Page 100 of Two Chances With You

“Of course, there was no one else here but you and me.”

“Sorry, but I’m not taking anything. I’m not taking the pill.”

“Really? Am I getting confused? I mixed you up with another girl!”

“You…complete knucklehead!” She climbs back on top of me and starts hitting me.

“Ouch! Ouch! That’s enough, Gin, I was just kidding.”

She calms down. “I understand, but were you just kidding when you said that you came?”

“No, not about that! Certainly not about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it was such a beautiful, unique, fantastic moment, that it seemed to me to be stupid to interrupt it.”

She throws herself down on the bed next to me again, plunging headfirst into the pillow. “You’re crazy, and what are we going to do now?”

“Well, we’ll do whatever you want to do.”

“Where are we going to find a morning-after pill in Vietnam? It seems absurd. We’ll never find it! I guess there’s no reason to bother looking for it.”

“What?”

“If we’ll never find it, then there’s no point in looking for it, is there?”

I kiss her. She’s stunned for a moment but she lets me kiss her. She doesn’t participate all that much. I pull away and look at her. “Well?”

She has a funny face. She’s surprised and perplexed at the same time.

“I’ll just rest up for a second, and then we can get started again.”

Gin shakes her head and smiles, as crazy as I am, and kisses me. She caresses me and kisses me again. And we both get our breath back quickly. And this time, I decide to lead, without haste. And as the sunset once again plays hide-and-seek, we come again, this time without hiding, laughing, united, like before, but more than before. Embracing our love. And embracing everything that might be next.

Later, in a strange pub named Apocalypse Now by its ironic Vietnamese owners, we’re drinking beer. Gin writes furiously in her diary.

“Hey, do you mind telling me what kind of Divine Comedy you’re putting down there? You haven’t stopped writing ever since we sat down, so what does that do to our conversation? A couple is also made up of communication, you know that right?”

“Shhh! I’m capturing the moment.”

Gin writes one last thing quickly and then closes her diary.

“All done! I’m better than Bridget Jones. This will be a worldwide bestseller!”

“What have you written?”

“Everything we’ve done.”

“And you take this long to describe two people fucking?”

“You jerk! You want to know what I wrote? Everything! Not just how we made love, but everything that happened. It’s a piece of our destiny. Maybe it was thanks to that instant that we’ll have a child. We’ll be together forever.”

Malaysia, the islands of Perhentian and Tioman

Golden, healthy, and slightly toasted by a sun that just never quits, we walk. The afternoon of any given day. The same as all days when you’re on vacation.

We stop by a painter stretched out comfortably in the shade of a palm tree and select our canvas without haste. “There, that one!”

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