Something about her words strikes me as unusual, and it takes me a few beats to figure out what: she used a contraction.
I don’t bother saying that I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. I can only move with her, feeling her sweet, lush body slipping like yards of the softest silk beneath me, tasting her lips, her breath. God, I love her. Love her so f**king much it should be impossible, and I love her more with every breath I take, with every delve of my c**k into the heaven of her pu**y.
I love her more, and more, and I wonder how much I might love her in ten or twenty years. I try to imagine it, and my head spins.
Her nails claw down my back, and she whimpers, cries out, and now her legs curl around my ass and she pulls me in, and in, and in, harder and harder. It’s heaven, it’s sweet glorious perfection, angel of love made flesh, made woman, whose name is Rania.
Her br**sts are crushed against my chest, firm but giving, and her breath is on my ear, erotic moans, the soundtrack of sex, of love. Her inner muscles are clenching around me, clamping down as I drive in, releasing as I slip out, and goddamn I didn’t know a girl could do that. It feels like her pu**y is grabbing me and letting go, and it’s the hottest thing I’ve ever f**king felt.
I slip my arms beneath her neck and kiss into her oblivion, into breathless abandon; I kiss her until she’s gasping for breath and bucking into me, flung by passion into wildness. She’s an animal suddenly, arching her back, clinging to me with her arms and legs, with her whole body, screaming my name as she comes, and I can’t hold back, can only come with her, and oh, my f**king god, it’s the most intensely purifying experience of my life, my whole body is plunged into fire, into ecstasy.
“Rania…” I gasp her name.
It’s the only word I know, in that moment. All I know is her. Her name. Her body, her love. Nothing else has ever existed.
The war, the goddamned awful memories, the death, Lani’s betrayal…it all is vanished, gone, subsumed in the river of Rania’s love.
She’s still holding tight to me, clinging to me like I’m a spar and she’s shipwrecked, her breath coming in long, deep, ragged gasps, br**sts heaving against my side. Her palm rests low on my belly, inches away from my cock. Her leg is thrown over mine, and she traces circles on my skin with her finger, then reaches down to touch my cock, rubbing her palm along its length, toying with the tip.
We don’t speak, and she plays with me, and then I’m hard and she’s climbing astride me and riding me. She spears herself onto me and sits with me deep inside her gorgeous body, and she rises up and falls down and her long bottle-blonde hair is in her face and across her shoulders and brushing her ni**les. I take her hips in my hands and lift her up, crush her down. I kiss her belly. I kiss her br**sts.
I hold back, tensing, until she comes for the first time, and then I sit up and guide her legs around my back and move with her, sitting up, face to face, kissing, making out as we glide into each other, and I feel the river widen, deepen, her love filling me and making me love her yet more.
THE END
Epilogue
DYEING
DES MOINES, IOWA, 2005
A woman stands in front of a mirror fogged with steam. She has a robin’s-egg-blue towel wrapped around her chest. She wipes a streak across the mirror with a slim palm, cleaning a swath in which to see her reflection. She smiles, a sweet curving of red lips. She unwraps the towel and cleans the mirror the rest of the way.
She smiles at her reflection again, her expression surprised, almost as if seeing someone familiar, someone not seen in many years. She drags her fingers through her hair, cut to brush the tops of her shoulders.
A man enters the bathroom, murmuring in appreciation of her naked body. He slides his hands down her sides to her hips, then over her slightly rounded belly and up to her br**sts, which he cups in tender hands.
He rests his chin on her shoulder and takes in her reflection with her. He lifts a hand to run a tendril of her freshly dyed ink-black hair through his fingers. “I love it, Rania,” he says.
“You do?” She turns to look at him, kisses his nose.
“Yes, I do. I really, really love it. It looks so perfect. So you.”
“So I didn’t look like me, before I dyed my hair?” Her voice holds a note of teasing.
The man just snorts. “You know what I meant.”
She laughs. “Yes, my love. I just enjoy teasing you.”
He chuckles with her, then moves his hand from her breast down between her thighs.
She smacks his hand away. “We don’t have time for that, Hunter. We have to be at the doctor in half an hour. Or don’t you wish to know if our baby is a boy or girl?”
He backs away, but not before giving her backside a playful smack. “Well, then, you’d best get moving, shouldn’t you?”
She snorts, turning to slap his arm as he dances out of the way. When he is gone, she turns to look at herself again, running her fingers through her hair. Her expression is distant, as if seeing a young girl in the mirror, young and innocent.
The woman shakes her head, and the girl is gone, replaced by her own face once more.
But for weeks afterward, she sometimes sees that little girl in the mirror, sees her in the flash of hair so black it is almost blue, in the wide, dark brown eyes that now hold love, happiness, and completion.