The Old Friend

The Long-Awaited Flight

Elena’s call came in the middle of the week. She and Natalie had been close since college, close in that specific way that survives on almost nothing — a voice note here, a photograph there, two calendars that had refused to line up for years. Elena lived four states away now and had a husband who couldn’t get the days off. Then a gap opened in her schedule, she bought a ticket the same evening, and by Friday she was landing at O’Hare with a carry-on and four days free.

Natalie was lit up about it all week. She spent Friday in the kitchen, cooking far more than three people could eat, changing the music twice, moving the good glasses out of the cabinet and then moving them back.

When Elena came through our door, I had to work to keep my face in order. Natalie had always called her pretty. That word had not prepared me for anything. Elena was small and finely made, narrow through the shoulders and long through the leg, and she carried herself with the loose confidence of someone who had stopped thinking about it years ago. Her jeans were worn soft and fit close. A thin knit top sat lightly over a small, neat chest. She brought in cold air from the street and the last of some expensive perfume.

“I finally made it!” she said, and threw herself at Natalie.

I came to take her bag, and she turned to me with a wide, open smile that held about a second longer than it needed to. I hugged her hello. She was slight against me, all fine bones, and something in my chest went low and heavy and stayed there.

A Game of Glances

We made an occasion of dinner. Natalie put out everything she’d been cooking since noon, lit candles because Elena liked them, and poured a cold white. The two of them talked without stopping — professors they’d hated, a roommate who’d stolen food, a boy from the third floor whose name neither could remember but whose car they both could. I sat at the head of the table and contributed almost nothing.

Elena had changed for the evening into short silk shorts and a loose tank that shifted whenever she moved, showing the line of her collarbones and the small shape underneath. I watched her more openly than I should have, thinking about my hands closing on that narrow waist. The only thing holding me in my chair was my wife, three feet away, laughing at something from 2011.

Then Natalie’s mother called, and Natalie took the phone out onto the balcony and slid the door shut behind her.

Elena lifted her glass. She looked at me from under her lashes, and she took her time about it.

“To seeing each other again?” she said, tipping her head slightly.

“To seeing each other again.”

I held her eyes while I said it, then let my attention drop to her mouth and stay there long enough that there was no misreading it. She didn’t look away. Whatever the dinner had been thirty seconds earlier, it was something else now.

Accidental Contact

The wine and the low light did the rest. I started letting myself flirt — small things, deniable things, calibrated exactly to the width of the line I was standing on. Elena took up the game without a word of negotiation. She laughed at things that weren’t funny. She kept finding reasons to push her hair back. She arranged herself on the chair so that her legs were simply, unavoidably there.

The apartment helped. The hallway between the kitchen and the living room is narrow enough that two people have to negotiate it, and while Natalie was in the kitchen dealing with dessert, Elena and I started for the living room at the same moment.

I could have stepped back and let her through. I didn’t. I kept walking, and we met in the middle of it.

Her chest pressed soft against my arm. Her hip slid along the front of my jeans. It lasted a second and a half. Elena went completely still inside it — I felt her breath stop — and color came up her throat.

“Sorry,” she said, barely a whisper, and smiled like she’d been caught.

Ten minutes later, passing behind me at the counter, she brushed my hand with the curve of her ass through the thin silk, and there was nothing accidental left in it at all.

Natalie was six feet away, describing a cake.

Right Under Her Nose

Natalie came back with the tray — tea, the cake, small plates — and found us already settled on the sectional. I’d taken the middle. Elena was on my left with her legs folded under her. Natalie sat down on my right and tucked herself against my shoulder the way she always does.

Above the blanket it was a good night in. Natalie asked about Elena’s job, her building, her neighbors, whether she’d made friends yet. Elena answered with her hands, telling a long story about a man on her floor who kept mailing her his own poetry.

Under the blanket it was something else.

Natalie’s whole attention was on her friend’s face. I let my hand go down and left, along the cushion, until I found skin — the outside of Elena’s calf, smooth and warm. Elena stopped in the middle of a word. Her eyes went wide for a quarter of a second. Then she swallowed, and picked the sentence up again almost cleanly, and kept going.

My fingers started up the length of her shin, slow, no hurry at all, taking their time to the back of her knee. Beside me Natalie was rubbing absent circles on my chest, warm and easy, entirely elsewhere.

The size of what I was doing sat in my throat like heat.

