Chapter 3 #2
I undress her slowly, watching her face the entire time, reading every flicker.
When the dress is gone and she's bare beneath me in the gold light, I take a moment just to look, and what I feel isn't only desire, though there's enough of that to take the floor out from under me.
It's something closer to reverence. This body that the world told her was broken.
This body that carried her through three years of being dismissed and underfunded and ignored.
This body she walked into an auction in, in four-inch heels, hiding pain from a room full of predators, to buy herself a future.
"You're doing it again," she says softly. "Staring."
"I'm appreciating."
"Appreciate with your hands. They've been criminally underused."
I huff something that's almost a laugh against her stomach, carefully above the healing incision sites, and I feel her breath catch.
"Tell me if anything hurts," I say. "Not the good kind. The real kind. You don't hide it from me. Not ever, but especially not here."
"I won't."
"Promise me."
"Akyl." She lifts her head and looks down at me, and her eyes are clear and certain. "I promise. I've got no reason to hide from you. You're the first person who ever wanted to see."
That lands somewhere I can't defend, and I respond the only way I know how, which is to lower my mouth to her and show her what I've been telling her all week.
I take my time. I have been promising her this for days and I intend to deliver on every word.
I learn her the way I learn everything that matters, completely, with total attention, registering what makes her breath stutter and what makes her hands fist in the sheets and what makes that careful composure of hers finally, finally come apart.
It doesn't take long the first time. She's been waiting as long as I have, and her body has spent so long associated with pain that pleasure, when it comes, moves through her like something breaking open.
She cries out, one hand flying to grip my shoulder, and I hold her hip steady with deliberate care, mindful of the stitches even now, even with my own control hanging by a thread.
When she comes down, she's shaking, and her eyes are wet, and I move up the bed to gather her against me, careful of her abdomen, tucking her into the curve of my body.
"Hey," I say, because the tears concern me. "Talk to me. Was that pain?"
"No." She laughs, wet and astonished. "No, that's the opposite of pain, that's the entire problem.
" She presses her face against my chest. "I didn't know it could feel like that.
I spent so long thinking my body was just a thing that hurt.
A thing I had to negotiate with. And you just," she stops, breathes.
"You made it feel like mine. Like it's allowed to feel good. "
"It is yours," I say against her hair. "It was always yours. The world was wrong about you. Every part of it. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never forget that for a single day."
"What about you?" she asks, her hand drifting lower with clear intent.
I catch her wrist gently and bring it back up to my chest. "Tonight was about you."
"Akyl—"
"I can wait until you're cleared for everything, and then I intend to be extremely thorough, repeatedly, for a very long time.
" I press a kiss to her knuckles, just beside the ring.
"Tonight I wanted you to know what it feels like to have your body be a good place.
That's the only thing I wanted. Let me have it. "
She studies me for a long moment with those eyes that miss nothing.
"You're going to be a problem," she says quietly. "I came here to survive. I had a plan. Survival was the entire plan."
"And now?"
She settles against me, her head over my heart, the ring catching the gold light each time she breathes.
"Now I'm thinking about the wedding," she says.
"And the charity. And what color to paint the upstairs rooms. And about a hundred other things I haven't let myself think about in years because thinking past next month was a luxury I couldn't afford.
" Her voice goes quieter. "You gave me a future, Akyl.
Not the surgery. Not the money. You. You made it safe to want one. "
I don't have words for what that does to me, so I do what I do instead, which is hold her, and watch over her, and stay.
She falls asleep against my chest within minutes, her breathing slow and even, no pain in it, none of the careful stillness she used to sleep with. Just rest. Real rest.
I stay awake a long time after, one hand spread across her back, the emerald on her finger glinting in the low light, and I think about the family table tonight, full and loud and warm, and the empty chairs that won't be empty for long, and the woman asleep against me who walked into a room of dangerous men and chose me.
I was the most controlled person any of my brothers knew.
I'm something else now, and I don't miss who I was at all.