Everlasting by Nancy Thayer

else, they were thinking about how soon they could stop doing it so they could return to the hotel. Catherine felt that she was taking the sustenance of life from Kit. When she wasn’t attached to him, skin to skin, she felt as if she were dying, she could hardly breathe, she panicked, even though he was sitting right next to her.
    The odd thing was that she knew she hadn’t yet experienced the ultimate pleasure of lovemaking, and she thought Kit probably knew it, too. But that didn’t matter. She still wanted— needed —to make love to him. But by the second day in Paris she could hardly walk, and sometimes when she sat up on the bed her knees trembled. She felt hot and swollen between her legs and felt relief only when taking a bath—or, strangely enough, when making love. It was insane. She had sometimes seen odd couples together, the man well over six feet tall, broad and burly, with a wife who was only five feet tall, bird-boned, her hips the width of her husband’s thigh. How do they ever manage to make love? Catherine had wondered. Now she felt she knew, for although Kit wasn’t huge and she wasn’t tiny, it felt that way when he entered her. It felt primitive and bestial, even brutal. She would lie with her head turned to one side, eyes closed, whimpering, broken, in a glorious pain.
    “Do you want me to stop?” Kit would whisper, soothing her, smoothing her sweaty hair away from her face.
    “No, no, please don’t,” she would say.
    So he went on and on, as if he needed to be there, inside her, fastened on to her, and so he labored, holding himself back, working hard, both frenzied and desperately calm. It was as if they were cursed to make love every second of the day, as if they would die if they stopped making love. As Kit worked against her, eyes closed, concentrating, grimacing, breathing heavily, exhausted, trembling, swollen, shuddering, she knew they were doing more than making love. It was as if they were making a vow with their bodies and sealing it with the glue of their sex.
* * *
    F inally, of course, they had to stop. They had to leave Paris, go home—and not together. The time came when they showered and dressed in respectable clothes. They packed their luggage and checked out of the hotel. They dropped off the little rented car, which they hadn’t used.
    Suddenly, too soon, it was over, and they were at the airport.
    Kit was flying to Boston, Catherine to New York. Her plane left two hours before his, so he came with her to her terminal.
    The hardest thing for Catherine during their Paris stay had been to keep herself from saying to Kit, “I love you.” For she knew she loved him. Even though she had never loved a man before, except for schoolgirl crushes, she knew this absolutely. All her life, she’d had trouble finding out what she knew, what she wanted to do with her life, who she was, but when she met Kit she was certain at once. She was supremely confident. She wanted him, and the more she had him, the more she wanted him. For once in her life she had found the perfect thing.
    She wanted him to know that. She hoped she’d told him with her body, but she wanted to tell him in words. So before leaving the hotel, while Kit was in the shower, she took a sheet of hotel stationery and wrote:
Dear Kit,
These days with you have been the most wonderful days of my life. Even if I never see you again, I want you to know that. I love you. I’m sure I’ll love you the rest of my life.
Catherine
    There was much more she wanted to say, but when she rehearsed it in her mind, the words seemed overblown and sentimental. This was simple and honest. She folded the note into an envelope, and just before she got on her plane back home, she handed it to Kit.
    “Wait till I’ve gone to read it,” she said.
    “I’ll call you when I get home,” Kit replied.
    They embraced tightly. She did not think she could pull away. But when her plane was called, she wrenched herself from him and walked