Autumn stretches out on my bed. She holds out her arms to me.
“Oh God,” I say.
She wants—
She said “with,” not “on,” but her arms—
I pull myself over her, leaning on my right elbow. One of her breasts is pressed against me. When I look at her face, her eyes meet mine. Her arms close around me, and she raises her lips toward mine.
I’m kissing her.
She’s kissing me.
It’s strange to feel as if I don’t have a body, but that’s what it’s like. I’m simply a soul existing ecstatically in the universe. Time and space are meaningless, temporary, inconsequential to me.
And then I crash back into myself. My body, her body, the actuality of the moment: they all hit me at once.
She is kissing me passionately.
Autumn is kissing me.
I cup her face in my hand.
I’ve wanted to touch her face so many times; every smile, every frown has tempted me. The lines of her face have haunted me as much as any other part of her body.
Her body.
Autumn holds on to me tightly, pressing against me. She moans softly as our lips part to inhale and exhale. If our brains weren’t so good at balancing needs, we probably would have suffocated by now.
I hope I’m kissing her right. It seems like I am. Maybe my instincts can finally be in charge and my frontal lobe will relax before I overthink this and find some way to mess it up.
Autumn is kissing me with the same intensity that I am kissing her, fast and hard. I try to slow down, worrying that perhaps my fervor will become tiring. But Autumn shifts to match my pace like we are dance partners and the music has changed. She doesn’t loosen her grip on me. Her sounds of pleasure are dizzying.
How did we get here? Unscrambling the last few minutes is too much for me right now. I need to be in this moment while it lasts.
Her.
Her.
I want to touch her breast.
No, Finn.
I try to bring my focus back to her lips—Autumn’s lips!—kissing mine again and again and again.
I try to be grateful for the breast that is pressing against my chest, but the other one is also right there.
Do I know how to make her happy? Because I can’t tear myself away from her mouth to speak. My left hand trails off her cheek and down her neck, around her shoulder.
Slow, Finn. Slow.
I try to signal what I’m doing so that she knows. No surprises, no mistakes. My thumb is at the bottom of the swell of her other breast, her ribs beneath my fingertips.
Slow.
I’m moving my hand, and then—
I’m holding Autumn’s breast in my hand.
After all these years of trying not to look at them yet having their silhouette branded in my mind, Autumn is beneath me and in my hand and under my lips and hips.
She sighs the sigh from the tent this morning, the one that I wished I had inspired, and I am gone again. I am only sensations. There is no other reality, only Autumn.
“Finny.”
I feel my name against my mouth at the same time as I hear it.
Again, I am crashing back into time and space.
I remember that my body is kissing Autumn.
The signal comes through.
Stop.
I raise my head and look down at her.
“Yeah?”
“I want—”
The light is still dim, but I can see her face a little better. She is flushed and her eyes are sparkling, wet. She looks apprehensive again.
I’ll say it for her if she can’t. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No!” she cries, surprising me. “I want the opposite of that.” Autumn bites her lip after blurting out the words, and she squirms nervously underneath me, setting off a series of feelings in my body that make it hard to process what she’s saying.
Because surely, she can’t mean what I think she means.
The opposite of stopping is—
“You want me to keep going?”
“Yes,” Autumn says.
My body screams for the same conclusion.
My instincts want to be in charge again, but this time, they are very wrong.
“I–I don’t have—”
Autumn must assume that I have condoms, which I don’t. Does she really want to do it with me after making out once, after waiting for so long with Jamie? No mistakes. No misunderstandings.
“I don’t care,” she says. There’s a firmness to her voice, a deep certainty.
“Autumn, no.” I should sit up and let us both cool down, but I don’t move. Autumn is nuzzling me. Nuzzling me.
“Please, Finny,” she says and kisses my neck in a way that melts me. “Please, Finny.”