The Last Time
She traces the familiar path of his vertebrae—thirty-three notches of bone she's memorized like prayer beads, like stations of the cross. Each touch an absolution neither of them deserves.
Time stretches. Contracts. Pools like candle wax in the hollow of his throat.
They don't speak because words would make it real, would crystallize this ending into something neither can take back. Instead: the whisper of sheets, the staccato rhythm of breath held too long and released too soon, the wet sound of mouths meeting and parting. Meeting and parting. Meeting and—
His hands remember things his mind wants to forget. The exact curve where hip meets thigh. That spot behind her left knee that makes her gasp, makes her arch like a bow string pulled taut. He's mapped her body in the dark so many times he could navigate it blind, could find true north in the constellation of freckles across her shoulder blades.
"Don't," she says when he tries to be gentle. Because gentle would break her. Because gentle would mean acknowledging what comes after.
The late afternoon light filters through gauzy curtains—the same curtains that have witnessed a hundred secret afternoons, a hundred stolen hours. Today the light feels different. Thinner. More precarious. Like it might shatter if they move too suddenly or breathe too deep.
He watches the shadows play across her skin and thinks about quantum physics—how light can be both particle and wave, how it can exist in two states simultaneously. Like them: both ending and eternal. Both here and already gone.
She bites his shoulder hard enough to leave marks that will fade before morning. Before he goes home to a different bed, a different life. Her nails dig crescents into his back—tiny bruised parentheses containing everything they've left unsaid.
The ceiling fan turns lazy circles above them. Around and around and—stop thinking. Stop. Just feel this: skin salt-slick with sweat, muscles trembling on the edge of release, the particular gravity of bodies falling into familiar patterns for the last time.
When it happens, it happens like this: a cascade of small surrenders. The way her breath catches. The way his hands tighten on her hips. The way time fractures and reforms around them. Like a wave breaking. Like a star collapsing. Like the end of all things.
After, they lie in the wreckage of what they've done—what they've been doing—bodies cooling in the artificial breeze. The space between them grows by microns, by millimeters, by miles. Already she can feel him receding, becoming memory.
She doesn't watch him dress. Doesn't watch him check his phone or straighten his tie or gather the scattered pieces of the life he's going back to. Instead she studies the ceiling, counting cracks in the plaster like rings in a tree—measuring time in concentric circles of regret.
At the door, he pauses. Opens his mouth. Closes it. What could words possibly add or subtract from this moment?
The click of the latch is so soft it's almost inaudible. Almost.
She lies there until the shadows lengthen and the day bleeds into dusk, until she can no longer smell him on her skin or feel the ghost-print of his hands on her body. Until she becomes singular again. Indivisible. Whole.
Or something like it.