiping his lips with his hands. A million thoughts rifle through my head, but none of them make it past my lips. I roll away from him, to my bedside drawer. Pull out a new, unopened box, hand it to him.

“I guessed at the size,” I whisper. “I thought I was being generous, but I think they may even be too small.”

“Nah. They’re perfect.” He opens the box, pulls one out.

This feels so weird, so foreign. In my previous life, we never used these. And again, that’s as close to that line of thought as I can go. Just that this, too, is uniquely ours, Nathan’s and mine.

I watch him rip open the square foil packet, and my nerves flutter in my throat.

He sets the foil aside, and is about to roll it on; I take it from him. Use my hand on him for a moment, just touching. And then I sheathe him in latex, and there’s a pause, him on his side, me on mine, facing each other, as we silently debate what’s next: whose going on top?

He pulls me to him. Rolls to his back. Yes, this. Our first time should be like this. I look down at him as I straddle him, like our first kiss when I straddled him—I never told him, but that moment, when I sat on him and kissed him, I had a vision of this, us like this, and I knew then it would like this. And that’s why I stopped, because I wasn’t there yet.

I am, now.

I reach between my thighs and find him. Grasp him, touch him to me. Hesitate. His eyes rake my body, then fix on my eyes, and we’re both shaking, trembling, panting, neither of us ready and knowing we never will be.