Chapter 22 #2
He slides it off one shoulder. Slowly. His hand follows the fabric down my arm, the inside of my elbow, my wrist, until the sleeve falls free.
Then the other side, the same way, his fingers trailing down the length of my arm until the shirt is gone entirely and the air touches my skin and I have nothing to hold onto except the mattress and the sound of his breathing.
“There,” he says, very quiet. “You’re beautiful.”
His mouth finds my shoulder. He stays there, unhurried, and then moves to my collarbone, tracing it with his lips, and I make a sound I didn’t plan and his hand comes up to my face.
“Stay with me,” he says. “Don’t go into your head. Stay here. I want you to feel good. Let me take care of you.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to stop trying not to.”
His hands move to my waist, find the clasp of my jeans, and he undoes it with the same deliberate patience, one hand holding me steady at the hip while the other pulls the zipper down slowly, slowly, like there is all night for this and he intends to use every second of it.
He eases the jeans down and off, and I am sitting in the dark in just my underwear and I can’t see and I can’t predict and my brain is doing the thing it always does, mapping, planning, trying to find the edges of this and brace against them.
He reaches around and finds the clasp of my bra. Undoes it. Slides the straps down my arms one at a time.
“You’re beautiful,” he says against my shoulder, and his mouth follows the strap down. “I want you to feel this. Only this. Nothing else.”
His thumbs hook into the sides of my underwear and he takes them off slowly, kneeling in front of me on the floor to do it, and the understanding of what that means, that he is down there, that he is looking at me in a way I can’t see, sends a heat through me that I feel in every part of my body.
He stands. His hands rest on my thighs, not moving.
And then something extraordinary happens.
My brain stops trying. It gives up on the map. It falls into the dark and the warmth and the fact that I am completely bare and completely blind and he is completely present and none of the things I was afraid of have happened, and my hands unclench from the mattress, and I breathe out.
“There you are,” he says.
I have never been only now in my life.
His hands move and I don’t know where they’re going until they’re there, the inside of my wrist, the soft skin at my waist, the back of my knee, every touch arriving without warning and landing with complete attention.
I can’t brace for anything. I can’t prepare.
He won’t let me prepare. He keeps finding the places I haven’t mapped yet and he stays there, patient and thorough, until my breath breaks open and I stop being able to hold any thought at all.
His mouth traces down my ribs, slow, his breath warm against my skin, and my stomach tightens under his lips.
His hands slide up the outsides of my thighs, his thumbs pressing into the soft hollows of my hips and I make a sound I didn’t plan, a sound that comes from somewhere underneath all the managing and the bracing and the careful architecture of who I let myself be.
He hears and stays exactly where he is, not rushing, not accelerating, just mapping me with his mouth and his hands like he has nothing to prove and the only objective is to take me apart slowly enough that I feel every single piece come loose.
“Let go,” he says, very quiet, against my skin. “I’ve got you.”
His mouth moves lower, down the center of my stomach, and I arch into him, my fingers finding his hair and gripping.
He doesn’t stop. His lips trail past my navel, his tongue tracing a slow line along the crease where my hip meets my thigh, and my legs fall open without my permission, without thought, just my body answering something my brain has stopped trying to negotiate.
He breathes against me. Just breathes. Warm air on the most sensitive part of me and he doesn’t touch, not yet, and the waiting is unbearable. My hips lift toward him and he puts one hand flat on my stomach and presses me gently back down.
“Stay,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
His mouth closes over me and my entire body locks and then releases in a wave that starts at my center and radiates outward, and I hear my own breathing, ragged, open, nothing held back.
His tongue is slow. Devastatingly slow. Long strokes that find the exact place where everything concentrates and stay there, steady, patient, a rhythm he builds and holds and doesn’t break.
My thighs are shaking against either side of his face and he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t speed up, just stays in that rhythm like he’s listening to something I can’t hear, like my body is giving him instructions and he’s following every single one.
