Kimmie
I wake at ten past five, because that is what my body does now whether I have anywhere to be or not, and it takes me a good four seconds to work out why the bed is the wrong shape.
The bed is exactly the shape it has always been.
I’m the thing that’s different. I’ve been folded into about a fifth of it, wedged in the strip between Natan and the wall, one knee thrown over both of his thighs and my hand flat on his stomach like I fell asleep checking the engine was still running.
He’s on his back with one arm up over the pillows.
In the gray light coming through the gap in my curtains he looks less like a man who lifted me up a flight of stairs and more like a large piece of furniture that got delivered to the wrong address.
His mouth is slightly open. There’s a crease down his cheek from the pillow seam.
I reach over him for my glasses and put them on so I can see him properly, which is possibly the greediest thing I have ever done at five in the morning.
Because that’s what I’m doing. Looking at him because looking at him makes me feel good.
The white line through his eyebrow. The dark hair going down from his navel and disappearing under my sheet.
The hand hanging off the edge of a bed that was never designed with him in mind.
And underneath it I’m working out what I want and then running the old calculation about whether wanting it makes me too much.
Last night Natan told me to say what I want out loud, in words, and he’d do it. He didn’t say anything about the reverse. I decide that’s an oversight on his part and not my problem.
I ease the sheet down to his hips. He’s already half hard, which I understand is a thing that happens to men in the morning without any input from their eyes, but I choose to be flattered anyway.
Moving down the bed takes some engineering.
There’s a lot of him and very little mattress, and I end up on my front between his knees with my hair falling over one shoulder and my glasses sliding down my nose.
I have to push them up with the back of my wrist like a woman about to do something technical.
I take him in my hand. He’s heavy, and warm, and thickening against my palm, and he gets a great deal more interested in the proceedings almost immediately. I’m still congratulating myself on how quietly I’m managing all this when he says my name.
“Kimmie.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
I look up the length of him. He’s propped on one elbow with his hair flattened on one side and his eyes on me, wide awake, and there’s nothing sleepy in his face at all.
“Ask me something,” I say.
He takes a second. His jaw works.
“Are you going to put your mouth on me?”
“That is the single best question anybody has ever asked me.” I lean down. “Yes.”
The first stroke of my tongue goes right up the underside of him, and his stomach hollows out.
I take the head of him into my mouth and hold there, tasting salt, feeling him twitch against my tongue, and he makes a sound that I intend to think about for the rest of my natural life.
His hand comes down into my hair. He doesn’t push.
He gathers it back off my face and holds it there in a loose fist, which somehow makes the whole thing filthier.
I take more of him. My jaw protests almost immediately, and I ignore it. What I can’t fit I wrap my hand around, and I work him in long slow pulls, and I let myself make a noise around him because it turns out I want to.
“Fuck.” It comes out of him cracked in the middle.
I lift off him, keeping my hand moving, chin wet, extremely pleased with myself. “Tell me.”
“What?”
“You made me do it. Now you have to.” I run my tongue up him again, very slowly, watching his face. “Tell me what you want.”
For a man who says everything he means, he takes his time. Then his fingers tighten in my hair.
“Slower. Use your hand at the base.” His voice has dropped somewhere below his usual register. “And look at me while you do it.”
I do all three, and the looking is the part that undoes me. He watches my mouth on him with his teeth set and his chest going. Every so often his hips come up a fraction and he stops them, and I can see the effort that costs him.
“Deeper,” he says. “If you can.”
I can. Not all of it, because there are limits imposed by anatomy and I have run into most of them, but I take him until my nose is nearly at his stomach and my eyes water behind my glasses, and he says something in Russian that I’d very much like translated at a later date.
He warns me. Of course he does. “Kimmie, I’m going to—”
I stay where I am and do it faster, and he comes with his hand fisted in my hair and my name coming out of him in pieces. I am so pleased with myself that I have to put my forehead down on his thigh for a second and get my face in order.
When I look up, he has one forearm over his eyes. He moves it. He looks wrecked and enormous and about nine seconds from unconsciousness.
“Come here.”
I crawl up and he hauls me the rest of the way, kissing me without any hesitation about where my mouth has just been, which is the sort of information I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
“Good morning,” I say.
“It is.”
We leave late, as a direct result. He uses my shower after me and fills the entire cubicle in a way I find hilarious, and I put on jeans and a shirt with a paint stain on the cuff that I’ve decided is a design feature.
In the kitchen he stands with his coffee at the exact spot on the counter where the light comes in. My journal is still on the table where I shoved it last night, and I go past and put it in the drawer with what I hope is casual efficiency.
“I wasn’t going to read it,” he says.
“I know. I’m protecting you. There are four pages in there about your forearms. You’d never recover.”
At half past six, we leave. Mrs. Horace’s curtain moves at number nine as we pass, which I clock and choose to gift to her as a treat. Natan walks on the road side of me. I don’t think he decides to, I think it’s simply where he goes.
“Right.” I hook my hand through his arm, because his arm is there. “Three questions. You said starting now, and it’s now.”
“Go.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“City side. Eight streets back from the second yard, above a place that fixed washing machines.” He says it evenly. “My mother still lives four floors up from a bakery that Eduard bought so nobody would bother her.”
“Siblings?”
“One sister. Tasia. She’s ten years younger and she’s been sending me houses on this side of the river since March.” He glances down at me. “Four a day. She sent one at two in the morning once because she loved the kitchen.”
“Last one,” I say. “What do you do all day?”
He doesn’t slow down and he doesn’t dress it up.
“The family brings freight into the city and moves it across that bridge. Eduard runs it and we all do stuff to help. When somebody steals from us, or lies to us, or puts something in one of our trucks that we didn’t agree to, I go and see them, and afterward they don’t do it again.
” A pause of about half a step. “Yesterday morning I broke a man’s finger in a body shop on the eastern road because he’d been selling access to our night gate. That’s what I do all day.”
I keep walking, and I keep hold of his arm. I think about how easily he could have said transport, or logistics, or that it’s complicated, and how he chose not to make me work for it. He chose not to lie to me.
“Okay,” I say.
“That’s it?”
“You told me the truth. Do you know how rare that is?” I bump my shoulder into him, or as close as I can reach. “I’ll have opinions later. Some of them will be long. Right now I’m going to be pleased that you didn’t lie to me this early in the morning.”
The café’s front is dark, though the kitchen light is on at the back and I can hear the extractor running, which means Delilah is already in there baking for the day. There’s a white van parked up by the old laundry with its lights off.
“Oh, someone might finally be doing something with the laundry,” I say, nodding at it. “It’s never been open since I’ve been here.”
Natan looks at the van for exactly as long as it takes to walk past it and says nothing at all.
At the gallery I get the shutter halfway up before he takes it off me and puts it the rest of the way, and while I’m turning on the lights he goes through to that back past the mop and the bubble wrap. I hear him working the back door handle twice.
“This lock is garbage,” he calls.
“That lock is original to the building,” I counter.
“That’s what I said.”
He comes back through, and the lights are on the long wall now. He stops in front of the boatyard. Tobias’s orange dab sits there in all that gray water, saving its own life.
Then his phone goes.
He takes it out and looks at the screen, and I watch him read a name and go somewhere else entirely. He answers it with one syllable I don’t catch. He listens for about eleven seconds. He says two words in Russian, and then, “Twenty minutes,” and hangs up.
“I have to go,” he says, regret lacing his words.
“Now?”
“Now.” He’s already got his keys. He comes over and takes my chin in his hand, tips my face up and kisses me, unhurried. “I’ll be back before you close.”
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“It will be.”