Fucking on the train it’s easy to forget it’s 95 degrees outside and the air is so sticky you can walk on it. The large window on one side and the door to the hallway on the other both offer glimpses of our mundane act if anyone cared to look, but in this heat, would anyone care? The conductor’s feet pass us by as I pull her to me–slowly and repetitively–and I realize that I’ve forgotten our fantasy.

“You can’t come in me,” she moans as I grip her tighter, watching the beads of sweat pool on the small of her back. The air-conditioner is going full blast, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Her words don’t clarify the game, but what can I do? Both of us are lost in our heads. At least as much as it’s possible to think.

“How come?” I grunt as I thrust faster, knowing that no matter what she says I won’t pull out.

The answers are endless. She could be too young or too fertile. It could be that her husband would find out or her daddy might check and be angry. Possibly we were strangers, and it was a simple matter of practicality, although that felt unlikely. We couldn’t be so beaten by the heat as to be that lazy, could we?

“Please,” she moaned again, her words clear but half-hearted. I wondered if she was somewhere else, maybe in a new game that I wasn’t privy to. Were we still on a train? Still on our way home after a week of booze and sex and sweat? Still listening to the sound of the conductor welcoming new passengers aboard as we fucked in our tiny room like it was the kinkiest thing in the world?

“Tell me why,” I said again, refocusing my attention.

Looking down, I could see our merging bodies, and it was beautiful. Sex is mechanical as much as anything else, but as we fucked, our humanity felt less relevant than the dream. In the pervasive heat and the flickering shadows both from within and without, we transcended form and function. We surpassed the action itself and moved into something else entirely.

“You promised,” she said as she turned and looked over her shoulder. Her big blue eyes were mesmerizing, and all I knew was that I was in love and in need. In love with her freckles and her smile. In love with the way, her body fit around mine as I thrust into her, moving sixty-four miles an hour. In love with the fantasy I had forgotten and in love with all the reasons that hung in the air like possibilities.

“I’m sorry,” I groaned, kissing the back of her neck as I pulled her to me, feeling myself let go in a flood of emotion. “I can’t help myself.”

She cried out no even as she pushed back against me, her hand between her legs as she drove herself to come as well. Between the rocking of the train, the footsteps and sounds from the hallways, and the visceral reality of coming inside her, we bit our lips, closed our eyes, and let everything fall away.

I held her to me, still within her as she climbed the hill, turned the corner and let herself go. I kissed her and whispered terrible things in her ear, my apology lost to the winds of depravity while she came, and for a single moment, for a brief second of empty time, for one flash of pure and blissful eternity, I forgot about the shadows, the footsteps, and the heat.

Hidden in our tiny room, traveling through swamps and marshes, alone among a crowd, we were flawless and alive. We were sweat and damnation, fear and trembling, love and light, and something akin to bliss and mercy.

And it was the most normal thing in the world.