27. Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
I brace my hands on his chest and change the angle and watch what it does to his face—the way the performer goes completely, the way everything he usually manages simply leaves and there’s just Kragen, just this, just me above him with the amber lamp throwing its light across both of us.
“Right there,” I say.
“Yes.” Barely a word.
I do it again. His hands grip my hips hard enough to feel it tomorrow.
I want that, want the evidence of this on my skin.
His face goes unguarded in a way I have never seen it before, not on stage and not in this room the first time and not anywhere.
This is new. This is the version of him that exists when there is nothing left to perform and no one to perform it for.
“I’ve been thinking about watching you,” I say. “From here. Like this.”
“Have you.” His voice has gone rough at the edges.
“For weeks. While I was sanding joints and not answering my phone, I was thinking about exactly this.” I move again and feel him respond and feel it move through me. “You, looking like this. Because of me.”
He makes a sound that is not a word, and his hands find my breasts, and I arch into them, and the rhythm builds past deliberate into something neither of us is steering.
I am loud. I have stopped caring about being loud.
The first time cured me of caring, and I have no intention of starting again.
I am here and he is here. His gaze is on me, and I watch him back, and there is nothing between us—not the obligation, not the weeks of silence, not the careful management I have been practicing since I was seventeen. Just this. Just us.
When I get close I tell him so, in plain language, and he responds—his hands, his voice, my name—and I come apart with my palms pressed flat to his chest and his name in my mouth, the release moving through me in waves, my whole body shaking with it.
I come back to myself in pieces. His hands are moving slow at my hips. His eyes are still open.
“Stay,” he says, low. “I’m not done with you.”
I laugh—a real one, surprised out of me—and he takes my mouth before he rolls us, a kiss that says everything the words haven’t yet, and then I’m beneath him and he’s above me, all of him, blocking out the amber lamp, and he looks down at me with an expression that has stopped managing anything at all.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say.
He doesn’t take his time. He has been patient long enough and we both know it. Neither of us is pretending otherwise.
When he moves, it’s with his whole body, deep and present, and I feel everything—the drag and the depth and the weight of him, all of it unavoidable, all of it exactly right.
His voice is at my ear, low and continuous, and I catch my name in it and other things I will think about later when I’m trying to work and failing.
He finds what undoes me and returns to it without asking, because he knows, he learned me the first time and he hasn’t forgotten anything, and the sound he makes against my throat when I come apart the second time is not a word and not quite human and moves through me like the first bar of a song I already know by heart.
He finishes with his face pressed to my neck and his hands gripping my hips and my name in his mouth like it costs him something, the vibration in his chest going rough and then going quiet, settling, the way a bell goes still after it’s been struck.
We lie still afterward in the amber light. His hand moves slowly at my waist.
Later.
The lamp is still on. The curtains move. Somewhere down the hill the creek runs.
I’m on my side facing him, with his arm around me and his feet still off the end of the bed, and my grandmother’s ceiling above us both.
I’ve been lying here for a while, not sleeping.
I know the sound of his breathing now. I know which version of his stillness means he’s asleep and which means he’s awake and holding something.
He’s awake and holding something.
“I should have said this before,” I say.
He waits. He is very good at waiting.
“I love you.” I pause. “To your homeworld and back.”
The room is quiet.
His thumb moves against my shoulder. Once. Then again. I feel him taking it in—the way he takes true things, carefully, not trusting them too fast.
Then:
“I wonder sometimes,” he says, “if I was born loving you.”
I go still.
“You are so easy to love, Honey.” His voice is quiet.
Not performing anything. Just saying a true thing in the dark.
“I don’t think you know that. I think you’ve believed the opposite for a long time.
But from the first visit, there has been nothing difficult about this. Nothing. You are the easiest thing.”
I don’t say anything.
I can’t say anything.
For ten years I’ve assumed there was a reason people left.
He just called me easy to love.
I tuck my face into his chest.
His arm tightens around me.
Neither of us says anything else. The curtains move. The creek runs. The summer night does what it does outside the windows of my grandmother’s house, where four generations of women stayed. And now I’m here with a male who was born on another world.
Twenty-three miles down a Missouri two-lane, he found me anyway.
Twice on the drive home, he pulled over just to look at something I’d made.