"Want me to do your back?" he murmured, standing close to her in the torrent, the water cascading in rivulets over his body.
Matt had changed over the years, getting thicker without getting stout, layers of muscle on top of the lean frame of the young man she'd first seen at the meet-up in the café a decade and a half ago. He followed her gaze, looking down at himself.
"Not bad for someone halfway to forty," he grinned.
"Because I regulate your bacon intake. Also, halfway to forty would be twenty. You meant nearer forty than thirty, or does adding up baffle you?"
Reya could hear the snarky tone in her voice, part of her peeved at the way he'd just decided to invade the sanctuary of her shower. She still felt weighed down and unwilling to face him.
She looked up into his eyes, about to rebuke him, but then he kissed her and just like that the burden lifted.
"You left me with blue balls," he grumbled.
Her hand slid down his body, reaching between his legs to fondle his sack. Matt grunted in surprise as she squeezed gently.
"You going to pop?" she replied.
She felt him stiffening and knew what was going to happen next. He pressed against her, and she felt his erection poking her belly, allowing herself to be pushed back against the cold tiles. She spread her feet and Matt bent his knees, angling expertly, his tip pressing against her entrance. Reya kissed him deeply and he entered her.
They made unhurried love, his hands cupping her rear, supporting her on tiptoes as he drove himself into her. Reya wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him deeply, enjoying the sensation of being filled by the man she loved. The test and all its implications seemed a million miles away: it was just the two of them, like it had always been, alone together.
Reya's lips parted, making little high-pitched noises as Matt began to increase his tempo, driving harder into her. She felt her own fire, fueled by seeing the passion in his eyes, his lust for her body. She rose to the edge and broke through all at once, climaxing on his cock as he plunged deeply into her and twitched, filling her with his seed, and nothing else mattered.
Reya clung to him, burying her face in his neck, her breathing laboured, feeling every movement of his body, trying to lose herself in it, resisting the world intruding in. When he finally slipped out of her, she felt the hollowness return, but she smiled up at him and kissed him again and he didn't see it.
---
Reya called the Monday all-hands meeting to order, and they all began to go around the room with their status updates and plans for the week. The not-for-profit family assistance agency wasn't large and the updates were over quickly. She made notes, then dispersed the team and sat down at her desk to check through her inbox. Mah came by at ten, as usual.
"Coffee time?" she asked, smiling at Reya brightly. "Ducks all in a row?"
Reya glanced at her schedule and then pushed herself up from her chair.
"Sure, let's go," she replied.
Mah walked her out of the building, bubbling away about her weekend catching up with family. Mah had a large family, three kids all now finally in school, so she was able to get out to work and mix with adults again after a decade of being either barefoot or pregnant or both, as she'd described it. She had a big family, living in a huge house in the outer suburbs with her husband's parents in the back, bedrooms filled with her own children and then a private sanctuary of calm on the top floor for herself and her husband. Whenever Reya and Matt had gone over to visit, the house had been filled invariably with the aroma of Balinese cooking and screaming children.
Reya knew how much the job meant to her, more than having a modest second income to prop up the family finances. One night out at drinks, after a second bottle of wine, Mah had confessed why she wanted to come to work every morning and the revelation, coupled with the surplus of Chardonnay, had brought Reya unexpectedly to tears.
Mah had revealed that she was the black sheep of her family, emigrating from Bali in her twenties, joining a diaspora that scattered across the world in search of better work, settling at last with a man from her original hometown in a country half a planet away from where they grew up. She knew all about the burden of separation from loved ones. She had come to work for Reya almost out of necessity, as if repaying a debt.
Reya had worked her way up, stepping into her retiring boss's shoes at the age of thirty, suddenly facing the reality of running a not-for-profit containing a wide variety of personalities. Mah had called it herding cats, but cats with a calling.
Mah was right, it was a calling: Reya felt it too. She ran an organisation born from tragedies and unlucky circumstances, families split apart, children adopted out. Their job was to help those children, or the adults they became, reconnect with their siblings or with their parents. People like Mah and Iris, the veteran who had intimidated Reya so much when she'd first joined, had acquired a skillset that let them slip through the walls of the bureaucracies that governed their world. Between the two of them, and their nurtured web of contacts, it seemed that they could find anyone.
