other like this before, but this time was different. My heart was thundering, and my skin sang. His hand traced down the line of my spine, and I arched into him. He continued over my hip and down my leg, his fingers curling behind my knee. A zing of electricity shot from my knee up to my core as he pulled my leg over his hip.
Our mouths met and he said, “God, I love the way you taste.”
He leaned into me, situating his leg between mine, and aligning our hips. He pushed inside me, and for a moment my whole body seemed to forget how to work. My blood forgot to pump, my lungs forgot to breathe, and my hips forgot to move.
His hands tightened on me, and he released a low groan into my neck.
He growled, “I love the way you feel.”
Laying on my side like this with our legs twined together, he reached deep inside me. I’d never had sex like this, wrapped up in another person until it was impossible to find the divide between us. His hips withdrew and then pushed again, and the friction had me arching my back.
My hips stayed aligned with his, but I bent backward until my head and half my back rested on the bed. Jackson leaned with me, curling around my body. His mouth burned a hot path from my collarbone down into the valley between my breasts. He kept a hand at the small of my back and used it to pull me in every time he surged forward.
He rained kisses down on my chest, and I clutched the back of his head, needing to feel him, to hold him against me.
He trailed up again, flicking his tongue over my collarbone and scraping his teeth against the column of my throat. My skin broke out in goose bumps, and I shuddered in his arms. He placed a kiss on the underside of my jaw, and I dipped my head down to meet his.
His tongue plunged into my mouth, mimicking the deep movement of the rest of his body, and I clung to him as he wrung pleasure from my body with each slow thrust.
“Kelsey,” he whispered.
I had to pry my eyes open, and even then each time his skin slid against mine I had to fight to hold up my eyelids. He pressed his forehead into mine, and rather than falling into his dark eyes, they seemed to pour something into me. Confidence, maybe. Or affection. Whatever it was, I stopped worrying about how this would play out. I stopped thinking of the ways I was inadequate. I stopped everything that didn’t have to do with this moment.
He said, “God, do you have any idea what you do to me? Any idea how long I’ve wanted you?”
I didn’t have any ideas about anything, except that I was so close.
I hooked my hand around his hip, my fingers splaying from his lower back to the curve of the rest of his body. I pressed my fingers into his skin, my fingernails spurring him on.
“Harder,” I begged.
His hips pushed forward, and I felt it all the way to my toes.
He slid the arm out from underneath my head and lifted himself up. He kept one knee between mine, and our hips fitted together. He used the leg I’d had around his hip to guide me onto my back. Then clutching my leg to his chest, he gave me exactly what I asked for.
His hips rolled into mine first, as I adjusted to the new position, then rocked forward harder. On his second thrust, I reached up and pressed my hand flat against the headboard.
His pace shifted from slow and steady to fast and hard and the bed creaked beneath us. I sucked in a breath, holding it as I drew closer and closer, and then I was falling all over again. Falling from that bridge. My heart in my throat. Falling for him. My heart in my hands. Falling apart. Falling together.
Falling into place.
It felt like hours before my heartbeat slowed, and I was strong enough to open my eyes.
When I did, my head was both clouded and clear. I couldn’t have remembered fractions or the state capitols or maybe even my name. Those things had been locked behind a wall of bliss. But Jackson’s face above mine? That was clear, as was the way just the sight of him made my heartbeat pick up again.
He lowered my leg to the outside of his hips, so that he was cradled between my thighs.
He leaned down and teased my tired lips with his own.
He said, “I could watch that a hundred more times. A thousand.”
I scrunched my nose up, certain that I’d probably made some hideous face in the throes of the moment. He smoothed the lines on my forehead with his thumb and said, “ I want to memorize the way your eyes clench shut and you bite down on your lip, so that I can sketch your expression from memory. I want to know the exact angle of the way your neck curves, and how many times your heart beats a minute. I want to know everything.”
I swallowed, my heart speeding up when it should have been slowing down. There were things about myself that even
Changing the subject, I asked, “So you don’t regret crossing that line?”
His mouth trailed across my jaw, and he hummed under his breath.
“I can still think of a few other lines I’d like to cross before the night is through.”
He rolled, pulling me on top of him, our bodies still intimately connected. The friction teased my sensitive skin, and I had to steady myself with my hands on his chest.
He traced the curve of my body from my breast to my waist to my hip and said with a wicked grin, “You’re adventurous, right?”
Now, this was the kind of adventure I was always on board for.
Hours stretched into days, and we only left the apartment in Riomaggiore when we had to. We got whatever food and supplies we needed, but we never lasted very long before our tastes turned away from food.
Our seventh day came and went, and neither of us made any move to leave or end our time together. And I began to understand the Via dell’Amore a little more, that chair and all those locks. I realized it wasn’t the lock that mattered so much as the fact that it required a key.
Jackson had found every little sensitive nook that made my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He knew what made me hold my breath and what made me cry out his name. He unlocked my body, and in doing so unlocked doors that held nothing but stale air and bad memories.
If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. I wondered if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.
23
I WOKE, MY breaths pushing from my lungs like broken glass. Jackson wasn’t in bed beside me, and I curled into a ball, glad for his absence.
Pieces of my dream were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try to hold on to them to examine or to push them away so I wouldn’t have to.
I’d been twelve again, but in that way that dreams don’t make sense, I was also twenty-two. Mom and Dad were arguing in the kitchen, and Mr. Ames, Dad’s business partner, had come upstairs. He said he was looking for a bathroom, but there were two on the bottom floor. He touched my shoulder. He told me I was soft. And like those animated flip books I played with as a kid, the sheets of my dream began to fan, and it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s hand against me, but the boy I’d lost my virginity to just a year and a half later.
He trailed his fingers to my neck, and then down to my chest. The pages flipped. More hands, a different one on every page. Some looked familiar. Some didn’t. But with each page, the hands swept across my body. The pages flipped and the locations began to change along with the hands—the back of a pickup truck, my freshman dorm, my apartment, a few hostels.
The scene shifted, and it was me and Mr. Ames in all those places, and I screamed and cried long after the dream had shifted on to a new person, a new place. And each hand carved away a part of me, sanded and chiseled until I was hollowed out, a wisp of a girl.
I pulled away, crying, and stumbled from a hostel bed to my parents’ living room couch. This time I was just me, present day, but my parents looked down at me like I was still only four feet tall.
Dad was talking, saying I was blowing things out of proportion. He morphed into Mr. Ames for just as