Page 52 of The Break-Up Pact

His hands are roaming farther down now, landing on my waist, following the rhythm of me as I ride him. I feel him hit that impossibly sweet spot in me and have to close my eyes, have to throw my head back for the way it stuns me, the delicious friction of it, the way it’s building so steadily that for once, a resolution isn’t an if, but a when.

The feeling is startling enough that I slow my pace, and Levi eases himself up and says, “Can I…”

The pressure of his fingers tightens around my waist and I nod, already shifting before he moves me, settling me down with my back bare on the mattress. There’s an excruciating moment when he slides out of me and I am aching with the loss of it, but then he’s on top of me, then he’s sliding back home, and my back arches up to meet him with a new kind of shock. From this angle, he’s hitting that sweet spot and then some. From this angle, I can feel the friction of him so thoroughly that it feels like he’s reached into all of me, pulled me apart like something juicy and ripe.

He presses his finger just above my entrance again, and this time there’s nothing light or teasing in the pressure; it’s constant and relentless and perfect bliss. He picks up the pace and I stare up at him, and the sight of him in total and unmistakable rapture seizes in me, stirs every part of me, the feeling familiar but utterly foreign at the same time.

“I’m gonna—” My breath hitches, overcome with the heat pooling in my stomach, with the dizziness in my head, with the utter, bone-deep disbelief. “I’m gonna…”

Only a handful of times have I ever come from sex. Every true peak and valley I’ve ever felt has been self-given, in the minutes after sex or whenever I pleasured myself alone. I thought I knew what the buildup felt like—the mild disappointment and milder relief—but that… all that was nothing. A hiccup. A series of blips. Nothing compared to the heat coiling so deeply in me that it is awakening something that’s never been touched, something that growls in me low and deep, both satisfied and angry to have been kept waiting so long.

I’m desperate to give in to it. Desperate to know what kind of bone-quaking, earth-shattering feeling might come on the other side, even knowing that I am going to lose myself in a way I have never been lost before.

Levi’s next thrusts are slower, deeper. More deliberate. He presses himself into me, his teeth grazing my earlobe just before he says into my ear, “Tell me, June.”

The way he says my name just then blazes straight through my body. The tenderness and the heat of it. The possessiveness and the freedom in it—the way I know deep down, further than any of this goes, that he is the only person I ever want to say my name like that. That I could hear it a million more times in that tone of his and it would have the exact same searing, near-damning effect on me that it does right now.

“Oh, god,” I say, my words coming out in a strangled gasp. “You’re gonna make me come.”

His face is burrowed in my neck, his mouth sucking ruthlessly against the sensitive skin, his fingers digging into my shoulders—all of it grounding me so thoroughly into this moment that I am more present than I’ve ever been in my own body, feeling every inch of myself at once, from my swimming head to my curling toes.

“Then come,” he says, a low, gentle command.

Even the buildup doesn’t prepare me for how fast it happens at the sound of his words, as if they cast a spell over me. I am undone, powerless against the shuddering ecstasy of it, the need to press myself closer, closer, closer to him as my breath stalls and I let out a cry of pleasure in a pitch so unfamiliar that I don’t recognize it as my own even as it comes out of my own throat.

I’m senseless, weightless. There is only the pressure of Levi’s hands roaming my body, the heat of my own clinging on to his back, the surge of mutual oblivion. I am somehow both lost and found, somehow outside of my own body but more myself than I’ve ever been. The peak of my pleasure shudders through my body with a force that borders on violence, a force that seems to command Levi in turn; he lets out a gasp and a groan of pleasure so intense that I don’t just hear it but feel it vibrating in his chest against mine, feel it lingering in the air between us, a sound I seize and know I’m going to hold on to forever. A sound that is wholly and spectacularly mine.

I don’t even realize I’m gasping his name over and over until he’s murmuring mine back. By then, both of our eyes are wide open, staring into each other’s, and we’re breathing warm, stunned air in the few inches between us. I stare up into eyes that are somehow achingly familiar to me but startlingly new, like some new depth of them has been revealed, and I am finally seeing into the whole of him. As if he has been waiting to show it to me, or maybe I have been waiting to finally see it.

It’s love and it’s fear and it’s everything in between. It’s ancient with understanding and fresh with desire. It’s everything I feel reflected back at me, anchoring me in this moment so surely, so steadily, that it feels every bit as shocking to my system as everything that came before it.

But this—it’s a gentler kind of shock. A quiet, settling kind. Levi holds my face between his hands, using his thumbs to wipe away tears that somehow slid out of me in the heat of our pleasure, ones that are still streaming out of me even now.

“You’re okay?” he says.

“I’m…” Everything, I want to say. I’m everything I’ve never been, everything I didn’t even know to ask for, because I didn’t know it existed. This feeling of completion. Of no longer knowing the beginning or the end of me, but not minding one bit, because at the borders of it there was still this: a person who knows me. Who looks at me like this. Who holds my face in his hands and stares at me with such unselfconscious, unselfish care that it suddenly feels absurd to me that I spent so much of my life without it. That I settled for the brief, cheap shine of any other kind of pleasure when Levi has brought me the sun.

“More than,” I finally say, my eyes tearing up again. “Levi.”

He smiles down at me, the kind of smile I’ve never seen on him before, easy and slow and dazed. Mine.

“June,” he says right back.

He brushes the other tears from my cheeks, then slowly pulls himself out of me. We let out twin gasps at the loss of the pressure, aftershocks to the earthquake of us, but his gaze on me never wavers.

After we’ve cleaned ourselves up, we ease back on top of the tangle of sheets together, his eyes searching mine, two blue flames in the dark. “Do you want me to stay?”

“I want you to stay,” I tell him. And I don’t just mean tonight. I don’t just mean my apartment. I mean here, in Benson Beach, in my heart, where he’s never so far that I can’t reach out and touch him like this again.

The new smile of his softens. He presses a kiss that starts at my temple, travels to the tip of my nose, to the edges of my lips. With steady hands he repositions us, shifting his body to the mattress so we’re still side by side, still linked by his arms wrapped around me as he gently eases the front of his body to the back of mine. I am so warm with the reassuring heat of him that I forget to overthink the intimacy of it the way I always used to do, forget to feel the sound of my own heartbeat, forget to worry about what he’s thinking of me, forget to worry about anything at all.

“Good,” he murmurs into my ear. “Because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

The words are a balm for my hammering heart. I press myself farther into him, taking the hand of the arm that’s draped over my shoulder and weaving my fingers into his. He squeezes back the way I knew he would now that I’m leaning fully into this innate trust I have in him, the one I have wanted to let myself feel for longer than I can trace back.

I don’t mean to close my eyes. I take in a breath to say something—to talk about what just happened. To tell Levi how much this means to me, in case he didn’t already understand.

But I feel it in the weight of his arm around me. The understanding, and the calm in it. The way I don’t have to be anybody but myself in this moment, because he understands my heart by touch alone.

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