I can’t stop it, she thought. I can’t.

And what hurt more, what was harder still, was the look in Tina’s eyes as she reached to separate Bette’s body from her own, as she slid two fingers against that hard seam and stilled them there, as she pressed in and up, until the roughness was inside Bette, driven deeply by the softness that was Tina, who stared in wonder at the face above hers as it gasped, and writhed, and touched her even more than her own desire, which pushed even further into Bette, wanting too to feel what she couldn’t see, what she could only imagine and want. Could only imagine wanting. Forever and all at once, in the superior instant of now, with the snow falling outside, and the heat within, with home a memory of someplace once known, and been, but inconsistent with being now. With this tingling feeling of non-narrative bliss.

You’re caught up with me?

The question lingered, though far away now, so charming then, so earnest and yet so teasing, emerging guilelessly from full lips, dark eyes, a face framed by dark hair, crowning a body now shuddering against her. Tina shuddered back.

“You feel so good,” Bette whispered, but Tina couldn’t respond. Couldn’t form words when words were thoughts only, and wouldn’t rotate into sound. Not when sense was gone and sensation all, including, again, this rumbling sensation of forever, which Tina heard like thunder in her mind. Like something late to sound but contemporaneous with light and electricity, each together forecasting storm. She jerked up, forcing her mind back into the room, and savored Bette’s gasp.

Neither was naked, yet both were, in that space where narration failed. Where expression was physical and unconscious, nonverbal, reduced to grunting and clawing, as Bette did now, grinding hard against Tina’s whole fist, which banged against her like a punch she couldn’t stop throwing and Bette couldn’t stop taking, over and over, in a brutal and agonized give and take. Their movements grew more frenzied, Bette reaching to pull Tina’s bra above her *****, and Tina shoving upward so hard that Bette’s gasp heightened, her eyes squeezing shut.

“Tina,” she screeched out, wincing at the sound of her own voice, so tortured and ecstatic, so lost and found in this one woman, in this one name, attached to a person who moved beneath her behind her own closed eyes, so far inside her now that she could have come right then if she’d wanted any of it to ever, ever end.

Which she didn’t.

The thought angled sideways through Bette’s pleasure, nudging her mind just enough to allow her to fall from Tina’s hand, which opened and slid gently against her, one finger pressing further than all the rest, abiding, commanding her attention. And capturing her desire so precisely that she needed no reminding how willing a hostage she’d become. She glanced down at Tina’s face, marred by passion and effort, but glistening with breath and life, and offering her a choiceless opportunity to submit.

To inclement weather. To the impossibility of return. To outrageous torture and non-narrative bliss.

To the end that would come.