Most women are used to being checked out in the gym.

So when I felt him looking at me as I pounded away on the treadmill I did the things that come naturally. I tugged my capris out of my crack. Gazed fixedly straight ahead. Turned the music in my ear buds up. Tried to wait out his attention.

But he kept looking. And later when I was sipping my usual Vanilla Protein Smoothie in the Bistro he sprawled boldly into my booth, saying, “Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you – and I don’t usually do this. But it’s just… you look so much like my wife.”

I must have said thank you, because I usually do, even though what I really wanted to say was, that is the lamest line I've ever heard. I can’t remember if I asked where she was or if he volunteered it. Either way, within seconds of hearing his voice for the first time, I learned that his wife had passed away a year ago.

I was thirty. I’d never been married, though I came very close to believing that I would be. But I’d lived enough life to know these moments don’t come by often—the moments when you look at another person and absolutely nothing stands in between the both of you. You can see who they are, and you know them, with the clarity of a crystal, and know that they know you as well.

He kept apologizing, his eyes darting between me and the tabletop, saying, “I’m sorry. It’s just that you really, really favor her, you know?”

I couldn’t know, of course. I couldn’t know the dreams that had lain between them, dreams probably still hot and burning in his hands when she died. He told me about her, about her ginger hair and hazel eyes and fair skin and freckles, just like mine. He told me about New York, where he was from, and where he and his wife had lived. He told me about their son, left behind when he’d come to Texas looking for a fresh start.

And as he spoke he kept staring at my face, something that any other time would have made me uncomfortable, would have made me blush and avert my eyes. But I realized, in that moment, it wasn’t my eyes he was looking into. It was his wife’s.

I wondered whether he spoke about her all the time or not at all. Could it be possible that the first person he opened up to - that the first person he could open up to - would be a woman who looked just like her?

I would have given everything for ten more minutes.

He didn’t say this. He didn’t need to. I’d felt it myself exactly one time in my life - not after the death of a family member, but when the man I had come to love more than any other in the world left me.

He had said it with tears in his eyes, and I received the news with a voice that refused to tremble. I had seen it coming - the months of bickering, frequent phone calls fading to terse text messages. Each spoken word tiptoeing through a minefield.

And then, finally, the explosion.

I can’t do this anymore.

We slept beside each other that night, knowing he would leave in the morning. Knowing that the next day was when we would begin to live with the consequences of that one sentence. Two best friends of six years, two people that had joked about baby names and growing old together, two people who had known each other and knew each other best would begin to undo it all.

I don’t know if he ever held me tighter than that night. I don’t know that I ever dreaded a new day more. At the end, he reached for me and I said no and he was gone.

For months after I felt haunted by all the things I hadn’t said, as if a few magic words could have been the code that would have kept us together. That if I had ten more minutes I would have found the words that would have kept him there. That ten more minutes of passion would have given him the faith to say, this can work. 

It took me the better part of a year to realize that ten minutes wouldn’t have saved us. We had done all we could do for, by, and to each other. We were just two people whose time had run out.

And here, over a year later, in a city a thousand miles away from that bed in Georgia sat this man whose wife had died and who had something very broken inside of him. Broken so badly that he had left their son in New York. So badly that he was sitting across from me in this booth, talking to me about Houston and how it was nothing like home. So badly that he would search a stranger’s face to find ten more minutes with his wife.

I could have cried right then but somehow I didn’t. I could have held his face in my hands and said I was sorry, because I was. I could have told him I loved him, because from that moment I did, because seeing anyone so clearly, having so little standing between you and another human being is exactly what love is.

I gave him those ten minutes, the best I could.

He led me to his car, reminiscing all the while. He held the door for me just as he would have for her, and I took her place beside him. He laughed and kept up a cheerful monologue during the short drive to his apartment, but the door had barely clicked shut when he enfolded me in a desperate embrace, clinging to me as if never to let me go, kissing me, caressing me, pouring out his grief and his loneliness and his love.

He stripped me by his unmade bed with practiced ease, and when I was naked he held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down.