I say his name and he says I’m here against me and the vibration of his voice goes through me like a current.
His hands slide under my hips and tilt me up and the angle changes and everything sharpens, and I grip his hair harder and I hear sounds coming out of me that I’ve never heard, sounds I would be embarrassed by if I had any capacity left for embarrassment, but I don’t.
I am stripped down to nerve and want and the wet, relentless attention of his mouth.
He slides one finger inside me, slow, curving upward, and his tongue doesn’t stop.
The combination is too much and not enough simultaneously.
I am dripping, I can feel it, I can feel how wet I am against his chin and his hand and I don’t care.
He adds a second finger and the fullness of it pulls a moan out of me that is almost a sob, and he presses deeper, finding the spot that makes my vision white out behind the blindfold, and his mouth keeps working and his fingers keep moving and I am shaking, I am shaking so hard the bed is shaking with me.
“Please,” I say, and my voice is something I don’t recognize. Wrecked. Open. “Please, I need you, I need you inside me, please.”
He doesn’t stop. His fingers curl and his tongue presses flat and hard against me and I am right there, right at the edge of it, suspended in the impossible tension between wanting to come and wanting this to never end, and he holds me there.
He holds me there for what feels like forever, reading every tremor, every catch in my breath, adjusting pressure, pulling back when I’m about to tip over and then building again, and I am begging, I am actually begging, words that don’t form complete sentences, just his name and please and don’t stop and I can’t and please please please.
He pulls his fingers out slowly, his mouth leaves me and the absence is so sudden and so total that I gasp, and then his hands are turning me, guiding me onto my stomach, his mouth finds the back of my neck and I feel his weight along the length of my body, his chest against my back, his cock hard against me.
I press back into him, I am past thought, past language, past everything.
“Tell me what you want,” he says against my ear.
“You. All of you.”
He shifts away for a moment. I hear the nightstand drawer, the tear of foil, the brief pause of him taking care of it.
He reaches between us and slides inside me in one slow, deep stroke.
I bury my face in the pillow, my hands gripping the sheets and the sound I make is not a moan, it’s a release, something that has been held for weeks, months, years, finally given permission to exist. He fills me completely and stays there, not moving, just buried deep, and I can feel him everywhere, his breath is ragged now too, his control finally breaking at the edges.
“Fuck,” he says, quiet, almost to himself. “Elena.”
He moves. Slow at first, pulling almost all the way out and then pressing back in, deep, the kind of deep that makes my whole body light up, and I push back into him finding a rhythm that is ours, two bodies that know exactly what the other needs.
His hand slides around my hip and his fingers find me again, slick and swollen.
He touches me while he moves inside me and the double sensation is so intense my vision goes white behind the silk.
He pulls the scarf off, turns me to face him slowly.
His eyes are dark, focused, completely undone.
He pushes back inside me. I wrap my legs around him, pull him closer, deeper.
His forehead presses against mine. I can see his face, the way his jaw tightens, the way his breath catches when I clench around him, the way he looks at me like I am the only thing in the world that exists.
We move together, faster now, harder. I can feel it building again, different this time, deeper, coming from somewhere inside my chest as much as between my legs.
I hold his face. Say his name. He says mine.
We’re both entirely present in this room on this night with the city outside.
When I come, it’s with my eyes open, his name in my mouth, his hands on my face.
I have never, not once, felt more wanted in my life.
He follows me over. I feel it, the way his whole body tightens and then releases, and the sound he makes against my neck is quiet and broken and entirely real.
This is him, paying attention to *me, Elena, as if the entire point is to know me completely, and that knowledge building and building until neither of us is anywhere else at all.
I lie in the dark and I feel his arm across my waist and I think: this is what it feels like to let something in.
I didn’t know it could feel like this.
I close my eyes, and I don’t reach for control. I don’t write the next scene in my head. I don’t plan the exit.
I just stay.