Chapter 20
Paula
Iris has filled the walls of our bedroom with photos.
It's strange. She used to live in a space without a single one. Like she didn't want evidence of her own life.
Now there are five. Big. Very big.
The first: Wesley grinning, holding a soccer ball that's too big for him.
The second: the team after winning the championship last year, everyone screaming, Hades in the corner trying not to smile.
The third: the two of us. Zoe took it at a dinner at her place.
Neither of us is looking at the camera. Iris is looking at me.
I'm looking at her. Zoe snapped it without us noticing.
I love that photo. It's real. No posing.
The fourth arrived in the mail three days ago.
Mama Celo, my grandmother. She's sitting in her rocking chair in El Paso in a blue dress, smiling hard enough to light up a room.
Next to it, a fifth: Iris as a little girl.
I've never seen it before. She never talks about her childhood or her family.
I don't push. I understand it's her call.
But someday I'd like to have that conversation.
“It took me twenty-seven years to hang photos on a wall. Probably a world record in emotional slowness,” she jokes, wrapping her arms around me from behind and kissing my neck.
“Worth the wait,” I say, tilting my head.
“Oh man, look how cheesy you've gotten, Miss Bodyguard,” she teases, pulling me onto the bed and climbing on top of me.
***
“What are you doing?” I ask when she walks into the kitchen the next morning.
“Looking at you.”
“You saw me three minutes ago.”
“I just love this thing you do where you walk around the apartment naked when you wake up. Hold still.”
I do what she says while she puts her hands on my waist and turns me around. Slow. Then she pins me with those green eyes, and I'm shaking. Her gaze drops to my nipples, she catches herself, smiles, and looks back up.
“Bedroom,” she orders. “I've been wanting to try something with you.”
“Try something?”
“I want to find out where your self-control ends,” she says with a wink that makes my knees buckle.
So she leads me to the bedroom, and the bed is made. Iris has made the bed. Another sign that the world is changing.
She sits me on the edge. Kneels in front of me.
She kisses my collarbone. The mole. She kisses it the same as the first time, with that absence of hurry that drives me out of my mind. Then my neck. She knows what it does to me when she kisses my neck, especially when she drags the tip of her tongue along my jugular.
“Still,” she warns when I try to touch her back. “You don't get to do anything.”
She pushes me onto my back, takes off her clothes, and lies next to me.
She traces me with her fingertips. Slow.
Painfully slow, like she's rediscovering a map she already knows.
She slides her hands over my tits, rolls my nipples between her fingers, and my back arches off the mattress.
I sigh, reach for her again, and get my hand swatted.
“That's not how this works. You have to stay still,” she reminds me. “The starfish has very strict rules.”
“The starfish?”
“Now you can't talk either. Next infraction, red card, and you're going to the shower. Cold water,” she jokes.
I roll my eyes and try to focus on our reflection in the closet mirror.
She kisses her way down my chest, plays with my nipples, then moves to my stomach.
She traces the scar on my side, the one I got at nineteen jumping a fence during army training.
The first time she asked about it I told her I was in a rush and didn't see the wire.
She kisses just above my pussy and laughs against my skin when I flinch, but I manage not to speak. For a long while she just watches me, and it's maddening. She draws aimless lines with her fingers, slides them across my skin, studies my face every time she tries something new to see how I react.
She runs her hand over my pussy, and I close my eyes.
“No,” she says. “Look at me. That's the rule.”
“How many rules does this game have?” I complain.
She just shrugs and smiles. But I obey and open my eyes. And I watch. I watch her bite her lower lip when she slides two fingers inside me, how she grins when she makes me moan, how she gets off on making me come as much as I do.
And when she takes me over the edge, I get there with my eyes open, gasping her name, my hands in her hair and her face between my thighs, breaking every rule of her stupid game, because all the self-control I thought I had has vanished in a second.
Afterward we lie still. Sheets wrecked. Window open, because Iris says cold air helps you think.
She kisses me while she traces the scar on my hand with her finger. The one I got trying to save Valentina.
“Paula.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
My eyes fly open.
“Oh God, I said it. There. I said it. Don't make me say it again because I think I'm having a cardiac event.
I'm already having a cardiac event. My blood pressure is spiking.
Can you die from saying I love you? Because I'm feeling things in my chest. Is it normal to feel things in your chest?
I should probably go to the ER. Can we call Tessa?
She's a doctor, she'll know what to do. Call Tessa and tell her I'm dying of feelings.”
I press my hands to my face and laugh while she covers me in kisses.
“Are you laughing or crying?”
“I'm going to make you say those words a million times,” I tell her. “I love you too,” I whisper, wrapping myself around her bare body.