Page 80 of Like First Love, Again

“I’m yours,” she stammered, overwhelmed by so many sensations at once.

“Tell me again,” she demanded, pressing the vibrator directly over Mia’s clit in what was almost too much. Something somewhere in the blurry line between pleasure and pain.

Mia said it over and over until the words lost their meaning. Until they blended into her pleas for release.

“Give it to me,” Tori demanded, sweat making them both slippery but nothing made her slow her intense pace. “Give me what’s mine.”

Crumbling forward, Mia rocked backward into Tori. Once. Twice. She took the vibrator from Tori and shifted its placement. When she came, she was screaming Tori’s name and begging her to believe that she was hers.

Completely inside of her, Tori only moved in the smallest increments while Mia clenched and spasmed around her. While she trembled and cursed and tried not to die.

Before Tori eased out of her, she kissed a line up her back. She was at her shoulder blade when she whispered, “Good girl.”

“Jesus,” Mia whimpered, dropping onto her side with just enough energy to turn off the vibrator. She didn’t let Tori take the harness off. She pulled her in close instead.

Understanding what she needed, Tori was still catching her breath when she wrapped her arms around her.

“Are you okay?” Tori soothed Mia’s hair back and kissed her damp forehead. “Too much?”

Mia shook her head and buried her face in Tori’s neck. She inhaled the scent of her skin and resisted the urge to cry. She wasn’t sad, but the emotions expanding in her chest were overwhelming.

“I didn’t know it could be like this,” she said, meaning so many different things at once. So many things she didn’t have the language to name.

“It can be like anything you want,” Tori replied like it was just that simple.

Mia closed her eyes and breathed her in. She didn’t say it.

She didn’t tell Tori she loved her. Even as it blazed a hole through her sternum.

Mia wanted to be everything for her. She wanted to be the reason Tori’s chest ached in the best way. The person she thought about when folding laundry or waking up too early or driving home in traffic. She wanted to be her soft place. Her spark. Her reason.

She couldn’t have imagined it was possible to feel this full. This seen. This fucking happy.

Giddy and delirious, Mia felt drunk when she asked, “So… can I try wearing it?”

Tori laughed before apparently realizing Mia wasn’t kidding. “Running and walking for the first time in one night?”

Mia let her hand wander over the curve of Tori’s lower back, intending to get them water before they continued. “Can you see the point of waiting?”

Tori stilled, just for a breath, eyes on Mia like she could peer straight into her soul. And then she smiled with every part of her face, but only the very corner of her mouth. The kind of smile that Mia felt like an earthquake in her chest.

“No,” Tori whispered. “Not anymore.”

Forty

With incredibly minor exceptions, every part of Mia’s body hurt. Hurt in that earned ache she once had after completing a spin class without collapsing off the bike, stupid clippy shoes and all.

Tori was hiding it, but Mia was sure that she was tired, too. The sky was starting to lighten outside Tori’s huge uncovered windows, and even for a runner, the hours of sustained cardio must have been depleting.

But Mia couldn’t stop thinking about all the time they’d lost. All the nights over the last nearly fifteen years they hadn’t been together. All the times Tori’s lips went unkissed. The nights she went to bed alone without Mia’s hand rubbing gentle circles on her back. Every time she thought of that, she couldn’t imagine stopping. Not for something as inconsequential as physical exhaustion.

“Did you change your mind?” Tori returned from the bathroom with a smaller strap and different kind of harness. Unlike the new one they’d picked, Tori’s looked like boy shorts.

“You wish,” Mia joked before getting out of bed and realizing even the bottoms of her feet were sore for reasons she didn’t know. “Why? You ready to call it quits?”

Tori laughed. Hair a mess and body littered with as many bites as Mia had—though all easily concealed under her work clothes—Tori looked thrilled by the challenge.

She leaned in and kissed Mia’s bruised lips. “Baby, you’re not going to out-sex me, but if you’re ready to tap out?—”

---