8. Kylie
Kylie
We’ve been closed two hours and neither of us has left.
The last patron went home at six. I locked the front, killed the big lights, left the two lamps by the back table burning, and told myself we stayed to finish the raffle letters.
We finished the raffle letters an hour ago.
They’re stamped and stacked and ready for the box, and we’re both still here, in the low gold light at the back of my library, not leaving.
Perry’s in the reading chair with his braced leg up on the ottoman I dragged over without being asked, and he’s turning my knitting bag over in his big hands.
“This yours?” He pulls out the sad gray scarf, the one I’ve been not-finishing since March. “Barnes. Is this a scarf or a crime scene?”
“It’s a work in progress.”
“It’s a hostage situation.” He holds it up to the lamp. “This poor yarn. What did it ever do to you.”
“You think you can do better?”
“I think a concussed raccoon could do better.” He grins. “Teach me.”
“You don’t want to learn to knit.”
“I’m benched, I’m bored, and my hands haven’t done a useful thing in three weeks.” He nods at the chair beside him. “Come on. Teach the furniture a trick.”
So I do. I pull a chair up close beside his and tuck my skirt under me, our knees near enough to touch, and I put the needles in his hands.
They’re enormous, his hands. They swallow the needles. He grips them like he’s field-dressing a deer, and I laugh before I can stop it, and he cuts me a look that says he heard it and he’ll allow it this once.
“Relax your hands,” I tell him. “It’s yarn, not a rope. It can feel when you’re scared of it.”
“I’m not scared of a scarf, Barnes.”
“The scarf isn’t so sure.”
“Like this.” I reach over and fix his grip, my fingers folding over his. His hands are warm and rough and still, and the second I touch them I lose the difference between knit and purl.
“You’re the teacher,” he says, low. “Teach.”
“Wrap the yarn. Over. There. Then you pull it…”
He’s not watching his hands. He’s watching my mouth.
“Perry.”
“Mm.”
“You’re not watching your hands.”
“No,” he agrees. “I’m not.”
I should move back. I know to the inch how far away safe is, and it’s farther than this. But his eyes have gone dark and slow, and there’s a stitch dropped somewhere in the quiet between us, and I don’t move back.
The lamp ticks. Out on the square a car goes by and its headlights sweep the ceiling and are gone. He reaches up and pushes a curl off my face, slow, like he’s asking permission with the back of his hand.
He sets the needles down, slow, deliberate, and lifts his hand to my jaw. His thumb finds the corner of my mouth. I’ve pictured this exact moment so many times that the real one lands like a thing remembered instead of a thing happening.
His forehead comes down against mine. I can feel him breathing, uneven, as undone as I am, and it steadies something in me to know I’m not the only one shaking.
“Tell me to stop,” he says.
I don’t tell him to stop.
He kisses me.
Fourteen years I’ve wondered, and it’s nothing I imagined and everything I did. His mouth is warm and unhurried and sure. One hand cradles my jaw, the other finds my waist and pulls me half out of my chair toward him, and I go, I go so easy, all that hard-won distance gone on a single breath.
The kiss goes deep and slow, and then it goes nothing like slow.
He kisses the way he does everything, like he’s got all the time in the world and means to spend every minute of it on me.
My hands find his shoulders, the solid heat of him, and I end up half in the chair and half in his lap and not one bit sorry.
“Two weeks I’ve been trying to behave,” he says against my mouth.
I almost laugh, since I’ve got him beat by fourteen years.
“You make it real hard, Barnes.”
“Good,” I say, and kiss him again.
I end up standing. I don’t recall deciding to. His hands run up the backs of my thighs under the hem of my skirt, and he tips his head back to look up at me, and the look on his face undoes fourteen years of good behavior in about four seconds flat.
“Can’t get down on my knee for you,” he says, rough, pushing the skirt up my hips. “Doc’s orders. Gonna have to make do.”
He raises the skirt to my waist. Cool air first, then his hands, then his mouth at the inside of my knee, working up, slow, and I catch the back of the chair and hold on.
