Keeping my hands bound at my back, he runs his other hand down my spine. “And now.” He leans forward, keeping me locked between the tiles and his body. “You’re going to make us both late.” After lightly sinking his teeth into my shoulder, he licks over the spot, sending chills racing everywhere.
“I’m okay with that,” I taunt him, pushing my ass into the heat of his body behind me. “Are you?” I ask, eyeing him over my shoulder.
Turning me back around, his hands effortlessly glide down to cover my breasts. “I think you’ll see,” he croons. Bending slightly, he lifts my leg, tucking it into the crook of his elbow. The wide crown of his cock presses into me, eliciting a sigh of relief from both of us. “That I’m more than okay with being right here with you.” He buries another inch into me, the veins in his neck bulging under his restraint. “This is where I belong.” And then there’s no him and me.
There’s only us.
Our bodies glide together smooth and easy, a delicious contrast to the hard and fast rhythm he’s pounding into me. “I’m not going to last long at all, baby,” he warns. “You’re too hot. Too tight. Too fucking much.” Reaching between us, he runs his thumb over my clit. Thankfully he’s holding me up, otherwise I’d be nothing but the puddle of water circling the drain, swirling blissfully around and around before being pulled down into oblivion.
Between the rapid motion of his thumb, and the heavy fullness of his body in mine, I lose control of everything. My body isn’t my own. It’s his to do with as he wants. Even the air in my lungs no longer belongs to me, escaping past my lips in uncontrollable puffs of ecstasy.
With his face buried in my neck, he growls, coming in a wildly passionate blaze of heat. When his breathing returns to normal, and I return to my own body, he lowers my leg to the floor. In a gentle swipe, he pushes the wet hair from my face, which I’m sure is flushed in patches of red. “Now that’s one fine way to wake up.” His smile, my God, it’s beautiful. Warm and luscious, smooth and sexy—and all mine. It beckons me to return it with my own.
And that’s how we finish out the shower. With lingering kisses. Warm smiles. Loving touches and rinsed bubbles.
It’s not lost on me that we move around each other with ease through the rest of the morning. An impossibly huge smile spreads across my face as I realize we have our own routine. “For you,” he says, handing me my to-go mug of coffee as I adjust my bag on my shoulder. Ever the gentleman, he opens the door for me, extending his hand to the side as I walk past him.
And ever the sex fiend, he grabs my ass in the process, slapping it lightly as I walk to my car. Leaning around me, he opens my door. The sun sparkles high in the sky, casting its warm rays down on us. The leaves rustle along the ground, the early offerings of a cool autumn tumbling over our feet. “Have a good day.” Leaning in, he kisses me. Though it’s simple and sweet, it speaks volumes to me. “Love you. Talk to you later,” he says as he turns to walk toward his car.
“Love you, too.”
A kiss blown in the wind falls on his back, a subtle reminder of how much I love him to stay with him through the day.
“You seem awfully chipper this morning,” Tim observes aloud as I walk into the room. After this morning’s shower session, I have definitely been a little lighter on my toes. In fact, I doubt anyone has signed in this morning with as much enthusiasm as I have. “What’s gotten into you?”
His question, echoing the words of David’s from last night, elicits a chuckle of a response from me. “Oh, nothing,” I dismiss, setting my coffee down on my desk.
Looking over at me with an ‘uh huh, yeah sure’ look plastered to his face, he pushes forward. “Nothing?” He laughs. “No one is this happy to be at work at ten to seven in the morning. Even people who love their jobs. Spill it.” Dropping his heels from their perch on his desk, his chair creaks as he spins to turn toward my desk.
“Just happy this morning. Can’t say much more.”
“Can’t or won’t?” he presses on, taking a sip of his coffee.
“I was raised never to kiss and tell. So I’m sure as heck not going to kiss and tell twice.”
His coffee goes everywhere. Scattering like a fool, he moves to wipe up the spewed-out coffee from the papers on his desk. A few attempts at a response get stuck in his mouth, unlike his coffee. And luckily for him, a group of his first period students walk in, looking like zombies of course. They break up the non-conversation and I excuse myself as I make my way to the room in which my study hall is held.
“Today we’ll be starting some background notes on Arthur Miller and his definition of tragedy,” I begin the lecture to my second period class. Like any early morning lecture would be, my words are met with little more than a few groans of disapproval. Ignoring their not-so-silent protests as best as I can, I wait patiently while the twenty-five students open their notebooks and take out their pens. “In the model of the classic tragedy, you have a hero of very high status coming to his demise through a massive conflict. These are the types of conflicts usually affecting a nation or an entire population over whom the hero usually has control.”
A hand flies up in the third row and I bounce on my toes, excitedly calling on the young girl whose name and face I still haven’t paired up. “Can I go to the bathroom?” My hope of the epiphany of a question I was waiting for walks out the door, behind third-row-girl and her not so urgent need to use the bathroom.
“And then we have tragedy the way Miller sees it.” Clicking on a few icons on the overhead computer, I pull up an image depicting the tragic hero as Miller sees him. “You see, the real tragedy is the story of the everyday man, who has a family and children perhaps. He lives a good life, but comes to his downfall through what most would consider a non-essential conflict.”
“So he’s a nobody?” Chris, one of the few kids actually awake and listening, chimes in as I pause to pull up another graphic.
“No,” I dismiss his conclusion immediately. “Everybody is somebody to someone. Just because you don’t know the person doesn’t mean they aren’t important. You don’t have to be a national icon in order to matter.”
“Yeah right.” A kid in the back row snickers. “No one cares unless you’re Kanye or a Kardashian.”
Taking advantage of what most would call a teachable moment, I close out the icons on the screen and pull up an image of ground zero and what it looked like the day after the attacks. Lines of people surrounded the pile of debris. Forming a conveyor belt of buckets, they worked to remove an endless sea of broken concrete and twisted steel searching in vain for anybody’s somebody.
“You see Kanye in there?” I point to the screen for the emphasis that isn’t needed. “How old were you when this happened?”
A quiet voice calls out from the front, “Three.”
Nothing more than toddlers, they were protected from the horrors of that day. Having only learned what they know of it through stories and images which are seared into our collective memory, they’ve missed the magnitude of the event that only witnessing it firsthand can provide. The hellish nightmare of planes flying into buildings.
Of people choosing to jump to their deaths rather than perish in a fiery inferno.
Of heroes climbing hundreds of flights of stairs in the hopes of saving one person’s life.
Who will be there to remember my son?
“Let today serve as a reminder that a hero doesn’t need to be a national figure. He doesn’t have to be of high importance, reigning over millions of people. He doesn’t have to have a lavish fortune to mean something.” Clicking on a few more images of the dust-covered people, terrified for their lives, running through the streets of lower Manhattan, I continue, “He doesn’t even have to be a he.” Pausing, I let their silence settle in. Before continuing, I open a picture from David’s firehouse. The names of the men who gave their lives that day are emblazoned on the side of their truck. Next to it is the image of the truck, twisted around itself in a heap of what used to be the Twin Towers.