“You’re just like her. So like her. It’s uncanny,” he muttered, and as if to confirm it, cupped and kneaded my breasts. Were they my nipples or hers that puckered in pleasure? Was it my sex or hers that melted with desire? Was it my hand or hers that discovered the erection in his shorts and caressed and rubbed until with a choking cry he pulled me onto the bed and covered me with his body while raining fevered kisses on my face and mouth and breasts?

He shucking off naked and held my breasts, as eager as a pubescent boy, then slowly ran his hand along my side to the curve of my waist and the lush swelling of my hip. I tingled at his touch. He brought his hand back up my inner thigh, feeling the special softness there, and over the springy ginger curls of my mound.

“She never shaved,” he mused. “I wouldn’t let her. It was like the glory of autumn between her legs, and just a glimpse would set me afire.”

His hands were to me gentle, warm, and wonderful, and my skin remembered every place he touched as he lost himself in me. In her. In both of us.

He kissed my mouth, and eyes, and cheeks, his breath hot in my ear. His tongue found the hollow of my throat and continued down between my breasts. He took each one in his hands and held them together, delighting in their fullness, the slightly salty taste of me and the softness of my skin. His tongue tickled one nipple, then the other, and when he pulled my boob into his mouth and explored my nipple with his tongue -pressing, pulling, nibbling - I felt a deep throbbing surge deep in my belly.

His finger parted my lips and the fragrance of my arousal rapidly filled the room. He traced the valley of my furrow and moistened my nubbin with the flowing secretions he found there until I pressed up to him and cried out. His warm tongue found my navel, then circled and dropped lower, to the soft curly fur of my mound, then lower still to my warm slit and the hard button of my pleasure.

He nestled between my legs, and his hands pushed my thighs apart to look at my rosy flower of petals and folds. He dipped down to taste - he remembered her taste, would mine be the same? - and ran his tongue up my wet furrow. Then with a groan, he held back no longer and fell to exploring me in earnest. He wanted to taste me, to drink me, and he knew I was ready. He nuzzled, nibbled, and sucked, his tongue tracing familiar folds, reaching into my deep well, then higher for my clitoris, right where he knew it would be, hidden beneath its hood.

My eyes opened wide for an instant as I shivered at the sudden throbbing rush that pulsed through me. I cried out again and again, my breath coming faster, and the clamorous storm building. All of my feeling was turned inward. There was no apartment, no bedroom, only the rising intensity of my senses. He knew it was coming, and though he could hardly hold back himself, he slowed, hoping to delay the onslaught. But I called out his name, reaching for him, wanting him, arching to his mouth unable to wait. And it came closer, building, growing. Tightening with anticipation, I groaned my pleasure.

And suddenly it was there. Powerful, shuddering waves seized me. With a convulsive cry it crashed over me. I burst with the spasm of release, and with it came the indescribable desire to feel his manhood inside me. I clutched him, trying to bring him to me.

He raised up as he felt my spurt of wetness, and sensing my need for him clasped his eager shaft and guided it into my deep and welcoming well. I felt him enter and rose up to meet him as he plunged. My warm folds embraced him, and he penetrated deeply, filling me, overwhelming my senses.

He pulled almost all the way out and with complete abandon plunged again deep as before as I rose up tight against his pubis. I could sense he was struggling to hold back, to make it last, and when the intensity backed away from the peak he plunged again, and again, and again, each stroke building higher. I pulsed with each thrust, feeling the fullness of him, and his drawing back and filling me again was a pleasure almost beyond endurance.

I felt his heart racing, and my own, as our cries mingled. When he called out her name, it was I who rose to meet him and with a great overflowing burst I felt a release that matched any I had known. He thrust into my sudden wetness one more time and froze, my legs wrapped around his waist, until with a mighty, agonized bellow of pleasure his loins erupted and his seed spurted and ran in rivulets down my bottom.

----------

I’m not her, but he’s a man and I’m a woman, so we married. The usual catastrophe. And maybe I picked up where she left off, and maybe he stills sees her in my hazel eyes and ginger hair. But that ten minutes more is folding into forever and that’s all I ask.