Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 _Afterglow_

   Colin reached out and combed his fingers through her hair.  Half asleep,
sweat-slicker, and exhausted, she murmured something indistinct and shifted
on his chest, her ear pressed over his heart and her hand resting lightly
on Colin's shoulder.  gently, he folded his arms around her, let his eyes
close, and breathed deeply, enjoying the pressure of her body down onto
his, the delicate silken touch of her skin to his, and the soft, pervading
warmth of their shared bed.

   "G'night, Amanda." "Good night," came her muffled reply.

   Silence filled the room.  With his eyes closed, the few streetlights
outside and the lights of the city farther down the mountain were lost to
Colin.  He was held comfortably between soft sheets and soft woman.  The
fading scent of vanilla candles struggled to make itself known over the
scent of her shampoo almost directly beneath his nose, and the much more
recent scents of their exertions.  He was tired...  he felt the desire to
let conscious thought go, and sleep with what remained of the evening. 
Also pushing him towards sleep were the glasses of wine he'd had with
dinner.  But he held onto that half-aware state for as long as he could,
because she was there over him, pressing down warm and soft from chest to
feet.  Her back felt cold to his touch, so he reached down by his knees to
retrieve the blanket tossed half-aside hours earlier.  Slipping it over
them, up to her shoulders, the feel of the blanket on her back rousted
Amanda to wakefulness just long enough that she rolled off from him and
laid on her side with her back towards Colin.  Then she reached a hand
half-behind her to grasp the wrist that had slid to her hips with her
movement, and tugged Colin from his back to his side, facing her back. 
Wriggling slightly until her back pressed against nearly every part of his
body, she slipped his hand up to her breast, where he cupped her gently,
and held motionless while she fell asleep.  Some minutes later, Colin fell
asleep as well, his breath once again matching hers, as it had not so long
earlier.  His heartbeat slowed, and soon it too, matched hers once more. 
Colin never knew what she dreamed about, in the last few hours of evening
after they had made love.  He wondered about it almost every time they fell
asleep together.  For his part, he never recalled a dream upon waking from
such sleep.  He imagined it was much the same with Amanda.

   When morning came, Colin would go, as he always had to.  A week later,
Amanda would go back to California, as she always had to.  Months would
pass, slow as seasons, and then a week or two would disappear like sand
through the fingers.  Their relationship was an odd combination of distant
friendship and intense passion.

   Almost a year later, Colin went to her in California, first for a week
that passed like a season, and then later for a summer that could have
lasted all year.  Amanda was leaving for Europe soon, and Colin knew he
wouldn't follow.  She knew also.

   Time passed.  Things changed.  A thousand little things crop up when
lovers are separated by eight hundred miles, and before very long that
legion of trivial details grows into a thick forest of unfamiliarity,
without track or path.  She was the one who said the final goodnight, in
the end.  Colin, for all his cynicism in dealing with the rest of the
world, was always a hopeless romantic when it came to her.  By the end,
they could barely speak to one another, for all the thousand things that
needed to be said, but no time could be found for earlier, and that seemed
too late by then.

   Amanda said, when she was done explaining, "I had fun," and kissed him
softly goodbye.  For his part, Colin remained silent, wanting very badly to
cry, but not yet able to absorb the fullness of what had happened, and how
much those weeks meant to him, even separated as they were by months of
being alone in a cold bed at home, with no comfort but a pillow that he
would always hold in front of him, one arm draped across the top and up the
other side.  Another month would pass for Colin in California that way, as
he struggled to find a meaning to the life he had lived for the past two
years, until the last week before he would go home.  He drank too much,
stayed up too late and then spent most of the day in bed, living in a state
between loss and depression, every evening hoping desperately that tomorrow
morning he might wake up cupping her breast softly in his hand, and every
morning waking up to a cold bed and a pillow.  Finally, he cried, and in
that moment while the tears were still wet on his cheeks and on his shirt,
he finally understood.

   So he sat down at his computer, and started typing about the moments
that meant the most to him, the moments that would always link his heart in
some distant way to her memory.  He wrote about their sex because she was
his first lover and so would always remain marked out in his head for her
ferocity and her tenderness and most especially her seductiveness.  But
more often he wrote about the moments after sex, because those were the
moments he always longed for when they would part.  Those swift-footed,
fleeing moments where after one became none, slowly began becoming two
again but felt more like one and a half, with a goodly bit of overlap in
the middle where his chest pressed against her back and each heartbeat was
perceptible to the other and each knew that the other would always remain a
part of themselves, rhythm-perfect.

   He wrote, and as he wrote he felt the urge to destroy what he had
written, to delete the half-formed file on his computer, turn the blasted
thing off and walk away.  Why would he want to commit the past to record,
when the past was dead and gone?

   "Amanda lives in California, and soon Sweden.  I live in Arizona,
Whatever we had, is gone, and only the greatest fools insist on living in
the past," he said to the screen in front of him.

   But he stayed his hand.  He was writing for himself, and for her.  He
was writing for that entity that they became when they came together, that
being with two backs and one glorious, shining soul.  He stayed his hand,
because he wanted to read later, and understand again what he understood in
that moment, when his control broke down and he cried.  To understand again
what she had meant when she said the greatest discipline is losing control.

   In passion, and in sorrow, control kills emotion, but when the control
is lost, the moment takes over and guides that emotion where it needs to
go. His passion was never realized through control, but through abandon. 
His sorrow was never satisfied either, until the sleep deprivation and the
vodka and the sheer loneliness brought the walls of his control crashing
down, and he finally cried.  He cried because he loved her, and he cried
because he knew he had to go home.  He cried, and the screen blurred in
front of his eyes with the tears that came.  And when he was done crying
and typing, he saved that file, on death row then minutes earlier, and
printed out two copies besides.  One he slipped into his bags, to take
home, and the other, he slipped into an envelope, a letter to Amanda that
he never really meant to send, but that somehow got sent anyways while he
was abandoned to the loss and the sorrow.  When he was done, he realized
how perfect her last goodbye as his lover had been, and how appropriate her
words were.
   He'd had fun, too.