Dangerous Confessions

Elena was holding on by very little. Color had come up her neck and spread across her collarbones, and she kept reaching for her wine to have something to do with her face.

She hadn’t moved her leg. She’d had a dozen chances and she hadn’t taken one of them, so I stopped being careful. My hand went above her knee, then under the loose hem of the silk shorts. The skin high on the inside of her thigh was hotter than the rest of her. I stroked it slowly, moving up in small increments, giving her every opportunity to close her legs.

She opened them instead.

Then she pulled air in hard through her nose and changed the subject at speed, because she’d nearly made a sound.

“Nat — do you remember, junior year — the economics final—” Her voice came out a half step high and thin.

“Oh my God, yes.” Natalie was gone, straight into it, laughing. “You hid the cheat sheet in your shoe.”

While Natalie laughed, Elena turned her head toward me. There was nothing left in her face but permission. She shifted her knees a little wider under the blanket and let my hand come all the way up, and the cotton I found there was already soaked through. She bit down on her lower lip until it went white. Her chest was rising fast and shallow under the tank.

She held my eyes while her oldest friend sat beside me, laughing, giving us perfect cover.

Over the Line

The room had gone so tight that Natalie’s voice was reaching me through water. For both of us the world had narrowed to what was happening under a blanket.

I moved the thin strip of cotton aside with two fingers. Elena’s back came off the cushion without a sound and her hand closed hard in the throw pillow beside her. My palm covered her, and she was hot and completely wet, and when I started working her slowly she pressed her thighs together around my wrist — not to stop me, to keep me there.

Then she reached her limit.

“Nat, I’m going to — I’ll just go splash some water on my face,” she said. Her voice had gone rough and she got it out in one piece by not looking at anybody.

“Of course, go,” Natalie said, easy, reaching for a pillow. “You okay?”

“Long flight.”

Elena got up off the sectional fast, not steady, the silk shorts pulled tight across her as she went. The bathroom door closed. I looked at my wife. She was sleepy and warm and smiling at nothing.

“She’s great, isn’t she,” Natalie said, settling into my side.

“She’s great.” Elena was still wet on my fingers. “I’m going to go check I locked the front door. You want water?”

“Mm. Please.”

I got up and went into the hall, knowing exactly what I would find, because I’d heard her not turn the lock.

Behind the Sound of Water

The latch hadn’t been thrown. Behind the door the faucet was running hard — a steady, covering noise, aimed at the living room and the woman in it.

I pushed the handle down, stepped in, and shut the door behind me. The air inside was warm and damp and full of her perfume.

Elena was at the sink with both hands braced on the counter and her head down. Her legs weren’t holding her well. At the sound of the latch she came around fast, and what was in her face was three things at once — alarm, mortification, and a hunger that had gotten completely out of her control.

“Are you out of your mind,” she whispered. “She’s right there. Twenty feet.”

“She thinks I’m checking the front door.”

I closed the distance. She backed up one step, then another, until the tile stopped her.

I came in against her, blocking the way out of the corner. My hands went to her waist and she pulled in a breath and shut her eyes. She was so small in my hands it was hard to be rough with her; she felt like something you’d be responsible for breaking. Her chest rose against my ribs, fast. She was still ashamed — I could feel that in how she held her shoulders — but her whole body was throwing heat, and she had put herself in this corner on purpose, and both of us knew it.

Sweet Captivity

I ran my hands up over her ribs and under the loose tank, and covered her small breasts with my palms. She was soft, and her nipples went hard against my fingers immediately. Elena made a low sound in her throat and the running water took it. Her arms came up around my neck and she put her face against my chest to hide it.

“God, this is so wrong,” she said into my shirt, while I kissed down the side of her neck, across her collarbone, along her shoulder.

“You’ve been asking me to since the hallway.”

She didn’t argue. I moved my hands down to the waistband of the silk shorts and took them and the cotton underneath down in one motion, and she stepped out of them without being asked.

I got my hands under her thighs and lifted. She weighed almost nothing. Her legs came around my waist and locked at the ankle, and she held on to my shoulders while I braced her against the tile, her mouth against my ear, breathing hard.

Somewhere past the door and down the hall, my wife was on the sectional waiting for her water. Elena and I both listened for a second. It didn’t stop either of us. It did the opposite.

Fast and Quiet

She clamped her own hand over her mouth before I’d even started.

