Page 85 of The Fall Before Flight

My legs lock instinctively around his waist, my arms around his neck. I find his mouth and feed on the taste of him, the taste of me, until we both gasp for breath.

“Has it ever been like this?” he whispers in my ear.

I’m past speech at this point, so I shake my head. With a low growl of approval, he lets loose. The wet slap of our bodies joins the billowing steam. My sense of time and place shivers and blows apart as he drives again and again to that place of deep, brutal pleasure.

“Fuck, Leo, I’m—” The rest is lost in a cry of surrender.

He stiffens, pressed tight inside me, and comes with a roar. Aftershocks rock my womb like little firecrackers. I twitch in his arms and relearn to breathe.

“Holy shit,” he pants. “I can’t feel my legs.”

I gasp a laugh. “Don’t drop me!”

His eyes, full of wonder and tenderness, find mine.

“Never.”

Takeout Chinese food boxes litter the coffee table. There’s a movie on but neither of us is watching. My head in Leo’s lap, I flip through an architectural magazine while he scrolls through emails on his phone.

Staring at an ad for a tropical resort with a tagline of Find Your New Oasis, a question pops into my head. “Hey, do you know if Preston is okay?”

Leo freezes for a moment, then looks down at me. Sensing his discomfort, I sit up quickly. “It’s okay. Sorry I asked. I just, uh, never got his number and was thinking about him.”

His expression softens. “He’s fine. Doing really well, actually.”

I sigh. “Good. Great, thanks.”

For the rest of the night, we ignore how close we came to acknowledging the elephant in the room.

39

THE ELEPHANT

Leo and I lie entwined on his bed, which has fast become one of my favorite places in the world. The sheets and pillows are on the floor, victims of our recent passion. His head rests on my chest, facing away, and for the last few minutes his fingers have been playing on my abdomen. I know what has his focus—the three small moles just beneath my belly button.

“It’s Orion’s belt,” I murmur, stroking the hair at his temple. “Jameson has the rest of the constellation—minus the belt—on his right shoulder.”

Leo turns over and looks up at me. “Really?”

“Yep. My mom first noticed it. She was obsessed with the idea that we carried missing pieces of the other. When we fought, she often told us that no matter how far apart we felt, we would always complete each other, that it was a code written on our bodies. I remember one day she came home super excited from the craft store. She was always getting weird, artsy ideas, most of which ended up in the garbage. But this one came out pretty cool. She used tracing paper to mark our moles, then showed us how our combined constellation compared to the actual one.”

“And?”

I smile with the memory. “It was pretty darn close. Kinda freaky, really. For our seventh birthday, she presented each of us with framed copies of the constellation as it appears on our bodies. She did it so it looks like an actual map of stars.”

Soft lips press against my breastbone. “Do you still have it?”

I nod. “It’s in my bedroom.”

“I want to see it next time I’m there.”

My fingers pause in his hair, my gaze on the vaulted ceiling of his bedroom. “Okay,” I force out.

“Hey,” he says softly. “Come back.”

I meet his eyes with effort. “I’m here.”

He sits up and I follow, scooting back against the pillows and pulling the sheet over my breasts.

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