Chapter Eight #2
Her face softens and she reaches for my hand, her fingers brushing my knuckles.
I slide my own fingers up and entwine them with hers.
When I glance back up, she’s still watching me, her hazel eyes steady and patient, as though she has nowhere else to be, nothing else she’d rather be doing, and all the time in the world to wait for whatever I do next.
It’s the most disarming thing about her.
“I know I want to be here, but I don't know what I'm doing,” I whisper. It comes out more honest than I intended.
“That's alright.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” She squeezes my hand. “You need to give yourself considerably more credit, Cathleen.”
The DJ eases the hotel into a slower rhythm, the tempo softening as the music stretches out, wrapping the terrace in a hazy, intimate pulse.
The older couple continue their circuit of the small dance floor, completely in their own world.
They turn slowly together, hands clasped, smiling as they match their footing.
“Come on,” Emma says.
She stands and holds out her hand — that hand, those forearms, the suggestion of strength in them.
I think about the protagonist in my book, how often she reaches for someone else’s hands.
I always thought it was a writer's indulgence, hands as a thing to notice, a thing to want.
I am revising this opinion in real time.
“I don't dance.”
“You don't whoop on coaches either,” she replies. “And yet here we are.” Her hand remains open, the warm pool light flickering over her long, inviting fingers. And I want them.
We don't go to the dance floor. We stay beside our table, which suits me considerably better, and Emma's hand is at my waist, mine at her shoulder, and we move slowly, without any special ambition in the small space between our chairs and the pool. The music coils around us, a slow, sensual Spanish guitar that hums through the air, the pool light shifting gently, the sea out there somewhere in the dark, and I am dancing — well, swaying really — at eleven o’clock at night in Tenerife with a woman whose name I learned only hours ago.
She is watching me as we move. “You're a good dancer,” she comments.
“I'm swaying.”
“You're a good swayer.” Her hand at my waist shifts, drawing me closer by a fraction. “Better than you think.”
“I thought you were the one with the moves.”
“I am.”
“So?”
She leans in, her mouth close to my ear. “Would you like me to show you?” Her breath is warm against my skin. “In front of all these people?”
I feel it before I have processed the words — a throb low inside me that has nothing to do with the dancing and everything to do with the implication of what she just said.
I pull back just enough to look at her.
Her face in the pool light is open and unguarded, those eyes on mine, and the very slight curve of her mouth that tells me she knows exactly what she just did.
The full length of her is pressed against me, and her hand moves from my waist to splay across my lower back, fingers spread, drawing me in until there is no distance left, with a quiet authority that makes the throb deepen into something more urgent.
It occurs to me that I have already kissed Emma once tonight in the darkness of a mountain, and that I want to do it again in the light, in front of strangers, and that I have absolutely no intention of stopping myself.
I turn my face towards her. We are close enough that it requires almost no movement at all. I kiss her.
This time it is not tentative. Her mouth meets mine with an immediacy that is new, her lips parting, and the espresso on her tongue is delicious, dark and slightly bitter, and I want more of it.
Our lips meet and part and meet again, and I find myself chasing the kiss rather than receiving it, my hands tightening in the undercut, pressing my fingers into the close shave and dragging slowly across.
Emma’s breathing changes against my mouth, shorter and less measured, and the knowledge that I have caused that sits in my chest alongside everything else.
She nips my lower lip, and a whimper leaves me that I did not plan and could not have stopped.
Her hand tenses at my lower back, fingers pressing in, gripping slightly, and I stop thinking about the pool and the music and the bartender somewhere behind us, and I simply kiss her, here, beside our table in the tawny light.
The world continues without us for a while.
As I break for air, my hands are in her hair and my whole body feels lit from the inside, the way I've only dared imagine in private, and it is thrumming now, alive in a way that surprises me.
That tenderness between my legs — the one I created this morning, self-inflicted and inconvenient, the one I thought I had thoroughly exhausted — is an ache now, a different kind entirely.
I did not ruin it this morning. I only made room for it.
I know what I want. The knowing is its own pleasure.
Emma draws back slowly, her hands still at my lower back, her breath unsteady in the small space between us.
She exhales. “That was —” Her thumb moves in a slow circle against my back. “God. I haven't been kissed like that in a while.”
“Likewise,” I say. “You have great moves.”
She tilts her chin up slightly. “I have more.”
“I don't doubt it,” I whisper. And then, deciding to be bold, I add, “I'd like to see them.”
She makes a quiet sound, something between a laugh and an exhale, and her fingers press briefly into my lower back before she speaks. “Is this where I say ‘your hotel or mine?’”
“That depends,” I murmur, “on whether you're joking.”
“I'm not joking.”
I think of what it would have meant to have missed this evening entirely.
To have stayed at the hotel, to have never booked the excursion, to have never looked up from my book on that wall.
The thought is briefly unbearable. I have never wanted anything more than I want this, and I have never been more frightened of a thing I wanted.
“Mine's closer,” I tell her.
She leans in and kisses me again, her hands coming up to my jaw, as though she is making a point she wants to be certain has landed. “I want to, if you do.”
“I’m,” I say against her lips. My eyes go to the pool. “I should tell you — I'm not normally — This isn't —” I take a breath. “It's just been me — I've spent a fair portion of this holiday with a vibrator and sapphic romance novels.”
Emma stares at me.
“That came out differently than I intended,” I mutter.
“Did it?”
“The novels are part of a series,” I explain, as though this clarifies anything. “I've been working through them sequentially.”
“Cathleen.”
“Yes?”
“Are you telling me,” Emma says carefully, “that you have been in your hotel room, alone, reading sapphic romance novels and using a vibrator, for four days?”
“Five orgasms this morning,” I whisper.
She laughs then, the laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised into joy; a bright, helpless sound that rises out of her before she can stop it, full and delighted. She presses her hand over her mouth, and the laugh comes through anyway, unstoppable.
I am laughing too. Under my breath, which is as much as I generally permit myself, but there it is.
When she recovers, her face is lit up, eyes bright with it, delighted and fond and still, underneath all of it, careful with me. She leans in, close enough that her mouth is at my ear. “I would very much like to see that.”
“You'd like to see me masturbate?”
Emma breathes a laugh. “I'd like to see you orgasm. But if that's how you'd like to show me”— a small pause —“I would very much enjoy that too.”
Heat moves up through my chest and into my face in a way I am fairly certain is visible. “Would you have other ideas,” I say carefully, “of how to achieve that?”
“I would, yes.”
“And you'd want to do that?” I pause. “With me?”
“I want to do a lot of things with you, Cathleen.”
“I just thought —” I stop. Start again. “Whatever version of me you'd built up in your head. This stranger on your holiday. I thought maybe the reality would —” I stop again.
My eyes catch on Emma's mouth, and I lose my train of thought entirely. “I'm talking myself out of a fun thing here, aren't I.”
“You are,” Emma says. Without pressure.
“Right,” I reply. “Ignore me.”
“I'd rather not, but I'll ignore that line of thinking, yes.”
“Come upstairs with me.”
Emma turns back to our table, reaches across and pushes in her chair, then mine with a neat finality, the way you do when you are not coming back. Then she turns to me and holds out her hand. And I take it.