Chapter 6 #3
I undress her slowly, between kisses. Every time her hands come up to do something—to reach for me, to even the scales—I catch them and put them back down.
"No," I tell her softly against her throat. "Not tonight. Tonight you don't earn anything. Tonight you just take and give in to the feeling."
I feel the war in her body when I say it.
The flinch first. Then the slow unclenching.
The whole apparatus of her upbringing. Every lesson that taught her a woman's pleasure is a debt she'd better be ready to pay back. Fighting against the plain fact of my mouth moving down her.
"Njal—" My name comes out high and uncertain. "I should—you don't have to?—"
"I know I don't have to." I press my mouth to the soft of her belly and feel it jump under me. "I want to. There's a difference there too."
Then I show her.
I take her apart slowly. Patient. Not one second of hurry in it. And I don't let her hide from it.
When she turns her face into the pillow, I bring her back.
When her hands scrabble at the sheets, hunting for something to apologize to, I lace my fingers through hers and hold them down where she can feel that they're held.
"Eyes on me." She opens them, glassy and shocked and full. "There you go. Good girl."
The words land on her like a live wire.
I watch them hit. The flush races up her chest.
Her mouth falls open. Some lifelong locked door in her comes off its hinges at two plain words said like I mean them—because I do mean them.
"Again," she gasps.
I don't know if she means the words or the rest of it, so I give her both.
"Good girl. That's it. Let me." I feel her start to climb, feel her fight it out of pure reflex, the old terror of being caught wanting something. "Don't you hold back from me. Not here. Here, you're allowed."
Here, you're allowed.
That's the one that does it. That's the one that breaks her open.
She comes apart under my mouth with my name in her throat and her hand crushing mine, shaking, undone, watching me the whole way through like I've shown her something she didn’t know existed.
I don't take it further than that.
I could. She'd let me, boneless and wrecked and open as she is, and there's a part of me that's been straining toward it since she came through my door.
But this is enough for tonight.
This is the first thing she's ever taken just because she wanted it.
I'm not crowding it with anything else. The rest comes when she's ready and certain, and not one minute before.
I gather her up against me instead.
She's quiet a while, tucked under my arm, her face against my chest.
I know this part too. I know what comes after, when the body's done and the brain wakes back up.
For a woman raised the way she was raised, the brain wakes up looking for the bill.
I feel it start. The small stiffening. The breath she pulls to start apologizing, or explaining, or folding herself back up small.
"Don't," I say, before she gets a word out.
I pull the blanket up over us both and keep my hand moving slowly through her hair.
"Whatever you're about to say—that you're sorry, that that was too much, that you don't usually—don't. There's nothing to be sorry for. Nothing happened here that you have to explain to anybody."
Her breath shudders out of her.
"I don't know how to do this," she says into my chest, very small. "I don't know how to just—have something. Without it being wrong, or owed, or?—"
"I know you don't."
I get up. She makes a small sound of protest, and I come right back with a glass of water and press it into her hands.
"Drink. All of it."
I wait while she does. I take the glass and set it down. I pull her into me again and tuck the blanket around her shoulders and keep my hand moving through her hair until I feel her go heavy against me.
"You don't have to know how tonight," I tell her. "You just have to let me show you it's allowed. Same as I showed you in there. One thing at a time."
She's quiet a long moment.
"That's the most anybody's ever said to me," she murmurs, half asleep already, the day finally collecting what it's owed. "And you barely talk."
Something close to a laugh moves through my chest. She smiles against it.
Within a few minutes, her breathing goes slow and even, and she's gone, heavy and trusting in a way that lands on me harder than anything has in two years.
I lie there in the dark with this woman asleep on my chest, and I do the thing I do.
I look at what I'm feeling. I name it. I check whether it's the kind that stays put or the kind that climbs.
It's bigger than it was last night. A lot bigger. It's filled the whole room and most of my chest and it's got her name on it, and it isn't going anywhere—and I wait, the way I've trained myself to wait, for the lift underneath it.
The racing. The warning.
Nothing.
No lift. No racing. No locked-ward feeling, no climb toward a cliff I can't walk back from.
It's just real. It's just hers, and it's just real, and for the first time in two years I'm not bracing against a single thing.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulder and let myself have it.