I hooked my hand around his hip, my fingers splaying from his lower back to the curve of the rest of his body. I pressed my fingers into his skin, my fingernails spurring him on.
“Harder,” I begged.
His hips pushed forward, and I felt it all the way to my toes.
He slid the arm out from underneath my head and lifted himself up. He kept one knee between mine, and our hips fitted together. He used the leg I’d had around his hip to guide me onto my back. Then clutching my leg to his chest, he gave me exactly what I asked for.
His hips rolled into mine first, as I adjusted to the new position, then rocked forward harder. On his second thrust, I reached up and pressed my hand flat against the headboard.
His pace shifted from slow and steady to fast and hard and the bed creaked beneath us. I sucked in a breath, holding it as I drew closer and closer, and then I was falling all over again. Falling from that bridge. My heart in my throat. Falling for him. My heart in my hands. Falling apart. Falling together.
Falling into place.
It felt like hours before my heartbeat slowed, and I was strong enough to open my eyes.
When I did, my head was both clouded and clear. I couldn’t have remembered fractions or the state capitols or maybe even my name. Those things had been locked behind a wall of bliss. But Jackson’s face above mine? That was clear, as was the way just the sight of him made my heartbeat pick up again.
He lowered my leg to the outside of his hips, so that he was cradled between my thighs.
He leaned down and teased my tired lips with his own.
He said, “I could watch that a hundred more times. A thousand.”
I scrunched my nose up, certain that I’d probably made some hideous face in the throes of the moment. He smoothed the lines on my forehead with his thumb and said, “ I want to memorize the way your eyes clench shut and you bite down on your lip, so that I can sketch your expression from memory. I want to know the exact angle of the way your neck curves, and how many times your heart beats a minute. I want to know everything.”
I swallowed, my heart speeding up when it should have been slowing down. There were things about myself that even I didn’t want to know, let alone share them with him.
Changing the subject, I asked, “So you don’t regret crossing that line?”
His mouth trailed across my jaw, and he hummed under his breath.
“I can still think of a few other lines I’d like to cross before the night is through.”
He rolled, pulling me on top of him, our bodies still intimately connected. The friction teased my sensitive skin, and I had to steady myself with my hands on his chest.
He traced the curve of my body from my breast to my waist to my hip and said with a wicked grin, “You’re adventurous, right?”
Now, this was the kind of adventure I was always on board for.
Hours stretched into days, and we only left the apartment in Riomaggiore when we had to. We got whatever food and supplies we needed, but we never lasted very long before our tastes turned away from food.
Our seventh day came and went, and neither of us made any move to leave or end our time together. And I began to understand the Via dell’Amore a little more, that chair and all those locks. I realized it wasn’t the lock that mattered so much as the fact that it required a key.
Jackson had found every little sensitive nook that made my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He knew what made me hold my breath and what made me cry out his name. He unlocked my body, and in doing so unlocked doors that held nothing but stale air and bad memories.
If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. I wondered if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.