The way her breath caught when my hands touched her in certain places.
The way she gasped when I pressed my lap into hers.
The sound of her exhale, ragged and drawn-out, when my mouth moved against her neck.
Those sounds I’d never forget. No matter where life went from this moment, they’d stay a part of me forever. The sounds Cora made for me as I loved her body was enough to sustain a man in his darkest hour on his darkest day.
When her hands slipped between us, her fingers working madly to undo my jeans before tearing them off, my body stilled.
“Wait,” I breathed against her neck. “Slow down. Let me take my time with you.” When my lips covered her neck this time, they crept slowly across her skin, tasting the way the rain mixed with the salt of her skin. My hand slid up the bends of her body, memorizing every dip and curve. She shuddered below me, her own body stilling. “My whole life has been stolen moments, closed doors, and rushed encounters with you. I don’t want to rush right now. Let me just enjoy you. Let me just be with you.”
When I came to the place where I’d left my mark on her, I touched it. This would fade until one day, there’d be no trace of the mark I’d left on her. Could it be that I’d left a different kind of mark behind though? One that wasn’t so temporal? Was that the reason she was here? Because my mark on her was more than skin-deep?
Cora moved beneath me, lifting off her back to slip out of her robe. I found the tie and unknotted it slowly, letting myself memorize the feel of the material rubbing against the pads of my fingers, the strength of the knot, working against it for what felt like forever until, suddenly, it seemed to come undone all at once.
I slid the robe off of her shoulders, down her arms, off her hands, never allowing my eyes to look anywhere but into hers. A beautiful as she was, as spread out below me in a little cover-up as she was, I’d always known where that beauty originated from, its hidden source—her eyes.
My hand curved around her cheek, the other winding behind her back, and I pressed myself into her, lowering her back to the bed. This time when our mouths met, they moved slowly, as though time was an infinite entity and life was nothing beyond this moment.
“Matt,” she whispered against my lips, her fingers trailing down the canyon of my back.
Hearing her say my name, having her in my arms when she said it, made something low and uneven vibrate in my chest. Her mouth came around to my ear, where the sound of her shallow, uneven breaths ignited something inside me I wasn’t sure I could ever extinguish. When she whispered my name again, this time right beside my ear, I pressed myself between her legs, feeling dizzy from the thought of her saying my name like that when I was moving inside her.
When her hips lifted up to meet mine the next time I ground against her, I grabbed a fistful of her nightgown and pulled it up around her stomach. I didn’t stop rocking against her, my mouth claiming hers once more, as I made love to her, half-dressed, my body not yet entering hers.
I could tell from the way she was breathing that she was close. From the way she was twisting in my arms, her nails digging into my skin. I was just as close, feeling my own release rising from inside.
“Please, Matt,” she breathed.
My jaw ground to keep me from losing it the moment her hand gripped me, stroking me in a way that had me close to blacking out again. What was I doing? Why was I stalling? What had I needed to tell her before we did this again?
The reminder found its way into my consciousness, but just as it rose from my chest, another voice settled into the air around us.
“Hey, Matt!” The sound of feet moving quickly up the stairs outside. “We need to talk!”
The sound of a door being opened
The sound of silence, the kind more deafening than a sonic boom.
The sound of my brother’s sharp inhale as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Those were the sounds I’d also remember from tonight. The ones that would follow me to the grave, along with the others.
“What the fuck?” His words came out in a rush of air.
Lifting off of Cora, my eyes found hers and held there for a moment. In them, I tried to tell her it would be okay, that I’d take care of this. But her face was frozen in shock, her eyes filling with guilt, as she scrambled out from beneath me, adjusting her cover-up and pulling at the sheets to cover herself.
“How could you?” Jacob’s voice was quiet, quivering.
His eyes connected with mine once I turned to face him. Everything I expected to find was there on his face: betrayal, shock, outrage . . . even a shadow of sadness.
“You son of a bitch. I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t waste your chance to slide into my spot.” His volume grew with every word, his eyes becoming feral. “I can’t believe you.” Jacob’s eyes shifted over my shoulder.
Instinctively, I slid into his view.
“I can’t believe you,” he spat again, thrusting his arms back at where Cora had retreated up against the headboard.
“Jacob, I’m sorry.” Her voice caught as though she was guilty of this whole mess. To blame for everything that had gone wrong in the course of our twenty years together. “I never meant for you to find out this way. I should have come to you first. I should have explained—”
“Explained what?” Jacob shouted, sweeping a couple of glasses from the table with his arm. They crashed to the floor and shattered. “That you’d had enough of me? That you wanted to move on to the other brother? Just to see if you were missing out on anything? Just to see if he could give you something I couldn’t?” The vein running down Jacob’s forehead was bursting through the skin, his body quaking from the emotions coursing through him. “Just to see if he could make you scream his name louder when you opened your legs for him?”
“Jacob!” I slid off the bed, keeping myself between him and Cora as I approached, my hands raised. “This is more than just some endless battle between us for her. This is more than one of us coming out the winner and the other the loser.” Every step I took toward him, he took one toward me. “This is more than that. This is more.”
When I stopped moving, he did too. A few feet separated us, but from the betrayal on his face, I knew that while physical space might be one thing, after tonight, an impossible distance would be between us going forward. Unlike me, he wouldn’t be content to wait on the sidelines for years on end while another man loved the woman he did. He wouldn’t be content to do right by her no matter what, even if that meant letting someone else take the credit for his efforts.
“Yeah, no shit this is more.” His eyes dropped, narrowing when they fell on my open fly. “This is my brother, my best friend, fucking the woman who was supposed to be my wife behind my back. On our own damn honeymoon.”