Her eyes were enormous over the top of it — fear and shame and a want that had burned through both. Through the wall she heard the television change channels in the living room, heard Natalie shift on the cushions, and I watched the last of her resistance go out of her at the sound. She’d tried to keep her knees together at the start, out of some reflex of decency. Her body hadn’t cooperated; she was slick all the way down the inside of her thighs.

Then she gave it up completely. She pulled her legs wider, locked her heels harder at the small of my back, and there was nothing left to ask about.

I opened my belt and went into her in one push, all the way.

The noise she made came out muffled and mangled against her own palm.

I got her ass up higher against the cold tile and set a hard, fast rhythm, because we had maybe ninety seconds. Elena worked back against me as well as she could from where she was, her small breasts sliding against my chest, her toes curling in the air. The slap of it stayed under the noise of the faucet. When I felt her start to go I stopped holding back and drove into her at full depth.

She tightened and took me with her. I finished inside her, deep, with my forehead against the tile beside her head, and Elena shook once, hard, all through, and then went limp in my arms.

Midnight Conspiracy

I set her down carefully. Her legs still weren’t right and there was heavy color across her face and throat. We put ourselves back together fast and without talking — she pulled the shorts up, ran cold water over her wrists and face to kill the flush, and I shut off the faucet and filled a glass.

Natalie didn’t look up from her phone when I came back.

“You were a while, love.”

“Deadbolt was sticking. Fixed it.”

I sat down and put my arm around her shoulders.

A minute later Elena came out. She looked relaxed, freshly washed, entirely innocent, except for the one glance she sent me on her way across the room, which gave up everything that had happened behind that door.

“Okay, girls, the flight and the wine have finished me,” she said, stretching. “I’m going to go to bed.”

Natalie hugged her goodnight, and not long after that we went in ourselves. The apartment went quiet. Natalie was asleep in minutes — a whole day of cooking and most of a bottle of wine — and her breathing settled into the slow rhythm I know.

I lay there for half an hour, making sure of it. Then I lifted the covers back.

The guest room door was going to be open. I knew that the way you know the end of a sentence you’ve already started.

In the Quiet of the Night

It was open a few inches, laying a pale strip of light across the hall floor. I went in without letting the boards talk and pushed it closed behind me.

The room was cool and half dark. Elena was lying on the big bed under a thin sheet, turned toward the door, and in the light from the window her eyes were open. She had not been asleep at any point.

I turned the button lock. She heard it, and pushed the sheet off in one motion.

She had nothing on but the loose tank from dinner, which now covered almost nothing at all. Her legs went on forever in that light.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, so quietly it barely carried, and came up onto her elbows. The movement pulled the fabric tight across her chest.

“I told you it was the start of something.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, already getting out of my clothes, and she came straight to me and put her head down in my lap like it was a thing she’d done a hundred times. Every bit of the shame that had held her rigid at dinner was gone — burned off in the bathroom and not coming back. What was left was a woman who had made her decision hours ago and was now simply waiting to be given the whole night.

I put my hand in her hair. My other hand found the smooth line of her calf.

The Guest Takes Over

She didn’t wait to be told what came next.

The moment my palm settled on her leg she came up off my lap, flexible and unhurried as a cat, and swung one long leg across my thighs to settle on top of me. Her weight came down on my lap and I could feel her through the fabric — still hot, still slick from the bathroom.

She caught the hem of the tank, pulled it up over her head, and dropped it on the floor. In the light off the window her body was all fine lines: narrow shoulders, the deep hollows above her collarbones, small breasts that sat high and firm. She let me look for a moment, and she liked being looked at.

“My turn,” she said, and there was not one trace left of the woman who’d whispered sorry in my hallway.

She leaned in and kissed me — deep, wet, taking her time about it — and while she did it her fingers went down and got my pants open without any fumbling at all. She freed me, lifted up onto her knees, and put me where she wanted me.

The Night Marathon

She lowered herself the whole way in one long, smooth movement and let out a deep sound at the bottom of it. She was tight and hot and she stopped there for a second with her head thrown back, finding her breath again, her chest rising fast.

Then she found a rhythm — her own, unhurried at first, deepening. She rode me with her palms flat on my chest for leverage, taking me at the exact angle she wanted, and she was very good at it. I got my hands under her hips and helped, pulling her down harder each time she came down.

