We Both Paid the Same Stranger to Sublet the Same One-Bedroom, and Neither of Us Would Move Out novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: This Is the Apartment

We didn't turn on a single light.

We climbed the stairs in the dark with our fingers laced, and he shut the apartment door behind us.

The sound of it was the best sound I had ever heard.

No air mattresses, no sheet curtain, no tea mugs on the coffee table.

Gloria had moved the others into the second floor by nine, with sheets, a toaster and a hug each.

The apartment sat empty and quiet around us.

It was ours, and the door locked, and nobody in the world was on the other side of it.

"From the top," I said.

"What?"

"Everything. In order. Start to finish."

He looked at me in the dark.

The streetlight lay across his face, and his mouth had begun to curve.

"Do you have a diagram?"

"I have a bed."

"Then I'll follow your lead."

"Good boy," I said, and watched his pupils swallow his eyes.

I walked backward into the bedroom, pulling him by the front of his shirt.

The full-size bed stood under the window with the blue quilt turned down, and it had never looked so enormous.

I sat on the edge and lay back on the pillow in my party dress.

Randy lowered himself beside me with his hands on his own chest.

"Back to back," I said. "That's where we started."

We lay back to back, with five inches of dark between us.

It lasted a few seconds.

I rolled over and he rolled over, and we met in the middle, mouth to mouth, laughing into each other.

Then we stopped laughing.

The kiss was the same kiss as the first night, slow and warm and full of the same startled hunger.

The difference was that now I knew the shape of his mouth.

I knew where his hand would land and how it would feel.

It landed on my hip.

"Under the quilt," I said.

He pulled the quilt over us both.

His hand slid up the inside of my thigh in the dark, under the hem of the dress, and I felt every callus.

"Soaked," he murmured.

"Since the landing."

"You said that last time."

"It's still true."

His fingers slid under my underwear and over my clit, and I arched into them with a breath that shook the mattress.

He circled me slowly, the way he had that first night.

But this time I took his wrist, and I pressed his hand down harder.

"Two fingers," I said. "Now."

He slid them in, deep, and curled, and I came apart in under a minute with my mouth against his neck.

"You're getting faster," he said.

"I'm getting better at being yours."

I pushed the quilt off the bed.

I peeled off the dress and tossed it at the dresser, and unclasped my bra.

I lay back in the streetlight with my legs falling open.

"Dawn," I said. "The morning after."

"Dawn."

He knelt between my thighs.

He took each of my ankles in his big warm hands and set them on his shoulders, slow, the way he had that first morning.

He folded me until my knees were beside my breasts.

He looked down at me in the light.

"I've thought about you like this every day," he said.

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