Last Summer

Then they found his head. She pushed his forehead, pushed his head back, off of her. He looked at her eyes. She was alert, aware again, her look boring into him. She answered the question in his eyes. "Almost" she said.

"I want to remember it." she said. "I want to know it. To see it. I never want to forget."

He too needed to fix the moment in his mind. To remember it as it actually was, not as a reconstruction from scattered flashes of sensation and vision. "I'll remember you for the rest of my life." he said, and regretted it. It cut too close to the finality of this summer. He looked at her, his look momentarily frightened and sad. She nodded. He pushed the pain aside, and was ready to experience her, all of her.

She shuffled his knees forward to what he thought was the right spot. He grasped himself with fingers and thumb, his rigid shaft arcing through the air at the slightest motion. He tapped her with it. She curled forward, craning her neck to see. He saw the gentle roll in her belly, scrunching to bring their point of contact into her view. He saw the way her breasts compressed and pressed outward. Her legs were almost against her ribs now, her hips curled forward.

He shifted his hips and pressed forward, putting himself against her opening. He needed to move his knees again, to gain better position. Once he found it, his rigid cock poised at her opening with his hips pushed back, she put a hand on his belly and nodded up to him. She looked down at herself, and at him, at them, almost one but still separate beings for the last time.

He pushed forward and felt resistance. She looked tense, and he kept pushing slowly. He felt her resistance give, and she winced. The hand on his belly held him back. He tore his eyes away from the view of his manhood now becoming realized, her parting around him to accept him within her. He looked in her eyes. She looked pained and held him still with her hand. He didn't dare move.

Then she nodded timidly, hesitantly, and the hand eased its pressure on his belly but remained tense. He pushed further and felt her slide around him. There was a little too much friction, and her hand held him back again. He pulled back, then slowly in again. He got further before he felt a gripping friction and stopped. He backed up slightly and slid forward again. He finally felt his body press against hers. She sighed, and her hand fell away.

She lay back again after witnessing him fully inside her. They explored each other's eyes, their friendship forever changed. Their lives forever changed. They each looked at the other anew, as if meeting for the first time. It was true, they were different people now. He searched, not sure what he was looking for. But then he saw it. His best friend. She was still there, still within this body he only now knew so fully. She smiled that old smile at him, and he returned it, assuring her that he too was still there.

"Slow" she said.

He pulled out slowly, and slid back in, inch by inch, pressing her apart. He moved at a steady pace and was all the way in again. "One more." she said. He repeated the slow, full stroke, watching, watching himself penetrate her, watching her eyes accept it.

She was breathing heavily. She held her arms out and he shifted his weight again, falling over her onto his hands. With his own hips curled forward, he had the leverage he needed. They kissed. He moved only gently in her, another long slow stroke. She wrapped her arms around his neck and her ankles around his hips. They broke the kiss and he stared into her eyes. He could see her knees in his peripheral vision. "Faster" she whispered in his ear.

He began to move, one stroke following another without pause. He would not last, but he wanted her with him. He moved at a moderate pace, letting her build back up, keeping himself on edge as much as he could. But he had no experience in it, he did not yet know how to control it. He wanted to let his mind wander to delay the overwhelm he knew was imminent.

"Stay here." she said, seeing it. "Remember this. Don't worry about me."

"I want you with me." he said.

"I'm right here." she told him.

He moved faster. Her belly rose to him, her back arched. Her hips pulled back, then she thrust them up to him, her belly curving to press herself around him. His hands were on the bed again, supporting his weight. Hers began to move wildly as he moved in and out of her as fast as his muscles could carry him.

It was too late for him. He was at the brink and the current would carry him over no matter how he resisted. The world came into sharp focus, he saw everything in stark detail, as if the whole room was awash in light. Time paused for a heartbeat, two. He felt like he could survey the scene at leisure. He saw her face scrunched up, her back arched under him. He saw himself invade her. He saw her surrounding him, consuming him.

And then the moment became something else. He moved frantically, then changed to hard forceful thrusts timed to the convulsions coursing through his entire body. He saw nothing, a random kaleidoscope of flares through tightly closed eyes. He felt his whole life run through him and into her. He caught his breath and looked down, just as another spasm wracked him. He saw her moan, without hearing it. He saw her panting without hearing it. His ears rang, his body vibrated.

He ejaculated stream after stream into her, and she consumed him. It went on for a lifetime. His mind flashed to memories, random, out of time, to them on their bicycles in the woods, to her skinned knee, to her crying about her failed date, to her running away to his house where his parents gave her dinner and walked her back home. He filled her with all he had, his memories, his universe, everything converging on a single point from which his love for her streamed.

She bucked under him as he started his slow return to the world. She yelled. "keep going." and he did, going back to his frantic pace. Muscles he'd never used this way before strained and ached, but he kept them working as if their lives depended on it. He fucked her with abandon, his own semen lubricating the heat of his motion.

It only took a moment. He had not flagged, and a final spasm gripped him yet again. She screamed. The ache in his muscles started to overcome him, but he stayed with her. She writhed, she grabbed his hips, pulling her deeply into her with her hands and her legs.

She finally tensed and arched her back like an acrobat, the top of her head pressed into her pillow. Her hands froze into claws and he felt her toes curl on his ass. Her body wracked with convulsions. He stayed with her till she finally collapsed and pushed his belly with her hand.

They lay on the bed after. Edward felt their combined moisture soaked into the sheets beneath him as he lay on his back. Bren was half on her side, half on her back against him, facing away. He had one arm around her, the other out to his side. He felt her heartbeat and the gentle swells of her breath. "Summer will go by so fast like this." she said. He felt wetness seep against both his temples and her body gently rocking. They both knew how fast a summer could go by.

===

Edward loaded his parents SUV with all he would need for college dorm life, everything he could not bear to leave behind, with one exception. He looked over at the empty house next door on every trip to the driveway. Bren's parents were home, but it looked abandoned, hollow, devoid of life.

Their summer had gone by in a whirlwind of everything he'd ever dreamed of, and it seemed to fulfill many of her dreams as well. It passed in the blink of an eye. They'd spent every day together and every night, not hiding any of it. There was no time to sneak, and both sets of parents accepted it. Almost as if they'd known it was coming for almost two decades.

As the sun fell lower in the sky day by day, a shadow crept over their idyll and over their shared bed. She wouldn't say what day she was leaving, but he knew his departure was only a bit over a week away, and hers could be any time.

One night as they lay in bed, after making love slowly and tenderly, she said. "I don't love you."

It hurt to hear it, but he knew it would hurt even more to hear the affirmation. He looked at her. Her eyes were filled with tears. She buried her face in his shoulder and gripped him like she didn't want to ever let go, and he knew it had been their last time. "I don't love you too." he said, his voice choking, and felt her body wrack with sobs. His own vision clouded, and tears ran down the sides of his head, dripping into his hair and his ears.

The next day she was gone without saying goodbye. Over the years, he would alternately curse her or thank her for that, but he knew it was for the best. Best friends don't ever break up, she'd said.

They never saw each other again. They never spoke, never crossed paths on social media, but they were part of each other forever. He remembered her for the rest of his life, and not for an instant of it would he have traded this day's pain for the emptiness of never having experienced her, never learning the final lessons they had to teach each other, never learning to know each other as so much more than best friends.

He kept no pictures of her, save one. It was taken more than 18 years before that summer. They lay on a bed together wrapped in swaddling clothes, tiny faces scrunched, fists balled. He could never be sure which of them was her, but he suspected that he was the one that was crying.

As his dad pulled the SUV away, he turned to look out the back window, watching both empty houses recede into the past.