In the silence of the apartment the wet slap of it and the small complaints of the mattress sounded enormous. Natalie was one wall away. Neither of us cared, and it was better for it.

Elena arched in my hands and kept moving, her legs tight at my sides, low sounds breaking out of her every time I bottomed out. She was running the whole thing — pace, depth, everything — and giving the night everything she had.

Before Dawn

When I felt it starting to run away from me I took it back. I turned her onto her back, put her knees wide, and set a final pace with my full weight behind it. Her hips came up off the bed to meet every stroke and her hands twisted into the sheets.

“Harder—” she said, hoarse, past caring how it sounded.

We finished together. I went in deep and emptied into her with my face in her shoulder, and Elena cried out against my collarbone and shook through a long one, then went slack under me, breathing like she’d run somewhere.

I eased out, pulled the sheet up over her, and kissed her damp forehead. She smiled without opening her eyes.

I let myself out of the guest room without a sound and went back to our bedroom. Natalie was still on her side, still deep under, exactly as I’d left her. I got in behind her and put my arm over my wife, and lay there in the dark feeling the heat of the last two hours slowly bleed out of me.

Caught

The next day, close to noon, Natalie went out for groceries.

The door hadn’t been shut two minutes before it started again. Elena went into the guest room to strip the bed, and I was behind her before she’d reached it. There was no hesitation left in either of us and no conversation about it — clothes came off in the doorway, and we ended up on the bare mattress with her on her knees, palms braced, taking me from behind as hard as I could give it to her. Her back was slick. Her legs were shaking. She had stopped keeping her voice down at all, and the room was full of the sound of her.

Which is why neither of us heard the front door.

The lock turned. We froze — far too late. Footsteps came fast down the hall, and the guest room door swung open.

Natalie was standing in it with a grocery bag in each hand.

She didn’t move. Her eyes went from me, still hard and still on my knees behind her friend, to Elena, naked and gasping and scrambling for a corner of the sheet.

The silence had a sound to it.

I braced for screaming, for tears, for the end of my marriage. Instead something moved across my wife’s face that I had never seen there before — cold, and calculating, and, unmistakably, aroused.

She set the bags down on the floor. Carefully.

New Rules

Natalie came a few steps into the room, folded her arms, and looked at the two of us the way you’d look at a delivery that arrived damaged. Elena went scarlet from her chest to her hairline, her breath still coming fast, holding the sheet against herself with both fists.

“So that’s how it is,” Natalie said. Her voice was level, which was worse than shouting. “You two decided to throw a party without me.”

Neither of us said anything.

“Well then, love.” She let it sit. “Since you’re playing by your own rules in my house, I’ll play by mine.”

She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and took out her phone. Unlocked it. Looked me directly in the face while she did it.

“I’m going to call some friends. Those big guys from my gym — the ones who’ve been circling me for a year, the ones you tell me not to worry about. They’re going to come over here, and they’re going to fuck me and your Elena right in front of you. Both of us. And you’re going to sit there and watch.”

She opened her contacts and pressed the call.

Elena and I sat on the edge of that bed and didn’t breathe. The whole polarity of the room had reversed inside of ninety seconds. We had been the ones with the secret; now we were the ones with no say at all, and Natalie had taken hold of the entire thing and turned our betrayal into the opening move of something much bigger.

The Call Is Answered

She put the phone to her ear without taking her eyes off us. Two rings, and then a low male voice came through clearly enough that I caught the shape of it.

“Hey, Marcus,” Natalie said, and started walking slowly around the room. “Are you at the gym with the guys? Good. I’ve got a much better offer for you. Put the weights down and come to my place. Right now. Yes, same address. Bring Shane and Owen with you.” A pause. Whatever he said made her smile. “Because there’s a party here, and my friend and I need some help with it. I’ll be waiting.”

She hung up and looked at us with total satisfaction.

There had been no persuading required. From the speed of the answer, they were already in the parking lot.

Elena sat on the edge of the mattress with her legs drawn up under her. Her chest was moving fast and her face was doing two things at once — deep mortification, and something else underneath it that was beginning to win. She understood the arithmetic. In half an hour this room was going to have three large men in it, and she was going to be handed to them.

I stood there and felt myself go hard again, against all logic, at the thought.

Natalie had taken the game away from us so cleanly there was nothing left to do but go along with it.

