Chapter 6 #2
"I know all the numbers, Kieran." She crosses to me. "I run them every night too. They don't change anything. They stopped changing anything a long time ago." She takes the hem of my shirt in both hands. "Stay."
I stay.
The first beat of it is slow, and it nearly kills me, the slowness.
She undresses me first, deliberate, the way she does everything, peeling my shirt up and over and dropping it, running her hands flat up my chest like she's reading me, and her eyes track every scar and old line and bad prison tattoo, and she's not flinching from any of it, she's cataloguing it, the way she catalogues a piece she's about to make better.
When her fingers find the puckered scar low on my ribs she pauses, and I feel the question, and I say, "Knife.
I was sixteen. He came off worse," and she presses her lips to it instead of asking more, and the heat of her mouth on the worst part of me undoes something I've kept knotted for years.
I get her out of the soft gray shirt she wears, and the camisole under it, and when I finally see her — the warm lamp gold across her skin, the small constellation of freckles over one shoulder I've drawn a hundred times from memory and never once seen — I have to stop and just look, and she lets me, patient, and says, "You're staring, prospect," in the exact voice from the compound the first night, and I laugh and it breaks into something raw and I say, "I've been staring for four months. I'm not going to stop now."
We move to the low couch under the cracked window.
I get the rest of her clothes off her slow — the jeans, the plain cotton underneath, until she's bare in the gold light and I can finally see all of her, the freckles, the soft weight of her breasts, the dark hair between her thighs, every inch I've been forbidden for four months laid out warm under my hands.
The salt air comes in cold and the lamp is warm and her skin is warmer, and I take my time, because she taught me to take my time, because patience is the whole skill.
I learn her by hand and by mouth — the line of her throat where her pulse jumps, the soft inside of her wrist, the tight peak of her nipple when I close my lips around it and feel her breath stutter.
She says my name once, low, her fingers tightening in my hair, and the sound of it goes straight through me.
I kiss down the flat of her stomach, the jut of her hip, and settle between her thighs, and when I press my mouth to her she's already wet, slick and hot against my tongue, and she arches up off the couch with a sound I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
I find the swollen center of her with the flat of my tongue and work her there, slow at first, learning what makes her thigh tremble against my shoulder, what makes her hips chase me, and then I slide two fingers into her, deep, and feel her clench around them, and she gasps my name and her hand fists harder in my hair.
I learn the rhythm she needs the way I learned to draw — watching, adjusting, reading the small tensions in her body, giving her room to breathe and then taking it away — tongue on her clit and my fingers curling inside her, building, pass after pass, until the trembling becomes shaking, until her back bows off the cushion and her thighs lock around my head and she breaks apart against my mouth, clenching hard around my fingers, her whole body shuddering, her voice cracking on the high edge of it.
I work her through every wave of it, slower, gentler, until the shaking goes out of her the way it went out of her hand in the shop — slow, complete — and she's boneless and flushed and gasping under me.
She drags me up by the shoulders, breathless, flushed all the way down her chest, and kisses me like she's furious about it, and says against my mouth, "Now. I'm done waiting. Now."
The second beat is nothing like the first.
The first was slow. This isn't slow. This is three weeks and four months and a whole season of held breath letting go at once.
She pulls me up over her, and her hands are everywhere, my back, my shoulders, the small of my spine, mapping me the way I mapped her, and her fingers close around my cock, stroking me once, slow and sure, until I groan against her throat.
She guides me to her, and when I finally settle between her thighs and look down at her — gold-lit, wrecked, mine — she takes my face in both hands and holds my eyes and says, "Yes," and I push into her slow, inch by inch, the tight wet heat of her closing around me, and the feel of being inside her drags a sound out of me I didn't know I had.