The Edge of Always

erection. She licks the tip of my tongue before closing her mouth around mine and I wrap my arms around her body possessively. She presses herself against me below, the softness of her skin, her wetness that I feel so easily through her thin, cotton panties. Without breaking the hungry kiss, I reach down with one hand, slipping my fingers behind each side of her panties and take them off. I thrust my hips toward her, pressing my swollen cock against her warmth.

I roll over on top of her and look down into her eyes. But I don’t say a word. I don’t tell her how wet she is, or force her to look at me. I don’t dominate her with words or gestures or demands. I just gaze into her eyes and know that this is a moment where words are not needed.

I kiss her lips again softly, the corners of her mouth, the outline of her cheekbone. Parting her lips with my tongue, I very softly kiss her and reach down and take my cock into my hand, rubbing it against her. I feel her hips shift toward me, letting me know how bad she wants me inside of her. I don’t want to tease her this time, or deny her what she needs, so I push myself in just barely and watch her lose control of her gaze, her eyes fluttering, her lips parting. Forcing my cock in further, I feel her legs tremble around me. She moans softly, biting down on her bottom lip. I kiss her again and finally push myself deep inside of her, as far as I can go. I hold it there, basking in the shaking of her thighs, the trembling of her hands as they hold onto me, her fingers digging into my back.

I rock harder against her, gyrating my hips. A thin layer of sweat begins to bead off our bodies. I want to lick it off her, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop…

I raise my body up enough that our chests are no longer touching and I grab one of her legs from around me, gripping under the bend of her knee, pushing it back so I can thrust deeper. I pound her harder, pushing her thigh down against the bed. She calls out my name, both of her hands clutching my waist, but she pulls them back and curls her fingers around the top of the mattress above her head. I watch hungrily as her breasts bounce up and down against her chest and I thrust even harder, leaning over to take her nipples into my mouth and then into my teeth.

My vision gets hazy. She moans loudly and then begins to whimper. The whimpering makes me crazy. I let go of her thigh and feel my body closing in on hers again, her breasts smashed into my chest, her arms wrapped tightly around my back. I feel her fingernails press painfully into my flesh. She rocks her hips against mine, and my mouth crashes over hers. As I start to come, my kiss becomes more ravenous. Tremors move through my body and I moan against her mouth and my hard thrusts are reduced to gentle rocking. Camryn takes my bottom lip between her teeth and I kiss her gently, still rocking my hips against her until I’m finished.

I collapse onto her chest. My erratic heartbeat trying to find its rhythm again, I feel the pumping of blood in my fingers and in my toes and aggravating the vein near my temple. I lay the side of my face against her bare breasts, my mouth parted, the breath expelling unevenly from my lips. Her fingers move through my moist hair.

We lie here together just like this, all morning, without saying a word.

31

I don’t remember falling asleep. When I open my eyes, the clock beside the bed says that it’s eleven ten. And I realize that I don’t feel naked because I have no clothes on, but I feel naked because Camryn isn’t in the bed with me.

She’s sitting on the windowsill, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt without a bra. She’s gazing out the window.

“I think we should go,” she says without taking her eyes off the bright New Orleans landscape.

I sit up on the bed with the sheet draped over my lower half. “You want to leave New Orleans?” I ask, confused. “But I thought you said we left too soon the first time.”

“Yeah,” she says, but still doesn’t turn around. “The first time we left too soon, but we can’t stay here longer now just to make up for that.”

“But why do you want to leave? We’ve only been here one day.”

She turns to face me. There’s something like sentiment or resolve in her eyes, but I can’t make out which, or if it’s both.

After a long hesitation, she says, “Andrew, I know this might sound stupid, but I think if we stay here… I…”

I stand up from the bed and step inside my boxers I find on the floor. “What’s going on?” I ask, approaching her.

She looks at me. “I just think that… well, when we first got here yesterday all I could think about is what this place meant to us last July. I realized that I kept picturing the times before, trying to relive them—”

“But they’re just not the same,” I add, having an idea.

It takes her a second, but finally she says, after a subtle nod, “Yeah. I guess it’s just that this place is such a significant memory—Shit, Andrew, I don’t even know what I’m saying!” Her thoughtful expression dissolves into frustration.

I pull out a chair at the table in front of the window and sit down, leaning forward and draping my folded hands between my knees, and I gaze up at her. I begin to say something to add to her explanation, but she beats me to it.

“Maybe we should never come back here.”

I didn’t expect her to say that. “Why?”

She presses the palms of her hands on the windowsill to hold up her body, her shoulders rigid, her back slouching. Confusion and uncertainty start to fade from her face as the seconds pass and she begins to understand.

“It’s like, you know, it doesn’t matter what you do, even if you try to replicate an experience down to every last detail, it’ll never be the way it was when it happened naturally the first time.” She looks out at the room in thought. “I remember when I was a kid. Cole and I would always play in the woods behind our old house. Some of my best memories. We built a tree house back there.” She glances at me and laughs lightly under her breath. “Well, it wasn’t so much a tree house as it was a few boards fixed between two branches. But it was our tree house and we were proud of it. And we played in it and in those woods every day after school.” Her face is lit up as she recalls this moment of her childhood. But then her smile begins to fade. “We moved away from there and into the house my mom lives in now, and I always thought of those woods and our tree house and the fun times we had together there. I used to sit alone in my room, or be driving somewhere, and get so lost in those memories that I could actually feel those feelings just like I felt them years ago.” She places her hand on her chest, her fingers outstretched.

“I went back there one day,” she goes on. “I got so addicted to the nostalgia that I thought I could intensify the feeling if I went, stood in the spot where our tree house used to be, sit down on the ground where I used to sit and drag a stick through the dirt to leave secret messages for Cole to read if I got there before him. But it wasn’t the same, Andrew.”

I watch and listen to her intently.

“It wasn’t the same,” she repeats distantly. “I was so disappointed. And I left that day with an even bigger hole in my heart than I had when I went there looking to fill it. And every day after that, whenever I’d try to envision it like I used to, I couldn’t. I shattered that memory by going back there. Without realizing it until it was too late, I replaced that memory with the emptiness of that day.”

I know exactly that feeling of nostalgia. I think everybody experiences it at some point in their lives, but I don’t elaborate or go into my own experience with it. Instead, I just continue to listen.

“All morning, I’ve been tricking my brain into believing that we’re not really in this room. That the bar we went to last night wasn’t Old Point. That the sad news about Eddie was just in a dream I had.” She looks me straight in the eyes. “I want to leave before I destroy this memory, too.”

She’s right. She’s absolutely right.

But I’m beginning to wonder if…

“Camryn, why were you trying to relive it?” I hate it that I’m about to say this. “Are you not happy with how things are? How we are?”