Page 137 of The Sun and Her Star

“I want to make love to you,” I mumble against her mouth.

“I want to make love toyou,”she says and then she lifts off me and kneels between my knees. I pull my hand back and watch her slide her palms down my torso.

“Oh, Graham,” she sighs as she traces the depressions and swells the muscles of my abdomen make on my stomach.

She grabs the band of my briefs and tugs them down. My cock springs out, and she bends down to place a kiss on the tip of it before she swipes the head with her tongue and licks away the bead of cum that’s already there.

“Apollo ...” I reach to stroke her hair, and she presses another kiss to my thigh before she pulls my briefs all the way down my legs and tosses them aside.

She climbs back up and straddles me. My cock nestles in between the cheeks of her ass, and she rocks forward.

I fist my cock and nudge the entrance of her pussy with just the tip. She rotates her hips each time, taking me deeper inside her.

“Oh, baby.” I grip her hips and gasp as her tight, hot, wet pussy surrounds me in the most delicious grasp. Time and space blend, reality bends. We flow into each other in an endless wave of give and take.

She’s not a sorceress who has cast an unbreakable spell. It’s not arrows from mischievous gods or even luck. What binds us is the fusion of two stars that were destined to collide. Where one ends and the other begins ceases to exist. All I can see, hear, remember is Apollo.

When we collapse into an exhausted pile of satisfaction and sweat, she curls into me.

My best friend.

My sunshine.

My salvation.

My heart is beating harder and faster than it ever has as I hold my entire world in my arms.

“I love you, Sunshine,” I whisper into the back of her neck

“Always, Star,” is the last thing I hear before I close my eyes and dream.

Epilogue

Graham

After my mother died, I couldn’t cry.

She warned me it would happen. In the two weeks leading up to her death, I spent a good part of every day lying next to her crying. When they moved her to hospice care, I panicked. She kept saying, “If you cry all your tears now, you won’t have any left after I’m gone.” She actually laughed as she stroked my head.

Mama hadn’t wanted to plan her funeral. Far too macabre for her blood, and besides, she’d said, “I won’t be here, what do I care?” Her only request was that after whatever we decided to do she be cremated and her ashes scattered back in Texas, near where she thought Ellie was buried.

So, I’m in Fredericksburg. Apollo is with me. She’s the reason I’ve made it through the week. Mama had been right. It hurt like hell, but there were no tears. So, I was busy planning the funeral, and every night I would collapse into bed, weary to my bones, sick with grief and I couldn’t cry. And it made me irritable. Apollo never once made me feel like the jerk I was surely acting like. She left me in peace when I needed it and stuck to me like second skin when I neededthat.There hasn’t been a second during this terrible week where I have felt alone.

Caine’s Weeping doesn’t exist anymore. After the raid, the entire thing was razed to the ground and trees were planted in its place. So, I had to approximate where to go. It was only then, standing in a place where my sister may or may not have been buried, that the dam broke. And yet, the grief that threatened to drown me didn’t because my lifeline was standing next to me making sure that I wasn’t washed away. I walked away from the site with a new understanding about my life.

Whether she intended to or not, my mother started preparing me for this moment a long time ago. If she had given me that book, I wouldn’t have wanted anything more from life than what I had.The Hobbitwas proof that there was life beyond Caine’s Weeping. That book moved through my life like a river and it carved me an entirely new course.

Because of that book, when the sun fell out of sky, I was there to catch it. And because I’d been introduced to wizards and hobbits, I hadn’t been afraid of the girl with hair like a raven’s wing and a smile that rivaled the sun for brightness.

For so long, I’d lived in fear of my mother’s passing. Did everything I could to delay it. Not just because I would miss her, but because I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t her son. Thanks to that book, that question has been answered in profound and pivotal ways. Repeatedly. I am always going to be her son. But, because of that book, I got the chance to be so much more.

It’s our last night before we head back to New York. We’ve tied a hammock on the porch of the house we’re renting. Apollo is asleep, as she often is at this late stage of her pregnancy. The baby cocooned in the safety of her strong, beautiful body has shown me that I am more than just the sum of my parts. This baby will be proof that Iexisted.

I gaze up at the stars and remember the first time I saw them up close I’d been afraid that I would never know more than what I was seeing that night. But, I should have known, that just like everything else Apollo has given me, what came next would exceed my wildest dreams.

“Hey Star.” Apollo’s sleepy whisper makes my pulse jump and my heart race. I love her so fucking much.

“Hey, Sunshine.” I kiss the top of her head and she throws a leg over my hip and wraps an arm around my waist. “You have a good nap?”

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