Page 83 of Avenged

I pulled his hand to my lips, kissing the palm before I said, “Then devour me, and trust I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”

He stared at me as I continued to kiss his palm, and then his wrist, and then I set his arm down and straddled him, aligning our cores so the heat of mine stirred the heat of his.

Maybe because I’d been more honest with him than I’d been with anyone in my life, maybe because he’d always seen through me, he could see I was telling the truth, because he pulled my face down toward his and kissed me with more desire than even before. If earlier had been a passion I’d never experienced, this was like another planet of passion. Another galaxy.

Our bodies were twisting and turning with the connection of the universe, the chemicals flowing through us as if it were the beginning of time and we were the very first creatures put on this world and charged with procreating it. It was what I needed. It was what I wanted, and I let myself slide away into a world where there was nothing but us.

Truck

OCEAN

“I can handle your heart,

So help me.

Here you are next to me,

So much beauty at my feet.”

Performed by Lady Antebellum

Written by Stoklasa / Buxton / Brown

I’d fallen asleep after making love to Jersey the second time. After she’d told me to stop treating her with kid gloves, and I’d given in to everything I felt. I didn’t know if I’d expected her to be timid and shy in bed like she sometimes was with people, but having opened up to me, Jersey was nothing like that.

She was full of passion and strength, and it was goddamn breathtaking. It worked itself onto my soul in a way that having sex with other women never had. I’d completely and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of my time with those women. They’d been sexy and fun. But what I felt when Jersey and I were joined together, it was as if the entire Earth had stopped for us. It had stopped so we could have this exact moment.

When I woke, she was sitting with her legs over mine, but she had her sketchpad in her hand and was scratching on the paper with purpose. She was so focused on the lines she was making that she was unaware I wasn’t asleep anymore. Before she could stop me, I reached out and pulled the pad from her hands. She made a little noise of objection and tried to grab it back, but I moved it out of her reach.

It was a drawing of me. Naked. The drawing stopped below my waist, the shadows and shading dropping to nothing, but everything else was there. My eyes were closed with a slight lilt to my lips. I looked happy. I looked peaceful. I wondered if she knew that was because of her.

“This is crazy good,” I said.

She tried to reach for the pad again, but I held her with one hand and flipped the notebook with my fingers. The pages before were filled with the people in her life as well as places. The flowers in the garden. Vi laughing. Mandy and Leena cooking in the kitchen. Intermixed with these real-life sketches were graphic-novel-like sketches. Superheroines and heroes I’d never seen before and must have been from her own imagination.

She stopped struggling, and I took advantage of it by bringing my other hand up to the pad so I could flip through it better. “Seriously, Jers. Di Felix was right; you really are talented.”

She lay down with her head on my chest, watching my hands as they flipped through the pages. I stopped at a picture of a superheroine who looked a little like Vi. The picture had her fading into nothingness. Invisible. Which made me wonder if it was supposed to be Vi or Jersey.

“What are you going to do with all these?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

I set the book down and looked into her face. “Exactly what I said. What are you going to do with your art?”

She scoffed. “They’re just doodles.”

“No, my little stick figures I draw for the recruits are doodles. This…” I flipped open to a page with Vi, because she always seemed to take things best when they were centered around her sister. “This is unspeakably lovely.”

She didn’t respond, and she looked away, rubbing her hand over the image of her sister.

“Does Leena know about this?” Leena taught art back in her teaching days, and she still taught free classes at the YMCA.

Jersey shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not something I usually do around others.”

My heart soared with pleasure at that thought because she’d been drawing off and on a lot while she stayed with me. She was drawing me as we lay in bed together, and she had to have known I’d wake up at some point. But just like everything that was truly Jersey, she hid it from the world.

“Screw your psychology degree; you should have gotten an art degree. You should be doing this.”

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