The True Love Experiment

I used to think first kisses were the most powerful of all the kisses. That first, hyperaware contact with such uniquely soft, responsive skin. The discovery of someone else’s sounds and tastes and desire. The ultimate reveal: Is there real passion there?

But I was wrong. First kisses are great, but the one hundredth, the one thousandth kisses are better. There’s familiarity and comfort, satiating a need but with enough knowledge to know how to tease and play. Whoever invented kissing is my favorite historical figure ever.

“I want to kiss you for the rest of the weekend,” I mumble into his mouth.

With a laugh, he rolls over onto me, his hand running up and down my thigh, gripping and stroking until I arch into his touch, coaxing his fingers up my hip, along my ribs, over my breast.

I could be satisfied with kissing, but I want everything else. Being with Connor feels like a devastating inevitability. I have this pit-deep need for something not just fast and satisfying but slow and whole. I sense the same surrender in him, too. It’s in the way he kisses me so slow and deep, the patient mapping of his hands across my body, over my clothes, before he drags one item of clothing at a time up over my head or down my legs with deliberate, patient purpose.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says into the sensitive skin below my ear, and then repeats it quietly into my neck, my shoulder, my breasts.

This isn’t rushed foreplay. This is like someone put the whole world on pause. He’s solid and strong above me, and I become a pliable, languid tangle of limbs and skin under his attention. His lips linger on my breasts, tongue and teeth teasing me expertly, mouth sucking. It hits me like a thunderbolt: only someone who knows me from the inside out can satisfy and torture me like this in equal measure.

I’ve never felt such a longing to be someone’s the way I do with Connor. I want to eat his possessive, open-mouthed kisses for every meal. I want him to have a memory of kissing every place on my body. I want my hands to instinctively mold to the shape of him. I want him to know by the heat of my skin and the pitch of my sounds how close I am.

Connor tells me he can’t stop thinking about me, that all he wants to do is touch me. He kisses down my body to settle between my open legs and reaches up, running his thumb over my lips, feeling the shape of my sounds as he works me over with his mouth, giving me something to suck and bite while pleasure pours out of me. I want to let my head fall back and lose myself in the wide swirls of his tongue, when he sucks, tight and determined, but I’m afraid to miss any of it. When I look down, I see the top of his head, his eyes closed in bliss. I tangle his soft hair in my hands, and when his name escapes on an exhale, he looks up, mouth still on me, fingers inside, his own sounds vibrating up my spine. I say his name, wanting to imprint on my memory that it’s Connor making me feel this way, should only ever be him taking me to the edge, closer, closer, and then making me fall. Once I’m wrecked and boneless, he rolls me over, sinking fingers and teeth into all my curves, biting gently down my legs, his teeth grazing the swell of my ass, up my back to send shivers down my spine. A slow thrust against my thigh, and I feel how hard he is, his breath shaking against my skin.

I look over my shoulder at him, feeling kiss drunk and heavy-limbed. “You don’t by chance have protection.”

“I do.” He kisses back down my spine and stands. “My wallet.”

“Please tell me it hasn’t been there since the divorce.”

He laughs. “Only since this morning.”

“How confident.”

“ABC’s,” he says, tearing it open. “Always be prepared.”

“That’s ABP.”

Connor huffs out a distracted laugh. “There’s not so much blood in my cranium at the moment,” he says absently, and we both watch him slowly roll it down his length, inch by straining inch.

“I’m seeing that.”

He pulls me to stand, bending to kiss me, his urgency in the tight grip of his hands on my hips, the restraint when he pivots me and sits in a smooth movement coaxing me onto his lap.

“I want you in charge.” Connor guides me closer. “Go slow.”

But slow sounds awful. I want to impale myself and die a happy death.

He tempers my impatience, and I don’t know how because he looks about as calm as I feel, flushed and tight all over. I want to bruise his thighs, eat him whole. The galaxy inside me expands, too fast, in a world-ending way. The feel of him—his patient, trembling hands on my waist and full mouth on my breasts and his urgent body filling me—sends me into a euphoric trance. I start slow, but eventually animal instinct takes over, slippery and wild. It’s so good it’s speechless, gasping sex. It’s take up the whole bed sex, head hanging over the edge, sheets popping off the corners sex. It’s screaming into his ear, laughing into kisses as we slow down and check in with each other sex. It’s slow, shared breath, tiny movement and fast, headboard slapping sex. When he finally comes—behind me, curled over my back and trapping me in a savage, tender cage—the room falls still for the first time in an eternity. His massive body heaves in breaths, fists shaking where they’re planted on the mattress beside mine.

“Holy shit,” he breathes against my spine. His forehead is sweaty when he presses it between my shoulder blades. “Holy shit.”

My ears are ringing, skin prickly and aware that I’ve taken a new shape. I can feel my heartbeat in my windpipe; my thoughts are warped with thrill and pleasure and the tight, hyperaware realization that I want him close to me every second of every day from here on out. I want to tattoo my name into his skin and shout his name a hundred times and make sure everyone hears.

He shifts back and away, standing at the end of the bed. I’ve never felt so physically drained and spiritually full all at the same time. I collapse forward onto the warm mattress, and roll to my back, staring up at the ceiling.

Connor gazes down at the situation around me. “This bed is a disaster.”

“Let’s put it back together so we can destroy it again.”

He laughs. “I might need a minute.”

