I rock harder against her, gyrating my hips. A thin layer of sweat begins to bead off our bodies. I want to lick it off her, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop…
I raise my body up enough that our chests are no longer touching and I grab one of her legs from around me, gripping under the bend of her knee, pushing it back so I can thrust deeper. I pound her harder, pushing her thigh down against the bed. She calls out my name, both of her hands clutching my waist, but she pulls them back and curls her fingers around the top of the mattress above her head. I watch hungrily as her breasts bounce up and down against her chest and I thrust even harder, leaning over to take her nipples into my mouth and then into my teeth.
My vision gets hazy. She moans loudly and then begins to whimper. The whimpering makes me crazy. I let go of her thigh and feel my body closing in on hers again, her breasts smashed into my chest, her arms wrapped tightly around my back. I feel her fingernails press painfully into my flesh. She rocks her hips against mine, and my mouth crashes over hers. As I start to come, my kiss becomes more ravenous. Tremors move through my body and I moan against her mouth and my hard thrusts are reduced to gentle rocking. Camryn takes my bottom lip between her teeth and I kiss her gently, still rocking my hips against her until I’m finished.
I collapse onto her chest. My erratic heartbeat trying to find its rhythm again, I feel the pumping of blood in my fingers and in my toes and aggravating the vein near my temple. I lay the side of my face against her bare breasts, my mouth parted, the breath expelling unevenly from my lips. Her fingers move through my moist hair.
We lie here together just like this, all morning, without saying a word.
31
I don’t remember falling asleep. When I open my eyes, the clock beside the bed says that it’s eleven ten. And I realize that I don’t feel naked because I have no clothes on, but I feel naked because Camryn isn’t in the bed with me.
She’s sitting on the windowsill, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt without a bra. She’s gazing out the window.
“I think we should go,” she says without taking her eyes off the bright New Orleans landscape.
I sit up on the bed with the sheet draped over my lower half. “You want to leave New Orleans?” I ask, confused. “But I thought you said we left too soon the first time.”
“Yeah,” she says, but still doesn’t turn around. “The first time we left too soon, but we can’t stay here longer now just to make up for that.”
“But why do you want to leave? We’ve only been here one day.”
She turns to face me. There’s something like sentiment or resolve in her eyes, but I can’t make out which, or if it’s both.
After a long hesitation, she says, “Andrew, I know this might sound stupid, but I think if we stay here… I…”
I stand up from the bed and step inside my boxers I find on the floor. “What’s going on?” I ask, approaching her.
She looks at me. “I just think that… well, when we first got here yesterday all I could think about is what this place meant to us last July. I realized that I kept picturing the times before, trying to relive them—”
“But they’re just not the same,” I add, having an idea.
It takes her a second, but finally she says, after a subtle nod, “Yeah. I guess it’s just that this place is such a significant memory—Shit, Andrew, I don’t even know what I’m saying!” Her thoughtful expression dissolves into frustration.
I pull out a chair at the table in front of the window and sit down, leaning forward and draping my folded hands between my knees, and I gaze up at her. I begin to say something to add to her explanation, but she beats me to it.
“Maybe we should never come back here.”
I didn’t expect her to say that. “Why?”