Waiting for It

The next thirty minutes were very long.

Natalie moved through them like a woman running her own house. She went into our bedroom, took off the clothes she’d shopped in, and came out in a sheer lace robe that covered her in the technical sense only. Passing Elena, she stopped and ran her fingers slowly down her friend’s bare shoulder.

“Well, sweetheart,” she said. “Ready for a proper welcome? Whatever your husband’s doing four states away, it isn’t this.”

Elena nodded. Just once, and small — but she nodded, and swallowed hard, and didn’t look away. The embarrassment was still there in her face, but it had stopped being the main thing. What was replacing it was closer to impatience.

Natalie settled into the armchair, crossed her legs, and scrolled her phone like she was waiting for a dentist.

I sat on the sectional and worked out what my part in this now was. I had spent two days as the one moving the pieces — the hand under the blanket, the unlocked bathroom door, the guest room at midnight. That was finished. I was about to become an audience, and the show was going to be my wife and her small, breakable-looking friend coming apart in front of me.

The buzzer went off like a fire alarm.

Natalie stood up unhurriedly, adjusted the lace across her chest, and went to let them in.

No Preliminaries

Three men came into the hallway — Marcus, Shane, and Owen. All of them tall, all of them wide through the shoulders, gym clothes doing nothing to hide what was underneath. They came in on a wave of cold air and certainty.

They took in Natalie in the lace, and past her, through the open guest room door, Elena on the bed with a sheet held to her chest. There was no offer of wine, no small talk, nothing. The three of them looked at each other, and that was the entire negotiation.

“Good call, Nat,” Marcus said, and pulled my wife against him by the waist.

He kissed her hard, like he’d been given a deadline, and had the lace robe off her shoulders while he did it. Natalie made a sound into his mouth and went where he put her. Shane and Owen were already out of their shirts and moving down the hall toward the guest room.

Elena drew back on the bed as they came in, her small breasts rising fast, actually frightened of the size of them. Then Shane took hold of her hips and turned her where he wanted her, and the fear went out of her face and something else came into it. Owen knelt up by her head. She looked at him for one second, and then she opened her mouth and took him.

The Whole House

The apartment filled with sound in under a minute and stayed that way.

Marcus put Natalie on the kitchen table — swept a placemat off it with his forearm, laid her back, pulled her legs apart, and went into her in one stroke. My wife’s shout came from somewhere near the bottom of her lungs. Her head went back over the edge of the table and her nails went into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.

In the guest room Shane had Elena bent forward with both hands locked at her narrow waist, taking her from behind at a depth she had not been built for, and she was taking all of it. She pushed back into every stroke. Sweat ran down the small of her back and caught the noon light coming through the blind, and Owen kept her mouth full, and the sounds she was making around him were not quiet and not restrained and not embarrassed.

I stood in the doorway between the two rooms with nothing on, watching my wife on the kitchen table through one door and my wife’s oldest friend on the guest bed through the other, and it was, without competition, the best thing I have ever seen.

Natalie found my eyes across the apartment, mid-stroke, and gave me a filthy little smile. Then she stuck her tongue out at me, just for a second, the way you do at someone you’ve beaten badly at something.

Natalie’s Triumph

The end of it came all at once.

In the guest room Shane finished with a low growl, deep inside Elena, and she went off around him and cried out into the mattress and stayed there shaking. Owen pulled out a second later and finished across her chest and her upturned face, and she took it with her eyes closed and her mouth still open.

On the kitchen table Marcus drove in a few more times and came across Natalie’s stomach with a shout of his own. My wife arched off the table, held it, shuddered once from her heels to her shoulders, and dropped back onto the wood, breathing hard, entirely done.

Then it was over, and it was extremely ordinary. The three of them cleaned up, found their shirts, and got dressed. Marcus clapped me on the shoulder on his way past like we’d been introduced at a barbecue. Somebody said something to Natalie about Thursday. The front door shut, and their voices went off down the stairwell, and the apartment was quiet.

Elena lay across the guest bed with her legs open and the evidence of the afternoon all over her, and there was nothing on her face now but a deep, finished satisfaction.

Natalie got down off the table, walked over to me, licked a bead of sweat off the side of my neck, and put her mouth to my ear.

“So. Are we even now, love?” she said. “Next time, think twice before you start a game without me.”

The Bed We All Shared

After a day like that one, the apartment settled into something surprisingly peaceful.