“Perry…”
“Easy,” he says against my skin, both hands spanning my hips now, holding me up as much as holding me still. “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”
It’s a lie, and we both let it stand.
He hooks my leg over the arm of the chair, opening me to the lamplight and to him, and for one second he only looks. I have never in my life felt so seen and so wanted in the same breath.
“Look at you,” he says, low and reverent and filthy all at once. “All this time. Right here under my nose.”
He doesn’t know how true it is. He doesn’t know it’s fourteen years he’s talking to.
Then his mouth is on me, and I stop counting the years.
The first touch of his tongue bows my spine.
He spreads me open with his thumbs, unhurried, and drags the flat of his tongue up the length of me, from the aching heat of my entrance to my clit, slow enough that I feel every second of it.
I grab the chair back and hold to the only solid thing left in the room.
He takes his time learning me. He works his tongue through the slick of me, licks up the sides, spreads my lips wide with his thumbs again and dips inside.
He drinks me down like he’s been thirsty for years, then drags back up and closes his mouth over my clit and sucks, gentle, then not gentle at all, until my knees quit meaning a thing.
“Perry…” I hear my own voice, thin and wrecked. “Perry, that’s… you can’t just…in the library!”
“I can,” he says against me, and I feel the words more than hear them. “Been thinking about doing exactly this since you handed me a coffee and told me no. Hush now. Let me.”
He circles my clit with the tip of his tongue, slow figure eights, then flattens and laps at me in long, greedy strokes and slides two thick fingers up inside me while his mouth keeps working.
He crooks them, finds the spot that makes me buck against his face, and stays there, steady and relentless, licking me open around his hand while he sucks.
It’s the same close attention he pays a whole room, only now every bit of it is aimed at the center of me, and it’s too much and not enough and I hear my own voice break around his name.
“Perry. Perry, please…”
“I know.” His voice comes wrecked and dark and pleased with itself, his mouth never once leaving me. “I know, sweetheart. I’ve got you. Give it to me.”
My legs won’t hold. He knows it before I do, one arm banded across my hips to keep me on my feet, and he doesn’t let up and he doesn’t rush.
He sucks my clit and works his fingers deep and curls them just so, and he keeps me right at the trembling edge of it long enough that I’d promise him anything he asked for.
There’s nobody in this building but him. It’s dark and locked and mine, and the man I’ve wanted since I was a girl is in my reading chair with his mouth on my cunt telling me to let go, so I let go.
I come apart with one hand fisted in his hair and the other flat against the bookshelf, grinding down against his tongue and his fingers, biting down on a cry that carries into the empty stacks anyhow, and he works me through every last wave of it, greedy and unhurried both, licking me clean and drinking me down like he’s got all night and every intention of spending it.
I sag against the shelf, boneless. A paperback knocks to the floor somewhere down the row and neither of us goes for it. He eases his fingers out slow, and brings me down with his mouth, gentle now, pressing soft kisses to my clit and my hip and the top of my thigh, like a man saying thank you.
When I can see straight, he’s looking up at me with his mouth wet and his chin shining and his eyes gone black and the most insufferable grin ever worn by a living man.
“So,” he says. “Knitting.”
A laugh falls out of me, wrecked. “Shut up.”
“I’m a fast learner. I did tell you.” He presses one more kiss to the inside of my thigh, gentle now, and eases my skirt back down my legs like he’s putting something precious away in a drawer. “You okay?”
I’m not okay. I’m the farthest thing from okay. I just handed fourteen years to a man who has no idea he’s been holding my whole heart since I was twelve, in a library he’ll leave the second his knee lets him, and I did it with my eyes wide open.
“I’m fine,” I say.
He hears the lie. He’s gotten good at hearing me. He catches my hand and draws me down into his lap, over his good side, and folds both arms around me and holds me there in the lamplight, and this is the worse thing. Not the wanting. The holding.
The wanting I’ve survived fourteen years.
The holding is what’s going to ruin me.