Chapter 27 #2
I unlock the door. She steps through and turns around in the hall. Whatever she was about to say I don’t hear, because I cross to her and kiss her. She makes a sound that is not quite nothing, a soft, caught thing, her hands going to the lapels of my jacket and gripping.
I pick her up. She makes a sound of mild surprise and then laughs, her arms going around my neck. I carry her up the stairs all the way to the bedroom door, she’s still laughing when I kiss her.
“Almost made it past the door,” she says.
“I like this door.”
She reaches up and takes hold of my tie. Works the knot, pulling it loose with her eyes on mine. Watching me watch her do it. She drops it. Steps back into the room.
I follow.
She reaches for the zip at the back of her dress. I catch her wrist.
“I’ve got it,” I say.
I turn her gently by the shoulder. The zip is small, running from the nape of her neck to the small of her back.
I pull it down slowly, one inch at a time, then press my mouth to the back of her neck as it opens.
The top of her spine. Between her shoulder blades, where the fabric parts.
She exhales through her nose; her shoulders drop, the held thing releasing. I slide the dress off and let it fall.
She turns around.
I look at her for long enough that her chin comes up slightly, the not-quite-defiant thing she does when being seen makes her want to reach for something funny to say.
She doesn’t say it.
I put my hands on her waist and walk her back until the back of her knees find the bed.
I lay her down and stay above her, my weight on my forearms. I don’t move.
Just look at her. Dark hair across the pillow, blue eyes on mine, her chest already moving faster than she wants it to.
I trace the line of her jaw with my thumb and she turns her face into my hand like it can’t help itself.
“Patrick.”
“I’m here.”
I start at her throat. The soft place below her ear that makes her eyes close.
The line of her collarbone. The curve of her shoulder where I’ve pressed my mouth in passing months, in the office, in the elevator, small stolen things, I take my time with it now, because there is no one coming home and no deadline and nowhere I need to be but here.
I move down, learning every place that changes her breathing, every place that makes her hands tighten in my hair.
She is warm and her skin tastes faintly of something clean and her body arches into my mouth with a trust she won’t say out loud.
I find the soft place below her hip. She makes a sound that isn’t a word and her hand fists in my hair, not pushing, just holding on, and I stay there until she says my name in the broken way that means she’s close, until her ribs are heaving and her thighs tremble, and I bring her all the way through it before I come back up to her mouth.
She is flushed. Her eyes are dark and half-lidded. She pulls at my shirt with both hands and says: “Now.”
“Say please,” I say against her mouth.
“No,” she says, and the dare in it is undercut entirely by her voice, which is wrecked. “I won’t.”
I pull back an inch. Look at her face. “Please,” I say, and I mean it, not as a tease, as the thing underneath, the actual request, please, let me be here, let this be real.
She reads it. I know she reads it because something shifts in her eyes, something that has nothing to do with the game we were playing.
“Yes,” she says. “Okay. Yes. Please.”
I reach into the nightstand drawer, tear a condom open, and roll it on.
Then I ease into her slowly. She exhales sharply and her hands go to my back and press, not urging me faster, just pressing, holding me close.
I go slowly because this is the thing I want her to feel, not the heat of it, though the heat of it is everything, but the specific weight of being chosen.
The difference between this and the managed, careful life I was living six months ago.
I want her to feel that I am here, completely, that there is no part of me somewhere else, no part of me managing what’s underneath.
She looks at me. I look at her. Her face is open in a way she only allows in this room, all the quick armor gone, and she is so devastating like this, so entirely herself.
“Hi,” she says softly, which makes no sense and makes perfect sense.
“Hi,” I say.
We stay like that. Moving together in the quiet. Her breath and mine. The low sound she makes when I shift the angle. In here there is only this, the heat of her, the blue of her eyes, the way she holds on.
When it’s over, she doesn’t move immediately.
She keeps her forehead pressed against my jaw.
I hold her and feel her breathing slow. Feel the exact moment her body releases the last of what it was holding.
I stay very still because that, the letting go, is the thing she gives me that costs her the most. I’m not moving until she’s ready.
“Don’t say anything profound,” she says into my neck.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“I was thinking about nothing.”
She makes a sound of moderate skepticism. I press my mouth to her hair.
She sits up after a while and finds her dress on the floor.
I don’t ask her to stay. We’ve had the conversation, the careful shorthand of two people working out what they can build without breaking anything, and the shape of it right now is: not yet.
I think she’s right about that. I also think, watching her pull the dress on and reach back for the zip she can’t quite reach, that being right about something and being fine with it are not the same thing.
I get up and zip it for her.
She turns around. Her hair is half down, her dress is on, her lipstick is gone. She looks like a woman who has been loved carefully and thoroughly, which she has. She’s already putting herself back together by degrees, which I also see.
I don’t say anything, because what I want to say will wreck us both.