Every line had been crossed and every secret was out, and the strange effect of that was to bring the three of us closer rather than blow us apart. We spent that night together in the big bed in our room — Natalie in the middle, me on her right with an arm over her, Elena curled up on her left. The blackout curtains held back most of the morning. The air in the room was warm and close and smelled of the two of them.

Elena woke first. She lay still for a few minutes listening to Natalie’s slow, even breathing beside her.

Whatever had been holding her back at that first dinner — the flinch, the sorry, the hand reaching for the wine glass to hide her face — the previous afternoon had finished it off entirely. She looked at her friend’s face, relaxed and unguarded in deep sleep, and what came over her was not want, exactly. It was closer to gratitude.

She moved in behind Natalie, careful about it. Her legs came against the backs of Natalie’s thighs and her small breasts pressed to my wife’s back. She held her breath, leaned in, and kissed Natalie’s earlobe so lightly it barely counted, then started working slowly down the side of her neck.

Waking Up

Natalie stretched in her sleep and half opened her eyes at the touch. She worked out whose mouth it was, and instead of pulling away she made a low, contented sound and tipped her head to give her friend more room.

“Elena,” she said, rough with sleep, smiling into the pillow. “What are you doing.”

“Good morning,” Elena said, and her hand came around under the covers and settled on Natalie’s waist.

I woke to the sound of the two of them whispering. I opened my eyes and then held completely still, because what was happening eighteen inches away was worth not interrupting: two women I had watched come apart the day before, now naked under one sheet in the early light, being extraordinarily gentle with each other.

Elena took her time. She traced the shape of Natalie’s stomach with her fingertips, learning it, and moved up to her breasts without any hurry at all. Natalie tilted her hips back and pressed herself into Elena behind her and let out a long, easy sigh.

Nobody was performing for me. That was most of what made it what it was.

Turning to Face Her

When Elena’s hands stopped being gentle and started being deliberate, Natalie turned over.

The sheet slid off both of them. They ended up face to face in the half light, and for a few seconds they did nothing but look at each other — two married women who had spent the previous afternoon in a house full of noise, now completely quiet, and completely focused.

Elena leaned in first. Their mouths met carefully, almost shy about it, and then it opened up into something deep and unhurried. Natalie sighed into her friend’s mouth and put both arms around her and pulled the smaller body in against her own. Elena’s small firm breasts pressed into Natalie’s fuller ones, and the difference between the two of them — the size, the shape, the whole scale — was its own thing to look at.

I took my hand off Elena’s hip and moved back on the pillows to give them the room.

I propped my head on one hand and became a spectator, and I stayed one. I was hard the entire time and I deliberately did nothing about it. Watching my wife lose herself completely in her friend’s arms was worth more than anything I could have done to interrupt it.

Her Tongue Inside Her

The room got tighter by the minute. Natalie’s sounds came closer together and got louder, and her hips started moving with real urgency.

Elena worked her way down the length of her, kissing as she went, and settled between Natalie’s thighs. She pushed them wide with her palms and opened her friend up completely.

Then she put her mouth on her.

Natalie jolted at the first contact — her whole body came up off the mattress.

“Elena—” It came out as a cry.

She grabbed two handfuls of the sheets and arched her back and pushed up into it, and Elena held her hips down and kept going. She knew what she was doing. Her tongue worked between the folds, unhurried, gathering everything there, coming back to the same place until Natalie stopped being able to form words. The contrast held my attention the whole time: the small, fine-boned woman doing the work, and my wife’s fuller body coming undone underneath her.

I lay there and hardly breathed.

Natalie’s breathing went ragged. Her thighs started to shake. Elena felt it coming and drove into it, faster, deeper, relentless.

Natalie broke with her whole back off the bed and a long cry that ran down into a hoarse whisper, and it went on and on, and she locked her thighs around Elena’s head and rode it all the way to the end.

Elena came back up the bed and pressed herself against her friend, and kissed her damp cheek, and stayed there.

A New Morning

They lay tangled together, arms and legs, catching their breath in the cool of the room.

Natalie opened her eyes eventually and looked over at me. There was deep, well-fed satisfaction in her face, and underneath it, one more flicker of that same triumph from the day before.

I smiled back and gave her the point without saying anything.

We both understood what that morning had been. It was the one thing in three days I had no hand in at all, and it was the best of them.