“I just don’t know what I would do without you,” he said.
“I know. I feel the same way …”
Omkar cut her reply short. “No, that’s just the thing … You don’t know. You don’t know that you’re all I think about. You don’t know that if my whole life just fell apart, it would all be worth it because nothing else has mattered so much to me in all my life as you matter to me. Aria, you are my yesterday and my today and my tomorrow. And just the thought of you with another man, I can’t stand it.”
He walked toward the door, hoping to find that it could be opened from the inside, despite being locked from the outside. He had thought that Aria had followed him, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had unzipped her backpack on the floor to find the feather that Luke had given her. When she caught up to him, at first she said nothing. She extended the feather toward him, far enough that the texture of it brushed against his arm.
At first, Omkar didn’t understand the symbolism of her gesture. “‘Bring me this hawk feather and I will know it means yes, you can give me your heart. If not, you can keep it.’ Omkar, I am giving you this feather because I am giving my heart to you.” Omkar looked down at the feather before he took it between his fingers. He let the feather fall, wanting instead to feel her between them.
The passion that drove his body toward her would have made resistance impossible, not that it ever existed within her. He ran his hands from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, gripping her as if torn between one part of him that wanted to preserve her and another that wanted to consume her. When he pushed her against the bookcase, Aria braced herself by gripping the case binding of the books, and when he pulled her away from it, a few of them fell onto the floor. The heaviness of his breath licked the silhouette of her neck before the tip of his tongue could taste it. Beneath the armor of his flesh, the way that he kissed her made the lines that defined them dissipate. She could have forgotten where he ended and she began.
Omkar’s mind wandered to whether or not anyone could see them. But the feeling of her hand against his cheek brought his mind back to her again. Wantonly she grappled with the unyielding fabric and buttons of his jeans. He tore his shirt up and over his head in response to her. Using his own weight to push her up against the bookcase again, he pulled the collar of her shirt just low enough to kiss the peach of her breasts with reverence.
Though her tug and stroke could not speak louder of the permission that she was willingly giving him, Omkar restrained himself from stripping the clothes from her with his own two hands. Instead, he waited for the pearl of her naked skin to be revealed to him when she took them off herself. It was far from the first time that Aria had found herself in a position like this. But the usual control that she took was something that the love she felt for him would not allow her to take this time. Whatever power she had, had been given over to the arch and bend of the light that displayed his muscles. Now that her heart was involved, like a prey animal that had been hunted down, she froze, waiting for his next move.
Omkar knelt down and placed her hands on the back of his neck. He held the back of her thigh, pressing deep kisses with his teeth into the front of it. He pulled her to the floor with him, using his arm like a cradle to buffer the willow of her body from the stone of the floor. At first, Omkar moved slowly so as to learn the notes to the melody of flesh. His skin slid pervasively over hers, so exposed that they could feel the earth’s rotation. In the pause he took to assure himself of her readiness, Aria thought about the fact that they didn’t have a condom. It was that moment that every girl looks back on and calls herself stupid for. But the fear of consequences did not outweigh her desire to belong to him.
Omkar reached down to insert himself inside her, his fingers sliding against the wet silk of her labia. When he entered the world of her body for the first time, Aria let a gasp egress from the back of her throat. The warmth and tightness of her fawned over the frame of his erect phallus. The instinct that drove them throbbed in waves that he thrust deep inside her. With the frailty of her femininity in the palm of his hands, the pain that he felt was the pain of not being able to thrust himself loose of the confines of his body enough for them to dissolve into one. With every thrust up to the last, it felt like he took a part of her into himself until he owned her completely. But it did not feel like a loss. It felt like she had found a home. The dew of her wanted to be taken and he had wanted to take it. The storm of their idolatry of each other had left the moon trembling in its wake. Its fragile beams streamed through the window and exhausted themselves across the shine of the floor. The virile fluid of his craving to make her belong to him was warm inside of her. Its slippery fervor had made a delicate marsh of her vulva and thighs.
Aware of the fact that the library was no place to let the tide of post-coital affection wash over them, Omkar rolled
