“I want it to be you,” I begged, looking into those languid eyes, the same color as the countless sunsets we had watched together on the lake “I need it to be you, Bobby.”

“Lil...” His voice wavered through shaky breaths. “I need you to understand. This . . . that this . . .” He pressed his pillowy lips to mine and muttered, “I love you.” The words blew against my lips like the warm night breeze.

“I love you,” I whispered back without hesitation.

Bobby laid his forehead against mine. The quiet attic was filled with the rhythm of his heavy breaths. “Okay,” he gently nodded. “Okay.”

Bobby pushed a few locks of damp hair out of my face. Then his hand slid down to mine, guiding me to the couch. My nightgown slipped to the floor as I stepped out of it and followed him. He paused to take one long look at my naked body, illuminated by the timid light of the single lamp in the room. There was no night sky to shield me this time. And his glare didn't stop at the curves and slopes of my tanned skin. He looked right inside of me.

Bobby laid me down on the sofa and rested his body atop mine. There was a comfort in his weight against me, even in the stifling heat of this tiny attic. Our breaths syncopated against the creaking of the old furniture, creating a music of our own.

We moved tentatively, heavy with the burden of the choice we made. Like we were dipped in warm golden honey, our bodies were heavy, slow, sweet.

I began to tremble nervously and it embarrassed me. I had always been a little sharp with my attitude, a little braver than most girls. Especially with Bobby. But here, lying under him, my body shook against my will.

Bobby didn't acknowledge it. He knew I never liked pointing out my weaknesses.

“I'm going to get you ready,” he rasped reassuringly.

His full lips made a path down my neck, to the shimmering valley of my chest. The concave slope of my stomach, glittering with tiny beads of sweat. The little bone on my hip. The delicate curve of my inner thigh. He opened my legs up and continued his voyage to the sensitive skin between my legs. Never rushing. Never pushing. He waited for the trembling to subside, caressing the forbidden fruit with his lips. His warm, patient breaths quelled the fear oscillating on my skin, and then his tongue slipped past the soft, wet flesh. Into me. I tugged on his sun-kissed brown locks, my legs wrapping around his shoulders.

I had never felt this before. Rory had played with me down there, but this wasn't playing. This was mastery. This was craft.

Bobby's warm mouth drank me up like wine as his hands gripped the suppleness of my thighs.

I couldn't last long like this. Not with Bobby’s lips kissing the slick skin, not with his tongue mapping ecstasy. I pulled his hair as my entire body constricted and then shattered into millions of pieces. Bobby had the presence of mind to reach up and cover my mouth, but my cries of his name reached past his efforts. I quaked and quivered under a contrasting explosion of sensations. If they could all be seen, I would mimic a star ending its life. But instead, my eyes moistened from the flood escaping me. Each tear a tiny little fragment of stardust.

I was broken, melted, reduced. And in that there was relief. I didn't have to be put together. Be the Lilly who loved the brother of the man she was about to marry. I was just scattered parts of myself.

Bobby rose back on top of me while I was still trying to reassemble from the dismantling. Seeing him there, that face, so perfect that it had confused me for so many years, brought my focus back.

I placed my hand on his cheek.

“Now you,” I smiled.

Bobby's length lingered over my belly as he kissed me again, sweetly, trying to slow down the moment for us. He burrowed his face into my neck as he pushed into me, patiently. It hurt, but the pain was always good with Bobby.

I gasped, and whenever he stopped out of concern, I beckoned him to keep going, to fill me.

“You're so tight Lil,” he groaned in my ear, before he was even all the way.

I dug my fingers into his back as he pressed along, inch by inch, until he was all the way inside of me, taking deep breaths to cope with the tension of his circumference inside of me.

Bobby pulled out slowly, then in, then out. Each thrust allowed my body to acquiesce to him.

“Oh god,” Bobby moaned into my ear, from somewhere deep inside. “You're so wet. Oh god,” he pleaded. “Lil, I should stop. I should pull out.”

I knew what he meant. He was close to the edge and he was inside of me, but I wanted him in me. This might be our only time and I wanted it to be complete.

“No, Bobby. Don't stop,” I assured him. “It feels so good. Keep going.”

“Lil.” His groan, deep and gravelly, tickled the curve of my ear. “Oh Lil, you feel so good . . . so fucking good.” I could feel a shift in his tone and the way his body tensed, just like I had when his mouth was on me, readying me for him.

Bobby’s hips found a rhythm, like a turbulent wake on a placid lake. The husky moans escaping his throat grew hollow as he tightened further inside of me. His eyes rolled up and he clenched the sofa just above my head, reciting my name through gritted teeth, marking me, taking the gift I had saved for him all this time, before collapsing onto me.

Summer 1957

“What are we doing here?” I asked, still in a daze from my nap. It had to be at least two in the morning.

“I thought we'd visit for old time’s sake. I haven't been here since . . .” he caught himself before making the mistake of mentioning the sin that had remained unspoken—the wedding.

He didn't know I hadn't been back either.

“Come on,” he said, making his way towards the main house. He pulled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door, switching on the lights as he entered.

“Jesus, it's like a crypt in here,” Bobby muttered. All the furniture was covered and dusty as if it had been frozen in time, because it had.

“It is.”

He yanked off a tarp from one of the sofas as cloud of dust puffed into the air. “You guys don't come here anymore?”

“No,” I replied curtly. I wandered through the living room, feeling like a ghost haunting this once happy home. “I haven't since . . . the wedding. I kept making excuses. And then when your parents passed, I told Rory it hurt too much to come here. But that wasn't the real reason.” I picked up a dusty picture of my sister, the boys, and me waving from a pontoon boat with pure smiles on our faces. I tried to recall that feeling. “Rory kept making plans to fix things up, like it could make the past go away, but he hasn't. He's been busy with work.” I glanced over at a ladder and paint can, the only evidence of a future within these walls. “We took the clock though. More like your mother gave it to us a few weeks before the accident.”

“Rory didn't mention anything.”

“He wouldn't, Bobby. He wants to impress you. He wants everything to seem perfect. He doesn't want you to see what's become of us even though it's glaringly obvious.”

I know Bobby thought coming back here might be a good thing. I once told him it was my favorite place on earth. But that was before it became the place that reminded me of the terrible decision I had made. Coming back here was like pulling out the stitches from a wound that never fully healed. Bobby coming back was enough to weaken the threads, and being here, I thought they might snap.

I did what I always did when I couldn't sleep at night, when the heat indoors, even tempered by the coolness of the lake, was too much. As I stepped towards the porch, Bobby followed me outside.

“Lil. I'm sorry. I thought—”