Page 13 of Coming Around Again

Finally I make myself stop pacing. I suck in all the oxygen I can manage. I start by speaking carefully. “Did you not know about the accident.”

This time her jaw falls open. “What accident?”

I tell her. The whole time I’m recounting what happened, or at least as much of it as I remember, she sits like she’s been turned into stone. Except that she starts crying, big fat tears just falling silently from those beautiful brown eyes, and when I talk about how hard I tried to get her to respond to me afterward, she starts to cry out loud.

“You didn’t—you couldn’t call me? You were in pain and you didn’t have a phone? Oh, Des…”

She dissolves into tears. I’m not all that dry myself. “Shh. Naya. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t try harder. I did get hold of your mom at home a few weeks later, but she didn’t know who I was, and she said she’d tell you I called, but—” I sniffle. Shrug. “I guess she didn’t.”

Naya is still crying. I kneel by the sofa and take her hand. “Oh, honey. I’m so, so sorry you were hurt.”

She looks into my eyes, sniffing back her tears. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I cut you off without ever dreaming that something might have happened to you!”

I reach over to the end table and hand her a couple of tissues, waiting while she blows her nose and wipes her face. “Joke’s on us,” I say sadly. “We missed out on eleven years together. Oh, Naya. It sucks.”

“It sucks,” she echoes. She touches my face, looking into my eyes. “Des.”

Something happens between us. It’s the same old thing, the same attraction. The same clicking together like magnets.

We’re suddenly kissing.

Like the years haven’t passed. Like we never hurt each other.

Like we are still in love.

We kiss for what feels like hours. I can’t get enough of her mouth, her lips. I can’t get enough of kissing her eyelids and her cheeks and her neck, and I can’t wait to kiss the rest of her. I pick her up and carry her down the hall to my bed.

When I lay her down on it, I hover over her, my whole body alive with need, desperate to be inside her. “Is it okay?” I ask her, hoping with every fiber she says yes.

“I need you, Desmond,” she says. Her eyes overflow, two tears dropping down, and I kiss her again.

I kiss her all the time I’m helping her out of her clothes. I kiss her shoulder, her collarbone, her upper arm. I kiss the slope of her breast as I’m unhooking her bra, then the tight peak. I lick it, then suck as much as I can get into my mouth.

Her moan kicks me into urgency.

I treat her other breast the same, while I’m stripping off my own clothes. She lies back on my bed, her glorious hair spread out and her eyes glowing with desire. I open the nightstand and hope I’ve got a condom in there, but she reaches for my arm. “No need,” she says. “Any other reason you’d need one?”

“I’ve never had sex without one,” I confess, and she smiles. She unfastens her trousers and slips them down. I help. Thank god her shoes fell off on the way in here, because I can slip them off over her ankles, and then she’s lying on my bed in pink silky panties, her bush visible through them and trimmed to a delicate auburn delta.

I stroke the seam of her folds through the underwear. She moans again, and I lose control.

The panties hit the floor, and I’m feasting on her pussy like I’m starving. She’s slick. Swollen. Beautiful. I lick, suck, and finger her until she’s writhing and crying out, and then we are naked together, and the feeling of her hot wet channel, fuck, so good.

This is Naya, I think, and I lace my fingers with hers, and look into her eyes, and we are making love together. Moaning together. Coming together.

It can’t be this easy, can it?

All those years of pain, gone.

7

NAYA

When Desmond asks to talk, I’m suspicious.

And yet, I want to hear what he has to say. Call me a fool…but if there’s someone in the world I’d be a fool for, it’s him.

And when he tells me about the accident, and everything makes sense, I realize that I really am a fool. I didn’t let him explain.

---