One Last Thing Before I Go

shaking.”
    “I need to tell you something,” she says.
    “OK.”
    She looks up at him, takes in his round eyes, his earnest expression. She realizes with a start that he is actually somewhat in love with her. Not in a way that matters or lasts, but just in this moment, and there’s something warming about that. She now feels herself shaking, almost shivering. He brushes the hair out of her face, and she runs her hand up his arm.
    “Casey?” he says, concerned.
    “Just . . .” she says. “Can you just kiss me?”
    He does not need to be asked twice. And even as he leans in, her hands have found their way under his shirt, sliding up the impossibly long expanse of his warm back. And one kiss becomes two, then three, then one endless kiss, and she feels herself pulling off her own shirt, even as she knocks him down on the bed with unintended force.
    She can no longer figure out what her intentions were when she came here, but now that she’s lying here, melting into him, she knows she probably never could have brought herself to tell him. The only false note comes when he leans away from her to rummage through his desk drawer for a condom, and she briefly wants to strangle him as she watches him slide it on. But then he’s kissing her again, and then he’s inside her, and for the next little while they’re just two crazy, horny kids on the brink of adulthood, practicing safe sex in his bedroom while, below them, the endless kegger rages on.

CHAPTER 34
    S ilverundresses Denise delicately, like she might break. He pulls her blouse off and kisses her chest, inhaling her scent, reveling in the familiar topography of her body. The shape of her shoulders, the shallow pockets behind her collarbones, the small scar over her left breast from a childhood fall. It’s surreal to be here again, feeling her heat, tasting her skin, realizing that he has carried the sense memory of her inside of him all this time.
    He watches her hands undo his belt buckle, and he is suddenly conscious of how his body has changed since the last time they were naked together. He is easily twenty pounds heavier, and the pathetically minimal muscle tone he has accidentally maintained through his drumming appears as nothing more than a shadow beneath the added weight. He thinks of his erectile snafu with the college girl and wonders if he will be able to perform. He can’t really feel himself down there, and it’s only when she wraps her fingers around him that he registers, with no small measure of relief, that he is hard.
    She leads him over to his unmade bed, and he is acutely aware of his bedroom’s sparse furnishings, of the clutter on his night table and the floor beside it, of his ragged linens and the fact that he’s not sure when he last changed them. He hopes they don’t smell.
    They come together slowly in his bed. He cannot stop touching her, running his fingers up and down the length of her arms, across her shoulders, down her belly. He opens his mouth against her breasts, kissing and tasting, feeling their familiar shape in his hands, and he considers the possibility that this is all a stroke-induced hallucination, that he’ll wake up paralyzed in his bed, or not at all.
    Their rhythm starts to build and he feels the force of her beneath him, the growing urgency in her kisses. He always admired her abandon when it came to sex, the way she was able to lose herself in the pleasure. It always aroused him further, even as he wondered why it was never like that for him. He certainly enjoyed sex, but there was always a side of him that stayed grounded, observing the goings-on from a neutral corner in his brain.
    “What’s wrong?” Denise says to him, panting hard, her breath filling his mouth.
    “Nothing,” he says.
    “Your heart?”
    “Broken.”
    “But beating.”
    “Yes.”
    She kisses him furiously, his hands sliding down her back to find the curve of her ass.
    “Then can you please get inside me?” she whispers to him.
    And so he does.
    He wants it to last forever and to be over already so he knows what will happen next. He knows he can’t keep her, but he wonders if maybe he’s wrong. God knows he’s been wrong about things like this before. He can feel everything all at once; her fingernails digging into his skin, her chin pressing against his as she arches her back, the intoxicatingly smooth surface of her ass in the palms of his hands, the first beads of sweat forming on her neck, his heart beating