Alex, if I’m hurting you—if you think I’m not good for you anymore—please, tell me.

I don’t want you to be miserable. I just want you to be happy. But I’m confused. Really confused. We should talk.

I hope you’re okay.

You’ve been crying for an hour now. I don’t know what to do.

That, was the end of David’s letter.

I slid the piece of paper onto the small, wooden bedside table.

I rested my hand across David’s chest, and pressed my naked body to his own. David had stripped down to his underwear. His hair smelled of artificial flowers and chemicals; I could tell he had taken a shower not long ago.

In all honesty, I don’t know what I was trying to do.

It was unlikely that I would be late for my meeting, if I lingered here. My Assistant and I were supposed to eat lunch together, and it was barely nine in the morning. As long as I left by half past eleven, I would be okay.

I didn’t wake David. I merely held him, shut my eyes, and listened to the sound of his breaths colliding with the air. It was peaceful. It was good. Separate? Us? I thought, as I reached down and rested my hand against his thigh.

I couldn’t picture it. Not being with him anymore. This felt so right. Too right. And apparently, David still shared the sentiment, too.

But we were changing—this, I could not deny. And when David awoke, after a little while of me staring at him with a grin on my face, for once, he smiled back. “Hey,” he said.

My lover curled his hand into my hair. He pulled me in for a kiss. It was loving, slow—everything we had failed to be over the course of these past few weeks. “Hello,” I answered back, in a sing-song voice, once we had finally stopped to catch our breaths, and my jaw was sore.

I caressed the side of his face with the back of my palm. “Slept well, angel?”

“Not enough.” David’s gazed traced my body. He frowned, then raised a brow at me. “Naked?”

I chuckled. I wrapped my arms around his neck again. The sun had cast a flutter of light amidst the room; it heated my back. “Is that no good?”

He pressed his lips to my neck. “I missed you.”

I cupped his penis with a single hand from beneath his boxers. “I want this inside me,” I told David. And I felt him tense beneath me.

He took a deep breath, then swallowed, hard. “We’re not fighting anymore?”

As he began to harden against my fingers, I met his question with a hum. I closed my eyes again. “Right now, I just want to be close to you,” I said. “Like before. I don’t want to think.”

He shifted closer to me. The mattress dipped beneath our weights. “Is it really okay?”

“As long as you want this, too, then yes, it is.”

David nodded. He took off his clothes. “I do,” he said.

I grabbed his hand and urged it between my legs. “It’s weird,” I mumbled, as a gasp and a shiver escaped me, when my lover left nimble touches against my skin. “I feel like it’s our first time all over again.”

“Nah,” David laughed. I clenched my thighs around his wrist and held onto his shoulder. “I’m way too awkward to be this relaxed for a first time.”

“Oh, fuck, David,” I grunted, as I came into his hand. “Shit,” I huffed. My chest, rose, then fell alongside my heavy breaths. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Already?” David had quite the smug grin across his face. He continued to fuck me with his fingers and kissed my lips. “It’s been a while for you,” he stared me dead in the eye, “hasn’t it?”

My head fell back against the pillows.

My lips parted with every whimper that left them. “S-shut up,” I shivered, as I grasped at the sheets. “It’s—”

David curled his fingers inside me. I cried out and arched my back off the mattress. It was like all the energy and stress that had once been in my limbs dissipated, as I—shamefully so—moved in ways that would encourage him to go deeper inside me.

“Wait,” David whispered against my lips. “I’ll get a condom.”

The absence of him was something I despised. I suddenly yearned to make up for all the time we had not spent near each other during these past couple weeks. “I missed you,” I told my lover again, once he had returned.

David ran his mouth atop my chest, where he left marks, scars of time he would never get back—time, spent with me.

I hooked my legs around his waist. Although we were still miserable, it occurred to me that I was not afraid anymore, of David seeing me as a woman. Nor did I feel like one. In this moment, we were simply two men in love, giving each other pleasure. And by now I had learned, that pleasure took many forms.