After checking the date, he lies flat on his back, his hands linked behind his head and a devilish smile across his lips. I rip the packet open with my teeth and pull down his boxer briefs and sweats at the same time. Then I roll the condom over him, something I know he loves to watch. He groans when he slides into me, his fingers digging into my hips. Then he reaches up to grasp my nape and pulls my mouth to his.

Swear, there’s no physical pleasure greater than Josh Warden inside me, his tongue dancing with mine, his moans filling the air while his hands worship every inch of my body.

“Stop,” he grunts, hands holding my hips in place. “Fuck.” He blows out a heavy breath. “If I make it three more seconds, that’s what? Five seconds more than the first time we did this, right?”

I laugh into his neck, my eyes closing when his hands find my hair. I pull back and reach for my phone.

But you made up for it the third and fourth time.

His eyebrows lift when he reads the text. “So this isn’t a one-time thing?”

I’m here all night.

* * *

Somehow, we end up on the floor of his living room, in our underwear, sitting cross-legged opposite each other, in a fort made of blankets, eating ice cream out of the tub. This is after making love in his bed, the shower, and the kitchen. We treat time like it doesn’t exist, like our joy and laughter is the remedy to prevent the sun from rising and delaying my imminent departure.

“Do you have to leave tomorrow?” Josh asks.

I nod.

“Why?”

I drop my spoon in the tub and get my phone. Cordy relays for me, “I have to work.”

He scoffs, sprays of ice cream flying from his mouth and landing right on my face. Laughing, he uses the blanket to wipe it away. “Who the hell works the day before Christmas?”

I soften my scowl. “I do. Obviously. And I’ll be working Christmas Day, too.”

“Oh yeah?” He eyes me sideways. “Doing what?”

I find myself smiling. “Visiting the families from the center.”

He returns my smile with a wider one. “Say Something, right?”

Nodding, I have Cordy say, “Yeah. I take the family portraits and this guy I work with—Joey—he’s going to dress up as Santa.”

His gaze lowers. “Joey, huh?”

I pat his head teasingly. “I should tell you all about Joey,” Cordy says for me.

Josh shakes his head. “I don’t want to know.”

“What?”

After dropping his spoon in the now empty tub, he says, “If you’re with some guy back in St. Louis and you just cheated on him or whatever, I don’t want to know.”

I pick up the spoon and use it to thump his forehead. Then type, “I’m not a hussy.”

With a chuckle, Josh says, “Hussy?” He picks up his phone and holds it to his ear. “Becca? Yeah. She’s here… hang on.” He hands it to me. “2001’s on the phone, they want their word back.”

I give him the finger, but I’m laughing with him. “What I was going to say was: he’s a big fan of yours. He talks about you all the time. He was at the St. Louis Skate Tour finals just to see you. Something about a 720 gazelle you did in Miami…?”

Josh cringes, then somehow gets tangled in the sheets and trips over himself. Seriously, I’ve watched YouTube videos of him doing triple backflips from thirty-foot cliffs and he struggles with blankets?

What…?

I stalk him, okay?

There.

I said it.

Finally settled on his side, he faces me “Does he know about you and me?”

I shake my head, pretending to scoop out the melted ice cream from the tub.

“So I’m your dirty little secret?”

I drop the tub, my mind spinning. Then I lie down, leaning up on my elbow so I can look down at him—at his eyes—eyes a mixture of sad and sorry. His gaze searches mine as Cordy says for me, “Sometimes I want to tell him that I know you…”

“I want to tell him about everything. But then I begin to type the words and when I read them back, it doesn’t do us justice, and it doesn’t seem right to tell someone in that way. The words are robotic. Rehearsed. It’s impossible to explain our joy and our love and our pain. But I wish I could. I wish I could tell people how I felt. How I still feel.”

He reaches up, his fingers moving my hair behind my ear. He whispers, “Still?”

“Yes. Still.”

I’m quick to add, “But I meant what I said earlier, Josh. We can’t let this change us. I’ve built a life for myself in St. Louis. I’ve made friends and I’m doing well in class and on the school paper. I volunteer at a place I love, and I’m getting a lot out of all the therapy I do.”

“I’m happy.”

“For the first time in a long time, I’m happy. Not as happy as I would be if I got to see you more often. But not as miserable as I would be if you gave up skating to be with me.”

He smiles at that, his hand cupping my neck while his thumb gently strokes my throat.

“So if one night with you is all I get, I’ll take it and carry it with me. And I’ll cherish it all the days we’re apart.”

—Joshua—

I wake up the next morning and without opening my eyes, without feeling for her next to me, I know she’s gone. I know because she’s taken half my heart with her. It’s the same way I felt when I woke up the last time we did this. The last time we said goodbye without saying the actual words. The difference this time is that it doesn’t hurt. Because when I reach under my mattress for the worn envelope, the edges frayed, the content evidence of everything we are—hope overpowers the ache, overpowers the longing. And even though she’s gone physically, she’s not gone forever. And the fleeting words I spoke the last time she did this still hold the truth. She’ll always belong to me.

I pull out the envelope and flip it between my fingers, over and over, the weight of its content shifting like the weight of my heart between moments of Becca. My breath falters as I empty it, photographs spilling onto my chest. I pick up one, an image forever burned in my mind, and I scan over it, looking for a new meaning. I do this with all of them, one after another. Pictures of the wallpaper in her old room, a shovel in the dirt, dying flowers, Tommy’s sandpit, porch steps, fried pickles, and birthday cakes. There are dozens of Tommy, of Tommy and her, Tommy and me, and a single one of all three of us. I stare at that one the longest. I always do. And I wait for my heart to slow, for the reminder to hit me… that I lost her once, but I won’t lose her again. That I loved her once, but I’ll make her love me twice. And when I build the courage, those thoughts infiltrating my entire existence, I pick up the letter, her handwriting scrawled in bright red ink:

“If you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph.”

- Unknown.

22

—Becca—

“I spent my childhood Christmases staring out of my living room window watching kids playing with their new presents out in the street, all while dodging insults from my mother. Occasionally, I’d dodge the empty bottles she’d down during those insults.