You Between the Lines

Chapter Twenty-Two

W HEN WE DRIVE PAST THE WELCOME TO PERRIN sign, I feel the weight of what-next, thick and opaque, looming over us.

“Do you want me to take you home?” Will turns his head to me. His flicker of a glance is quick—he looks straight back at the road again, but even in that single second I feel his want.

Despite everything with the fellowship, I’m no longer in any position to deny this. My body craves it too much.

“Nope.”

He keeps driving, one left turn, one long stoplight where I feel every second beat across my body. One right turn, another left. And then we’re in front of his apartment.

His small one-bedroom is clean and minimalist with stacks of books and literary journals on the desk next to his bed. The two-person dining set has white candlesticks with long drips of wax—something I might have rolled my eyes at last semester, because it’s so on-the-nose for a moody writer. But now I just see Will, trying so hard to create comfort in the art that has only given him anxiety for years.

“Well, this is it,” he says, and I drop my duffel on the floor. I already like how my stuff looks next to his.

“I like it.” I do a lap around the perimeter. His kitchen is immaculate—cleaner than mine. I open the fridge to find oat milk, sriracha mayo, and a jar of pickled red onions he’s presumably made himself.

I feel the heat of his body behind me as I close the fridge door. He snakes his arms around my waist, his palms flat against the planes of my stomach.

“Are you hungry? I can cook us dinner.”

I nod. And then he makes us pasta. He salts the water heavily and adds sprinkles of MSG to the tomatoes, which he explains adds more umami flavor, and he brings over little spoons of sauce for me to check the progress. I have no idea what to tell him each time other than that it’s good, then better, then maybe best.

“I didn’t know you were so good at cooking,” I say when he places plates of spaghetti on the table. I take a bite. It’s excellent, of course. Smooth and acidic and rich.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how good I am at it, but I like the idea of perfecting something where you can know, pretty obviously, if you’ve hit the mark or not. It’s not like poetry where I feel like I’m writing into a void and I can’t ascertain whether my work is good or not.”

“Your work is good, I assure you.”

“I like that you think so.”

I want him to tell me that my work is also good. I want the reassurance that I’m special, that I can make something out of a blank page. That I’m substance over style.

Maybe he doesn’t think I need the reassurance, or maybe he doesn’t actually believe it. But he doesn’t say anything else.

“I think you’re going to get the fellowship,” I say.

“You don’t know that.”

Yes, I do. But I don’t want to have that conversation. I want to fool him, even just for now, that I could get it, too.

After we clean up the kitchen, it’s obvious that we’re at the point of the evening where we have to decide what happens next. Should we “put on a movie” and get closer and closer until we fall asleep in each other’s arms on the couch? Should we get right to his bed to continue what we started last night? Should I go home altogether?

But that last option doesn’t really feel like an option at all.

Will sits down on his bed, removes his glasses, and puts them on his bedside table. I pace and he watches me. I go through his wardrobe, examining his sweaters and carefully folded pants, a small hamper with his Rowan School sweatshirt wadded on top. I have an urge to put it on, to feel him all over me.

“Come here.”

I look around as if he could be talking to someone else. A small smile washes over his face when our eyes meet and he leans back on the bed. I’m stalling and he knows it. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I don’t trust his attraction to me, even though I want it so badly, so I want him to force the issue. To prove that he does want me just as much as I want him.

I walk to the bed and stand in front of him, my thighs leaning into his knees.

“So did you get it out of your system?” His hands skim the sides of my thighs. It feels like he’s pulling me down to the floor like quicksand.

“Yep. I’m all good now, thank you.”

His hands grip my legs more roughly and he spreads his knees so I can stand in between them. Every emotion he’s bottled up flashes across his eyes.

“Really.” He winds one hand up the back of my leg, stopping at my ass, pushing me closer so that his face meets my chest. He breathes in deeply and lets out a muffled sigh against me. “The lavender has always driven me crazy.” His other hand slinks under my shirt, tracing up my stomach.

“You’ve had it in poems before.” My hands weave through his slightly overgrown hair. “I wasn’t sure if they were about me or not.”

He coaxes my thighs onto the bed so I’m straddling him and pushes up my shirt so he can press his mouth to my bare stomach.

“All of them are about you,” he breathes, trance-like.

“Shut up, half of them are about your dad.” I laugh.

He shakes his head and wraps his arms around my waist, flipping us over so I’m on my back, moving my shirt slowly up my chest until I lean up and he takes it off. “Sure, but they’re still somehow about you, too.”

Will’s on his side, head tucked into my neck, his hand meandering across my body. He tiptoes across my collarbone, down the plane of skin between my breasts, across my waist. His hand stops where my legs meet and he slides it under my jeans, but over my underwear, and just cups me.

A deep sigh leaves my body. He dips past my underwear, his middle finger circling all the spots he knows I like until I’m squirming, restless under his hand.

“Take these off,” he murmurs, his own breathing shallow as I unbutton the top of his jeans, my hand skating over him, hard already.

I lift my hips to shimmy off my jeans, leaving my underwear on, mesmerized by his deep concentration, how his brows furrow, his jaw tight.

