Refusal tightens my stomach. How can this be the last song? How can this be the end?
The melody lifts, sudden, unexpected, a joyous sound. It’s almost impossible not to smile, hearing that. Almost impossible not to hope for more. The irony makes me ache.
The Last Song. No.
The song lasts an eternity. It’s over in a second.
It tells a story, this last song. A story of searching, stumbling, losing. Of needing love. Of finding it. Enough, enough, enough. It tells a story of finally having enough. There’s almost surprise, when you’ve gone so long without. A sense of disbelief. It feels like you have more than you deserve.
It feels like someone’s going to come and snatch it away.
It’s her story, and it’s mine. We both had broken childhoods and a sense of guilt. We both can’t help but doubt the happy ever after we’ve been given. The one who won’t have guilt and doubt… the baby nestled in her stomach, listening to the music from the best seat in the house. The baby will know he’s loved from the moment he’s born. From right now. We’ve broken the pattern. That’s when I finally understand the song. The last fear. The last hunger. The last pain.
It’s not a song about endings. It’s about a new beginning. The Last Song.
The final note rises higher and higher, buffeted by the clouds, like a balloon floating away.
Silence. And then the opera house erupts in applause. Adulation. It’s completely deserved, this praise. I can’t even bring myself to clap. She does a slow, elegant curtsy. Then she walks off the stage. Our eyes meet. There are a thousand differences between us. Our ages are too far apart. I’m a fighter. She’s a musician. There are so many reasons she’s not right for me, except one. Love.
She runs to me, and I’m waiting to catch her, always here. Always hers.
Samantha
I’m waiting in the dark. The hotel hums with quiet efficiency, keeping out the heat of the season, making a cocoon for me. I’ve been alone for hours now. Liam has been working out. That’s never going to change. It’s part of his career, for one thing. It’s also part of his strength. I’ve come to see, too, that it’s almost like the hours I spend practicing the violin. A meditation.
A soft click from the door. Light skates over the smooth white bedspread and then disappears. He’s soundless as he moves across the room. Only a faint rustle as he closes the bathroom door behind him. The shower almost sounds like a dream through the walls. It feels like a dream when I put my feet onto the carpet. I follow him into the bathroom, where steam has already clouded the mirrors.
He pauses when he sees me. Water drips down his temple, his jaw. It streams down his chest. He might be a Greek god bathing in some waterfall.
I take off my nightshirt and let it fall to the floor.
He doesn’t move as I open the shower door and step inside.
Strange how water that’s so hot can feel cold when you’re inches away. The spray makes my skin pebble and my nipples turn tight. He drags me close to him so the shower hits me fully, and I gasp at the heat—the hot water, his body. A combined furnace that raises my temperature, boiling over.
I raise my eyebrow. “Do you want me to shower, too?”
He runs a square-tipped finger across the slope of my breast. “Please.”
It would be so easy to let him take over. So pleasurable.
Instead I push him until his back hits the wall. He doesn’t flinch, not my soldier, but the tile must be cold on his skin. He’s already hard and pointing in my direction. His cock looks swollen and red, almost as if it’s been hard for hours, never gone down since we landed in Sydney.
“What are you doing?” he murmurs.
I grasp his cock in my fist. “Taking care of you.”
“You don’t have to—”
A finger to his lips. “I don’t have to, but I want to. It makes me feel good to make you come. To give you relief. To make your knees weak. The same way it makes you feel good when you do it to me.”
He leans his head back against the tile. His arms spread as if to say, Have at me.
Of course it’s easy to talk about making his knees weak. The reality is a little more perplexing. When I squeeze him gently, his whole body jerks. When I stroke him, he grunts. I touch two fingers beneath his heavy cock, to the soft, tight sac underneath, and he grits his teeth. His body is like sheet music; it tells me the notes to play. I follow them across the staff up and down, playing a song that means desire, that means trust, that means gratitude.
“Thank you,” he says, his voice low as gravel.
“For what?”
“The present. The song. It was beautiful. Beyond beautiful.”
“Oh.” My cheeks feel warm. A smile plays at my lips. “You’re welcome.”
“Of course you didn’t tell me we were exchanging gifts. I didn’t get you anything.”
I sit every day and play the violin for hours. That hasn’t changed even while I’m pregnant. It probably won’t change when I have this baby either. It’s part of me, the same way his late-night runs and weight lifting are part of him. They’re the way we experience the world. A form of worship. “You did get me something,” I say, walking my fingers down the ladder of tightly defined abs. “Yourself.”
And then I show him how very nimble and strong my fingers have gotten from years of daily practice. I show him how much I appreciate his taut, muscled body. I show him that there’s love and lust and laughter, even after the last song has been played—that there’s music, even after the last note goes dark.
Do you want more of Skye Warren?
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Pash, No Rash
Penny Reid
“I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf. Maybe I’ll learn how to surf. That won’t chafe the thighs, will it?” Using the condensation my whiskey sour glass had left behind, I drew a surfboard on the surface of the bar. “But really, thigh abrasions aside, how likely am I to learn to surf?”
I didn’t lift my attention as I asked this question, didn’t check to make sure Patty the bartender was still listening. I’d known Patty for just two hours, but I liked her. She’d served me several drinks, offered me a room upstairs should I become too inebriated to walk back to the lodge, and didn’t seem to care that I was fuck-all good at small talk. Basically, she was now my closest friend.
Though, I doubted she was within earshot at present.
Didn’t matter. I wasn’t talking to her, not really. I was talking to myself, as I was prone to do in moments of panic, excitement, or melancholy. I’d been talking to myself quite a lot today.
First, when I thought my alarm hadn’t gone off this morning, as follows, “Holy shiitake mushrooms, Audrey! You are so fired. Your third business trip and you oversleep? And on a team building retreat. What is wrong with you? Pull it together! Where the hell are your pants?”
As it turned out, my panic was all for naught. The hotel’s digital clock on the nightstand hadn’t been adjusted after the end of daylight savings time last week. I hadn’t overslept, I hadn’t been late. I’d made it to the team building breakfast thirty minutes early and therefore was forced to wait in the lobby until it started. But I’d impressed the big boss by being the first from Research and Development (R&D) to arrive.