“Okay.” I throw an arm across my face. “But only one.”

He leaves, bare feet padding across the tile into the bathroom. Quiet shuffling. Water running.

I feel like I’m floating.

He returns and gently touches his fingers to my inner thigh before pressing a warm, wet cloth there, drawing it up to where a pleasant ache throbs, cleaning me with slow, careful hands.

“Ready?” he asks.

I push up onto an elbow. “I am. Are you?”

He shakes his head but kisses me, distracting with the familiar drag of his teeth along my lower lip, and then presses a fresh, cooler cloth between my legs. The shock immediately shifts to a soothing bliss.

“We went at it quite a long time. I’m worried you’re gonna be sore.”

I hum into his lips. “Good sore.”

The light from the bathroom sends gold along his arms, his fingers, and I feel like he’s painting me with stardust. It’s crazy, but I need him again. This is a choking, panicky feeling. I am infatuated, I am mesmerized by everything he does. When he stands to return the washcloths to the bathroom I grab his forearm, taking the damp cloths from him and tossing them somewhere to the side, out of sight.

“Don’t go.”

“I was just—”

“I don’t care. I don’t want you to leave my sight.”

With a smile, he climbs back over me.

“Look at you,” he whispers into my neck. “A needy cuddler. Who would have guessed?”

“I’m not usually.”

“No?”

“What have you done to me, Connor Prince III?”

He aligns his body beside mine, pulling me right up against him, coaxing my leg over his hip. “Only a fraction of what I’ve thought about doing.”

“You think about me when you’re alone?” I ask.

Connor hums, the sound raspy and deep. “All the time.”

“Me, too.”

He pulls back, grinning at me. “You do?”

“Of course I do,” I admit, and he tucks some of my tangled hair behind my ear. “Sometimes it’s sexy stuff, and sometimes I just really want to hang out with you. I like you.”

“I like you, too.” His hand smooths down my side, over my thigh. “Christ, you’re so soft.”

It seems absurd to me that I haven’t ever experienced such a basic building block of intimacy—post-sex languishing, lazy kisses and touches that are somehow more aware and more hazy—but I’m realizing I’ve been shitty at allowing any post-coital connection. These smaller kisses that lead nowhere, words spoken into skin, talking about the sex we just had with vulnerability and honesty and giddiness. Something creaks open inside me, a door to a secret room.

“That was the best sex of my life,” I say.

He doesn’t look surprised or skeptical. He says only, “Same,” as his lips make a warm path down my neck.

“I want to do it again.”

He laughs. “Do you see how sweaty I am?”

“Mmm, yes.” I run my hands over his shoulders. “Let’s go rinse off together.”

We stand and I see he was right: the bed really is a disaster. Connor holds my hand even for the short walk to the bathroom, and it’s good he does because my legs are shockingly wobbly. He presses his front to my back as we wait for the water to heat, his arms banded around my waist. He is a whole planet behind me, a sun.

Under the water, we share wet kisses and sudsy hands and it’s not long before he’s impatient again, too. He drips footprints on the bathroom floor as he rushes out to hunt for the second condom. Such confidence in this man who packed up his things earlier today.

This time the cold shower wall is at my back and his skin is hot, pressed all along my front. It’s slow and careful, then hard and frantic, his fingertips gripping bruises into my thighs, his body thrusting so deep it obliterates every other sensation. I don’t know how I’m going to function if I have to leave this room and act normal after this. I don’t know how I’m going to pretend I don’t want him with a clawing hunger every time I see him.

I finish him in the bed with my hands and mouth, his fingers a chaotic mess in my wet hair, his rough, filthy words scraping the walls as he comes. It’s a long silent pause after, my face pressed to his stomach, his heart pounding through the entire length of his torso.

“I’m crazy about you,” I say.

His voice is a low vibration reverberating down his body. “I’m out of my mind.”

“I’ll want you again tomorrow, and the next day, and literally every day after that.”

Connor is quiet so long I think he’s dozed off, but then his voice rises out of the darkness.

“Can we fake it?” he asks, finally. “I’m lying here wondering if we can do both. This and that.”

“I promise to do the best acting of my life, and I played a sun in a fifth-grade play, so I can assure you I’m very good.”

Laughing, he pushes up onto an elbow, looking at me with a pleasure-drunk blur to his gaze. “A sun?”

“I had to just stand there.” I kiss his navel. “You know me. Trust me, it was very difficult to not join in the orbit dance.”

He smiles, but it doesn’t take over his face the way I expect. “I’ll have to hide my jealousy.”

Oh.

“I won’t fall in love with any of them, Connor.”

He drags me up his body, aligning me over him. Our hearts pound in tandem, recharging. “What if you need to, to make the show work? That’s what I can’t stop thinking about. You have chemistry with Isaac. I should let you pursue that. This—you and me—seems like such a terrible idea, but I want you so bad. I can’t say no to you.”

“Let’s just take it one day at a time, okay?”

I haven’t felt this way before. It’s such a simple declaration, and for now I can only make it to myself. Any lie I ever said about keeping this easy, about being able to walk away and focus on the show, is obliterated into dust. There’s a universe expanding in my rib cage, stars and planets and all kinds of dangerous sparking debris that could destroy me. I’m consumed by a distracting ache, a sharp want, a desperation for this thing I have already in my arms. I know what this is even if I’ve never felt it before. I’m falling in love.