But Reya's job was to temper all that, taking the dossier and rendering it down to a simple choice for all parties concerned: whether they wanted to initiate contact with each other. Finding a father who had been missing for thirty years often brought joy, but it sometimes brought misery. Reya knew all about that, and so did Matt.
"How's your biodad?" Mah asked as they walked back to the office, coffees in hand.
Reya shrugged. "Same. Not my issue really. His kids are there to look after him."
Mah was doing it again, just checking in, showing that she cared. Her mothering instinct was strong; it was what made her so good at her job.
Reya's first interaction with the agency had been as a customer. She'd walked through the doors with a copy of her birth certificate and sat down in meeting room two and cried her heart out. She'd been seventeen, leaving her adoptive parents behind in the car while she gave her details to the man opposite her. Mr. Purvis had been in charge back then, and he'd done a thorough job, using the channels available to track down her biological parents. He'd summoned her back into the agency a few months later, and asked if she wanted anyone else present while her gave her the results of their research. She had declined.
Mr. Purvis had laid it all out for her, the intervention that had seen her removed from her mother's house a few weeks after her fourth birthday. They had photographed her bruises, logging it all in the report that the man on the other side of the table was reading from. He'd paused then, and gone quiet for a moment, his eyes on the pictures. In the end, she had walked out into the sunshine, to where her mother sat in the car, with two things: her biodad's address and her biological mother's death certificate. It turned out that she had finally managed to drink herself to death, and her father, the man she didn't even remember, who had left when she was a baby, had agreed to be contacted. But that was it, just agreed, no meeting arranged. He was living in the next city, having started again with a family of his own and three kids a decade younger than her.
Mr. Purvis had done one extra thing. He had introduced her to a community group of people like her. Reya had stalled for weeks before finally going along, dreading it, but had walked away at the end of the meeting feeling that her burden had shifted.
They called themselves Young Orphans, even though most of them, like Reya, came from loving adoptive families, drawn together by the same common thread of wanting to work out their place in the world. Some of the members came in from foster care, and each of their stories were different, and often sad. That had been the first time she'd seen Matt.
He was two years older, and easy to talk to. They just seemed to click. He laughed at her jokes, as in, really properly laughed, like he got it. They opened up about their backgrounds little by little: a distant father, an abusive mother, becoming wards of the state at four and six respectively. When she turned eighteen later that year and moved out of home, her parents, her adoptive parents, were happy to see her move into a share house with Matt and a couple more of their friends.
Matt and Reya agreed to stick together, their commonalities drawing them together, opening up about their pasts, revealing their secrets, their friendship deepening. Then, for the second time in her life, after first having received the news that the mother and father she loved were not her biological parents, Matt confided a secret to her and her world was completely upended. She made a solemn pact with him, swearing to always be there and to take it all to the grave. There were tears in her eyes, and in his.
The share house was rowdy, with a revolving door of characters dropping into and out of the lives of its occupants. Reya dated cautiously, but Matt, being just that little bit older, threw himself into it with all the energy of youth. They both attended the same college, Matt choosing Engineering while Reya did Social Sciences, caught inescapably in each other's orbits, gravitationally bound by their shared secrets.
Reya's boyfriends came and went, sometimes literally as well as figuratively, and the little seed of a thought began to grow in the back of her head. What if she was like her mother after all, what if the genes were inescapable? Lying in bed in the dark at two o'clock in the morning, drunk still and alone again after a one-night-stand, she could almost feel the strings tugging at her. What if that was her life, to marry and find herself with kids to a man she never really loved? Would she walk that same path? Would her relationship break down, leaving her with children of her own and a need for escape through the drink? Her lecture courses painted a picture of habit forming, of history repeating itself in certain social instances, and she recognised all the warning signs in herself.
Reya had gone in the middle of the night to the only person who would understand. He had wrapped his arms around her as she cried in the dark, and then he'd done the most unforgivable thing: he'd kissed her.