“These too.” He tugs the waistband of my underwear. I’m so self-conscious under his focused, magnifying-glass gaze.

“Do it for me.”

He smirks, shaking his head. “I like when you do it yourself.” He kisses me deeply, on top of me now, one hand propping himself up on the bed, the other trailing down my hip.

“But I like when you’re in control.” I press my hips up needily to meet his as he hovers over me.

“I know.” He kisses my neck, his teeth snagging gently on my earlobe. “So do what I say and take them off.”

A violent shiver runs through me. His eye contact is relentless as I hook my fingers into the cotton, pushing them down, down, until they’re mid-thigh and he takes it from there. I think he wants me to be equally complicit in this. Unable to take a back seat, unable to be someone that has stuff done to them. He wants me to do , and he’s creating the space for it.

His mouth trails down my chest, tasting my skin. Again, I run my hands through his thick hair, my nails on his scalp, pulling hums deep from his chest. How satisfying it is to turn him animal.

But then he starts sliding down the bed, his head suddenly between my knees.

“What are you gonna do?” I grasp for him, but he’s far away, out of my clutches.

He raises an eyebrow as his hands go to my thighs, nudging them apart. “I want to go down on you.”

I prop myself up on my elbows. “You don’t have to.”

He gets a strange look on his face, but his lips curl up. “Because you don’t like it?”

I shrug. “Yes. No. I mean, I usually skip it when I’ve been with guys. I’m too self-conscious.” I feel my face redden. I so badly want to be the kind of girl who is sexually confident, who just demands what she wants. But I never have been. I’ve always put others first. It’s a trait that embarrasses me. Intellectually I know better, but something deep within my body keeps me so wound up.

He releases his grip on my thighs and presses his mouth to my kneecap. “You have no reason to be self-conscious. But if you don’t like it, we won’t do it.”

I grimace. “It’s just… I just feel like it’s probably gross for you? I’m not a diligent shaver and I don’t like waxing and I’m not embarrassed but I also acknowledge it’s not like the gold standard—”

“Leigh.”

Will leans over me, one hand on the bed next to my waist, kissing my neck and collarbone, his other hand skimming across my breast, moving aside the flimsy fabric of my bra.

“You have no idea how little I care about that. It’s for me, too. It’s not like some sort of sacrifice where I don’t get anything out of it.”

My pulse races, his words curling around my center to the rhythm of my heartbeat. “What do you get out of it?” It comes out a whisper so low I hardly recognize it as my own.

He breathes in deeply at my neck, as if trying to inhale every molecule of scent on my body. “It’s like…” He looks up, dead in my eyes. “… watching you lose control and knowing it’s all because of me.”

I swallow. “Okay, then.”

Placing my hands on his shoulders, I push him down and down until I can no longer reach him. He seems to like this.

I lean back onto the pillow and close my eyes. I feel his hands splay me wide, gentle and soft, and then his mouth is on me. My breath hitches and I try to concentrate on inflating and deflating my belly, willing the muscles to relax, to surrender to the subtle pressure of his mouth.

My back arches on reflex and then an arm across my hips pins me down into the bed, keeping me there while he works. Twisting, circling. I grip the duvet in my tight fists, and his other arm wanders up my stomach to capture a wrist, intertwining our fingers. Heat builds and sweat beads along my hairline. The pressure bubbling up in me is almost too much; I grip his hand with my nails.

“Oh my god.”

“Relax. Give in,” he murmurs, coming up for a second to bite, then kiss, my hip bone. I close my eyes again, willing myself to feel nothing but the sensation, nothing but Will. To forget expectations.

I exhale a long breath and a wave starts to rise. Every pulse of muscle an incantation. Will, Will, Will.

“Good girl.” His voice is so low, so rough, that it’s almost enough to take me over the edge. It half feels shameful—how desperately I’ve chased his praise throughout the years—but in this context, I can indulge without the baggage or the guilt. And I know that he knows it.

While his mouth zeroes in with every rise and fall of my chest, he starts to run his hand down my inner thigh, a body part I forgot I even had until he draws attention to it.

I can’t think. I am just words on a page and he’s the poet, arranging me how he wants, using alliteration, rhyme, white space. Every moan a couplet, every breath a sonnet. He creates tension and I barrel down the blank page until the turn, the final stanza, where he breaks the words open into something more beautiful.

“You’re doing so well.”

That’s what does it. My brain slices into stars and a hymn of vibrations sweeps over my body.

He keeps his mouth on me until it’s over, pulling from me every tense-and-release of muscle I have to give until my heartbeat relaxes to its regular cadence. I drag him by the hair back up for a kiss and taste some combination of us in my mouth. We stay like that for a bit—drugging kisses that leave me aching.

“You can give me one more,” he whispers. And I do. I flip over onto my belly as he pulls a condom from his nightstand. He strips off his jeans before coming back on the bed, hitching up my hips, pressing into me teasingly slow so I feel every inch. We find a new rhythm as my fingertips dig into the crumpled sheets.

It shouldn’t be this good, really. It hasn’t been with anyone else.

His release, short and explosive, comes as he groans against my neck. And even when he’s done, he winds me up one more time. I give it to him. Just like he said I could.