Page 102 of The Seven Year Slip

Another kiss on my temple, on my nose, returning to hover against my mouth. “I guess we should get inside.”

“Probably.” And I pulled him in to kiss him again, and then I unlocked my apartment door, and we fell in, a mess of arms and limbs. We kicked off our shoes at the door as it closed behind us, and pushed each other down the hall. He slid his arms behind my back, and lifted me up. I wrapped my legs around his middle, pulling him closer. My fingers curled into his ginger hair. He was like a brandy I wanted to drink on a clear summer day, a golden afternoon I wanted to get lost in, an evening over cardboard pizza and lemon pie that was never the same twice—

He sat me up on the counter of the kitchen, trailing kisses down my neck.

“The plant’s new,” he murmured, glancing at the pothos on the counter.

“Her name’s Helga. She won’t mind.”

He laughed against my skin. “Good.” He nibbled my shoulder, his fingers slipping under my skirt, and unzipped it, tugging it off me, and then he undid the buttons of my blouse, and planted a kiss between my breasts.

I undid his buttons one by one, tracing the crescent-shaped birthmark on his collar before I kept going—and then I paused. Felt over a new tattoo I’d never seen before. My eyebrows furrowed. “When did you get this?”

He looked down at the tattoo, and then sheepishly back at me. “About seven years ago. It’s a bit faded now—”

“It’s a lemon flower.”

“Yes,” he replied, looking up into my eyes, searching them. He’d gotten a lemon flower tattooed over his heart.

“What do you tell people, when they ask about it?”

His shyness melted into a smile, warm and gooey like chocolate. “I tell them about a girl I fell in love with at the right place but the wrong time.”

A knot lodged in my throat. “And what are you going to tell them now?”

“That we finally got the timing right.”

“A matter of time,” I whispered.

“A matter oftiming,” he proposed, and kissed me again, before his mouth trailed down my stomach to my underwear, until he pulled them down, and I curled my fingers around his auburn curls as he said soft devotions to me right there in my kitchen. He was so tender as he planted his hands against my thighs, and spread my legs wide, and, oh, I really loved this man. I loved this man as he kissed the rest of me, and carried me to my bedroom. As he took time to learn about the scars on my knees from when I fell as a kid, as he traced his fingers, calloused and warm, across the freckles on my back, and kissed the scar on my right eyebrow from a close call with a piece of glass. He pushed my hair back gently and kissed me so deeply I finally realized what my aunt meant when she said you always knew the exact moment you fell—

I did, too.

Sort of.

I fell for every kiss he planted on me, but I’d fallen days, weeks, months, before. I fell a little in that taxi ride with a stranger, and I fell a little more when I asked that stranger, seven years later, to stay. I kept falling, tumbling, not realizing I wasn’t on solid ground anymore, as we had dinner and laughed over wine and danced to violin musicals, as we ate late-night fajitas in the park and walked on glittery sidewalks made of recycled plastic, tripping headlong into something so deep and terrifying and wonderful I didn’t realize I had fallen at all until he came to sit beside me in front of a painting of a dead artist, and told me he loved me.

He meant it as his fingers memorized my body, as he discovered how we fit together again, and he wassomuch better at it all than he was seven years ago. Like, impeccable game, sir. I suddenly had no qualms with all the women I remembered from his Instagram. They were a lot of practice and I was absolutely reaping the benefits. He wrapped his hands around mine, and as we moved together, he said my name as if it meant something all its own—a spell. Maybe the start of a recipe.For disaster? No, I won’t even think it.

He nibbled the side of my neck, just under my ear, and I pressed myself up against him, trying to be closer than we ever could go. I wanted to enter into his bloodstream, meld into his bones, become a part of him with everything that I was—

“I have dreamed of this for years,” he murmured, kissing the dip of my neck. “I dreamed so much of you.”

“How’s reality?” I asked, myself around him, never wanting to let him go.

“Fuck, so much better.”

I laughed and kissed him, and then he moved faster as our heartbeats rose, and there was no more talking as we fell, harder and harder, toward each other, coming together in the right placeat the right time in the right moment, and I loved him. I loved his scars and the cooking burns on his arms and the stupid whisk tattoo behind his ear. I loved how his auburn curls hugged my fingers, and I loved that he had three strands of gray hair.

Only three.

I was probably going to give him more.

And we laughed, and charted each other’s bodies down to our cores, maps of places that were familiar and yet new, and the night was good, and my heart was full, and I was happy, so happy, to fall in love on a night like this, where I felt like I had finally caught the moon, and more.

EPILOGUE

And We Stay

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